Without the state

Another reboot

Technorati Tags: politics,blogging,writing

This blog began a long long time ago in a far away country with a Labour government with some radical ideas - for a while at least until Tony Blair began to have dreams of being a world statesman.

Initially it began as an adjunct to the one man consultancy I was running which had a loose focus on supporting community groups in various ways. Later after the consultancy was wound up it had a more eclectic mix of posts on politics, philosophy, art, the environment and a whole lot more. Later still it changed its name to 'Without the State' with an explicit focus on what I thought of as 'practical anarchy', trying to provide an alternative to the insidious growth of right wing libertarianism and looking at practical ways for local communities to manage their own affairs without excessive centralisation.

That focus weakened, especially after the election of the Cameron government and it became more eclectic again, but also less regular as the enthusiasm waned and Facebook grew. Of late though I have begun to hate the sheer nastiness of social media and begun to think again about 'long form' blogging. I'm not sure what the audience for such will be, I was told a few days ago that something I wrote was too long at 2000 words, but I don't care. This blog never had a huge audience anyway.

So, this is is it. These days I also have an arts blog and shop trying to sell my own work and after I clean up all the links in the sidebars and look again at the layout I'll add that to the blog roll. Coming up I discovered some notes for a post on (in)equality which I started ages ago but in the light of BLM and the disaster that we will all be facing if Trump is re-elected seems very much on topic.

Oh - and if you are reading this in the USA and haven't voted yet I only have two things to say.

1. Vote

2. Don't for all our sakes, vote for Trump. Please!

Anniversary

Purely by chance I realise that this blog started on this date in 2003. To be honest I never expected to be still here. There have been gaps, and the focus has shifted from time to time but over the years I have produced a lot that I am still proud to have written. I hope to stay and carry on writing for many more years yet.

An even more significant anniversary comes up in November - 40 years married (to the same woman!)

B####er

I had my eyes tested yesterday. Apart from costing me the usual arm and leg for my new glasses, the optician also informed me that I have early stage cataracts. Bugger...

At least when the time comes, treatment will be on the NHS (unless the present shower in charge cause even more damage of course).

Related articles

• Will the coalition's pledge to "protect" the NHS backfire? (newstatesman.com)

Print making

Lacking any formal arts Education, I came to printmaking by a circuitous route. I started taking photographs as a part of my University course back in 1966 and I've been clicking away ever since, largely on urban subjects. Intermittently, I've also been dabbling in other media. I did some sketching, also as a part of my degree and about 20 years ago I enrolled on an arts course at my local college. I just didn't have the time to put into it though and that fizzled away.

About eight years ago, I began to scan in some old Victorian family photographs and some of my own very faded slides taken in the '60s and '70s. Many of the slides were in appalling condition - faded, fungal growth, peeling emulsion and in the process of restoring them I had to do a create deal of 'recreation'. This one for example involved almost totally recreating the sky.

This started like this:

 

After a while I realised that what I was doing for restoration could be done for its own purpose, leading on to a range of digital prints, of which these are some early examples.

http://www.fotolog.com/ibanda/1387675

http://www.fotolog.com/ibanda/1568919

http://www.fotolog.com/ibanda/3067614

After a while I started trying to sell these at craft fairs and in local shops, with only moderate success I have to say.

I used to get my pictures mounted and framed at a place that also made traditional 'handpulled' prints for major London galleries. One day when collecting some work, the framer invited me to look around the printing workshop. In there I had the chance to look at a linocut block made by Gillian Ayres, waiting to be printed and some other work by Howard Hodgkin. I found it fascinating to see the work in progress rather than just the final piece. In fact I found it so interesting that I enrolled within a week for a print making workshop at my local college. I'm now in my third year and enjoying every minute of it. 

So far I have worked in dry point, linocut, collagraph, solar etching and monoprint. Many of these have been uploaded to my flickr account or are available for sale on my own site.

From printmaking, I moved on to painting with acrylics and collage, but perhaps I should draw a veil over much of these for now...

 

Getting your hands dirty with printmaking

I have been making digital prints for quite a while now, although I didn't call them that at first. To be honest I don't think I called them anything but 'pictures'. I saw them as extensions of photography, since that was how they began, although they showed very little sign of that by the time I had finished making them.

