The Work Behind THE WORK

An artist friend recently opened an Etsy shop and posted  a link on Facebook. Her work is lovely, but one FB ‘friend’ posted that it was way too expensive. I was very irritated by this as I thought it very reasonably priced – each piece is original and beautifully made. I was reading some stuff recently in a-n magazine, the professional journal for British artists, about how art is undervalued and under-appreciated in Britain – people often seem to have no idea of the amount of training, practice and work that goes into creating a piece of art. I think we artists are partly to blame. We are rarely seen doing our art in public [it’s one of the reasons I sketch when I’m out and about] and people generally only see our finished pieces, not the masses of preliminary drawings, moquettes, notes, research and so on that go into making the finished artwork. Perhaps we should routinely put our preliminary work into exhibitions, so that the public can see how a final piece is arrived at.

I’ve been working on some block prints based on photographs I took from my second floor window of unsuspecting pedestrians below, exploring the concept of the artist as voyeur. I do some digital manipulation in Photoshop but I also draw from them, to get a feel for the shapes, the figures and the personalities before I begin to cut the blocks. Here are some of the preliminary sketches I did today, in biro into an A4 brown paper sketchpad that i bought on a visit to New York City.