Making this digital work seemed to awaken a wider creative urge however, and a chance opportunity to look around a printmaking studio led me to enrol on a Printmaking workshop at my local college. This isn't a course, but an opportunity to use much better presses than I could afford, to talk to other printmakers and to have access to advice and support from a tutor. I'm in my second year now, although last term was pretty much a waste of time because of illness, hospital etc (I still haven't written that post!).

I have up to now concentrated on collagraph and monoprinting although I have had a go at linocut and engraving too. I still prefer the look and feel of collagraph. At first I wasted a lot of time trying to get consistent inking in order to create an edition. That was largely a waste of time with a plate that in the nature of things is changing as you use it.

The picture below, available on Etsy,  was reasonably successful however, although even this simple image exists in two separate forms, with one of those further modified by application of chine colle.

One of the other forms is also on Etsy.

I also began making monotypes at home, using acrylic paints and a hand roller on half sheets of watercolour paper. Within these abstract images I find tiny imaginary landscapes and scenes that I select to make small prints for mounting. Occasionally I can take a second impression, which is usually softer in character.

This one was created that way, although in this case from an unsuccessful larger monotype made in the studio with oil based inks. The selection suggests to me a flock of birds over a hedgerow.

Etsy link

I'm really enjoying this approach to printing. It is satisfyingly tactile and sufficiently unpredictable to be interesting.

Also, as I develop my skills in making the handpulled prints, ideas are beginning to spill over into my digital work.

This image for example started life as two separate acrylic monotypes, neither of which worked properly. The first impression was too dark, so I tried a second. This was too light! I combined the two in a sort of digital art version of HDR. It is not of itself a reproduction, since it is not a direct copy but it still began life as a physical image, not in the PC.

Etsy/DaWanda

Following a family bereavement, my Etsy and DaWanda shops are temporarily on hold. I expect them to reopen around 4th May.

Refocus...

My reader may have noticed that the type lists on the left hand side have been revamped slightly.

Art Blogs etc is intended to provide links to the artists I come across on the web whose work I like, or who appear to be saying something interesting. I aim at some stage to start a regular post highlighting interesting posts or pieces of work, so if you have or know of an arts blog not represented, get in touch and I will have a look. Please note this is a personal selection, not a directory, so don't be offended if I don't include a link.

Selling stuff should be self explanatory. My intention is to link to as many of the online sites where you can sell your work directly. Again if you know of a site, let me know. This list is intended to be a directory, so inclusion of a site does not mean a recommendation. I have separate links to my own pages on the sites I use personally.

Arts Resources will have links to sites and/or specific posts likely to be useful to artists - 'how tos', other directories, advice on selling. 

The Politics list will be going, but selected links will migrate to the 'Daily Blog'. A new list may yet appear dealing with the written word.

The reason behind all this is an attempt to bring this blog more in line with what I am actually doing, which is painting, printmaking and photography, than it has been over the last year or so. Political and environmental posts will continue to appear, but they will probably be in the minority. I don't have the time (or to be honest the inclination) to research and write the sort of long posts I used to do. 

Also coming up will be interviews/profiles of artists, so if you think you might be interested in taking part, let me know. I'm working on a set of questions to be sent out, from which you can select and then on the basis of the answers I will probably follow up with supplementaries before writing the interview up for posting.

UPDATE: comments temporarily closed on this post, which for some reason is being targeted by spammers

How to be an artist (perhaps)

It's a truism I suppose, that as we get older, our tastes change and develop. My own late involvement in things artistic, coupled with thoughts about ageing as covered by Ronni Bennett has however caused me to think about this rather more deeply

I'm not alone in developing an interest in art late in life. Grandma Moses for example took it up even later than me, in her 70s. I want to know however if there are common factors or triggers. Grandma Moses was an embroiderer before she took up painting. Harry Bell, as I remember from our school days together, seems to have had a natural talent for drawing, but didn't fully pursue it until his 40s, when he went back to university and took a Fine Art degree.

In my case I've always been as much interested in the idea of creativity as in being creative. I first read Arthur Koestler's wonderful book The Act of Creation, some years ago and I suppose that ties in with one of my other interests, philosophy. I remember years ago on a training course, coming across Eric Berne's Transactional Analysis and in the course of some quiz, scoring highly on the Adult and Child axes, which according to the tutor was a strong indicator of creativity. I have to admit however, that after thirty years working in local government, I didn't come across many people who were obviously creative- or at least who tried to be creativity to their daily work. Any signs of a creative spark were seen not as something to encourage or build upon, but to be stamped out like a fallen ember from the fire.

It seems possible therefore that one factor that drives people towards creative activities in later life is that in their working lives creativity was suppressed. I have no idea of the conditions of Harry's working environment, but I know it was in the Civil Service, which from my contacts over the years is even more suspicious of new ideas than local government.

I do wonder how much creativity is locked up and suppressed by the demands of work, and what the impact would be for all of us if that creativity could be set free.

Thinking allowed

Although not triggered by recent events in the financial markets, they have certainly reinforced a changing attitude to the vagaries of life that I have observed in myself over the past few months. As the world outside gets ever more desperate, I find myself becoming more introspective, more inward looking. Don't get me wrong - I still fume and do a Meldrew at the stupidities of politicians and bureaucrats, but I no longer have the urge to get out there and break down walls and change things.

Is this age related? I have just turned 62, and I know from bitter experience that I have bugger all chance of making a difference politically. Indeed my head is still sore from 40 odd (some very odd, but that's another story) years of brick walls. So I suppose it is. Whatever the trigger, from now on life is for me and my family and I shall do whatever seems like a good idea at the time.

For now that means my energies are directed into creative activity. Alongside photography and digital artwork I am sketching and painting and I have just started a printmaking workshop where I hope to learn and develop new skills. At the moment I am concentrating on monoprinting and collagraphy. If I get involved in the community again it will be artistically, joining with other artists and writers to share and talk and generally have a good time - and about bloody time too...

20 (ish) things I’m longing to do in 2008

Having been fingered for this by Brenda I was going to let it pass me by, being allergic to good intentions these days. However, on reflection it seems:

1. a good way to fill a blog post, and less cynically
2. a genuinely useful way to ruminate on one’s lot in life.

New Year resolutions are of course doomed to failure. Producing a list of 20 (or 19 or whatever) things to do seems to be somehow much more realistic in that such a list can only be broad brush. This is already sounding a lot more pretentious than Brenda’s idea so without further preamble:

    1. Write more and keep focussed. In the past four years I have started two novels (both for NaNoWriMo) but because I let my attention drift in both cases they never got finished. (OK the first is probably crap too, but that never stopped some people)

    2. Blog more. I’ve separated this from 2 above but obviously they are both complementary and conflicting. I seem to be incapable of writing even a three line blog post without revising and refining it, so even minimal blogging takes away from more formal writing.

    3. I’m developing an interest in what I think of as ‘practical anarchism’ and I need to develop these ideas further – in other words we can’t get rid of the bastards, but we can still make their life hell… (see also 1 and 2 above!)

    4. Get to grips with my Bronica camera. In particular this will mean getting better at using a light meter, which has never been my strong point.

    5. Paint. The desire to paint has resurfaced recently, perhaps prodded back into existence by my digital work.  I haven’t really worked out if this is a sub-conscious feeling that digital art isn’t really art, a genuine artistic upswelling, or if it stems from my inability to do anything properly with getting diverted to something else after a couple of months

    6. Get out more. For a variety of reasons that hasn’t been an option over the last 2-3 years, but both photography and painting demand it.

    7. Get more business like about selling. I’m actually not too bad at the selling once I get to something like a craft fair, but I need to take a much more hard headed look at where and how I sell. I’m certainly not going to go back to being a wage slave – the very idea makes me feel ill – so selling my pictures or other craft work like jewellery is the only option, unless someone takes up my novel to make a block buster film.

    8. Keep learning. Like most people I have huge gaps in my knowledge and at my age only having a goal in mind will give me any chance of filling even some of them in any systematic way. Until I was 61 for example I had never read Jane Austen. That gap has now been filled by one of her books. I probably won’t be reading another, but now that is from choice, not ignorance… 

        As an example of my present scattergun approach, the books on my current reading pile include:

• Anarchy, State and Utopia – Robert Nozick
• A Glastonbury Romance – John Cowper Powis
• Just and Unjust Wars – Michael Walzer
• Cash – Johnny Cash
• What are Old People For? – William H Thomas (Recommended by Ronni Bennett)
• The Compass Rose – Ursula K LeGuin
• The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
• Poetics of Space – Gaston Bachelard

    9. Get angry. I’m retired and beholden to no one. The first time I saw the clip (below) I thought it was hilarious, but now it brings tears to my eyes, because we have taken it – time and again we have taken it and we are still taking it. So the new strap line will be: