A while ago, I posted this on my other blog.

***

In this book from The Tate about the artist Sir Terry Frost, I found this:

"To look at a painting which gives you the opportunity to have solitude, to be yourself and to be able to wander into reverie, is more than hedonistic, it's spiritual".

Until now I have never 'got' the work of Mark Rothko - I loved his way with paint, but never understood the paintings themselves. Somehow this quote managed to pin down for me their essentially meditative nature.

Which leads me to this from Rothko:

"Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness. "

***

I still find these inspiring and they still inform some of what I am trying to do in my own work, however unsuccessfully. I was prompted to repost them by this post over on Tina Mammoser's blog.

Writing on the Fine Art Views blog, artist and critic has this to say:

We must show that there is more than one avenue toward success in art. The reality is that an artist can be extremely successful outside of these high profile art/gallery scenes. The reality is that an artist can (and many do) create significant works of art having never stepped foot within an established art scene. An artist CAN have impact without a blessing from the high profile circles of the art world.

That rings true for me, never having had any formal arts training. It is extremely difficult to get a showing if you haven't been through the standard art school mill and when this is coupled with the emphasis on the London and New York art scenes the effect is deadening. The significance of a work of art is not determined by its price tag or the venue in which it is shown

Without any formal art education, I tend to come on new artists by chance or recommendation or perhaps from the media. Accordingly my knowledge of art and artists is patchy and variable. As an example I recently watched a documentary on TV about the artist Joan Mitchell, who was at the time unknown to me. Stimulated by that I have been looking, on the net only alas, at some of the work of her contemporaries. Like most people with a passing interest in the subject I knew of Pollock and Rothko, but beyond that people like Mitchell and de Kooning had passed me by.

One of the things that fascinates me about abstract art is the way in which a seemingly arbitrary arrangement of blocks of colour on a flat surface can still evoke a sense of 3D space. I found this in much of de Kooning's work. As an example, looking through a book about him, I came on two pictures - 'Palisade' from 1957 and 'September Morn' from 1958, both of which immediately made me think of the work of the Victorian artist John Martin, whose work I saw recently at the Tate Gallery in London. They had strong resonances with Martin's vast, storm swept landscapes, usually with a tiny human figure somewhere in the scene.

Similarly, 'Montauk Highway' conjures up a strong sense of movement through space which was apparent without knowing the title.

For me this goes to the point of my previous post about the difference between abstraction and abstract. De Kooning's paintings are fully abstract but still refer to and draw on landscape and 'real' space in their organisation and composition.

Edit: This is post 100 on this blog, which at one stage I thought I would never meet. To celebrate I am offering 10% of the first 10 orders from the shop received before the end of April. I'm going to be adding some new small prints in a day or so, so keep checking.

Howard Hodgkin is on record as saying that he has never painted an abstract in his life. This may seem surprising when when one looks at his work, but is explained by the fact that for Hodgkin all his work is about something specific - a place, an event or a person. Other abstract painters do not make this sort of claim, but nevertheless often seem to reference the world at large. Arshile Gorky's work for example often seems to include substantial figurative elements.

Joan Mitchell's paintings on the other hand have a strong landscape feel.

Despite these references, I still have problems when I see work being sold on Etsy or EBay described as 'abstract landscape'. This seems to me to be an oxymoron, but not one that is especially helpful. By definition surely, an abstract cannot simultaneously be a landscape. An abstract may reference landscape, but as a painting it cannot be both.

I think the use of these two terms in conjunction arises because of a confusion between the object - an abstract painting is after all an object - and the process of making it, the process of abstraction. It may be the writer in me, but I don't think this is mere wordplay. Too much of contemporary art is seen as at best remote from reality and at worst as meaningless and pretentious. Clarity of language is one way to challenge that view.

I haven't posted in a while, a problem with my foot has meant I haven't been in the studio much and so have little of my own work to talk about. For some reason this has also impacted on my other blogging. The hiatus has made me think therefore about the way in which this blog in particular is going.

Initially I had high intentions of creating a wide ranging resource for artists covering business planning, profiles of other artists and general posts on art matters. I recognise that was ambitious of course. The business planning work has gone no where - it is difficult to build up enthusiasm for a business plan when the business is moribund. I had some early success with profiles, but although I have had lots of acceptances, artists generally tend to be less good at following through. I haven't harassed people about this apart from a few gentle reminders, so they have fallen by the wayside. I have one still to post, so watch this space.

My own work is picking up again and I've made some new monotypes - all tiny - so although I do not want this blog to be about my own work exclusively there will be some posts soon on work in progress. This may rekindle the business planning work, we will have to see.

The music posts are fun to do, but in order to avoid copyright problems I want to use YouTube or Vimeo videos and I have had reports that these posts are causing problems for some people. I will come back to them, but I suspect I will only embed one or two and provide links to the rest. I will also experiment with embedding lower resolution versions.

Longer posts on art are more of a problem. I'm not sure how much interest there is in these but in any case writing them takes time and I need to be inspired and as ever inspiration has been in short supply lately.

So, for the future expect posting to be irregular and when it comes to be more about my own work than anything else. Thoughts and ideas on topics to be covered would be welcomed.

A little while ago I posted on the subject of 'cultural appropriation' (Pocahotties, Picasso and the Elgin Marbles). That post referred mostly to musical themes, but I want to come consider the broader topic of appropriation, that is the use of the work of others in some way, in our own art. Of course few, if any, artists can claim to be wholly original. Even the greatest of masters had influences and in Newton's famous phrase, “We are all standing on the shoulders of giants.

So, when a little while ago I found myself in a creative low spot, (In the desert), and inspired in part by the idea of theme and variations from music, I decided in the end to try and dig myself out by explicitly examining and using a work by Howard Hodgkin that I had seen in a book, and which had particularly drawn my attention. The work in question, which I have yet to see in real life, is 'Rain' in the Tate collection.

Using that painting as a model, I first of all made a print version. This wasn't meant to be an accurate copy, but more than something simply 'inspired' by the original.

Subsequent versions went further and further away from the original.

I'm not claiming any great artistic value in these tiny monoprints. They appear to me to be attractive in their own right and in making them I achieved my aim of getting out of a creative slump. I also learnt some things I hadn't been expecting. For example, despite Hodgkin's superficially loose style, the composition of his painting is actually very deliberate. The blocks of colour and their placement have great compositional significance. In part this is perhaps consequent on his stated view that his paintings are not abstract, but always about something very specific. I certainly found, as I moved further and further from his composition, that it was harder and harder to maintain the sense of completeness that I find in his work.

Since making these prints I have moved on a little and used the generic style, rather than a specific painting as inspiration. These prints have yet to be scanned so will be uploaded at a later date.

In the wider context of appropriation, it would be interesting to get your comments on the idea of using another artists work in this way. Obviously I'm not trying to 'pass off' these works as anything other than what they are and personally I found the process both useful and fun. Using the musical analogy again, I see the idea of 'theme and variations' as a positive thing, but what do you think? Have you ever used the work of another artist in this way? How would you feel if it was your work being used as the source?

I've been working on some small monotypes over the past few weeks. I started making these as a quick way to try out palettes and different ways of mark-making on the plate, keeping the size down for economy and to save time. I'm increasingly finding however that I like this size - the largest being no more than about 5" by 4" - especially the concentrated focus and the way in which marks have to be kept simple and graphic to show up. Despite that subtlety in shading is still possible.

I haven't put any of these in  my shop here. I'm not sure how much interest there would be in what are in effect studies. They have been uploaded to flickr however so have a look and if you think they have worth in themselves, please let me know. I would love some feedback.

I've included some examples below, but the full set, currently eight in number but with another half dozen or so still to scan, can be found here.

Some of the prints still to scan were made while trying to get out of my creative block that I posted about a few days ago. I'll put them into a separate post that will tie into the series of posts on 'appropriation' that I started here.

Have you come across 'pocahotties'? I hadn’t either until a few weeks ago. It is apparently the term used for young women who dress up in 'Red Indian' outfits in which to prance around on Halloween. I have to confess that until recently, being as happy to watch scantily dressed young women capering around as the next male, I would have seen this as essentially harmless, although it isn’t prevalent in the UK. However, reading the reaction of those on the receiving end made me realise that in practice this is just as offensive as would be putting on blackface and an 'African Princess' outfit. While there are, and probably always have been, people who respect Native American culture and see virtue in emulating it, dressing up for a party is not respect.

Following this up, I came across the term 'cultural appropriation’, defined on Wikipedia as “the taking – from a culture that is not one’s own – of intellectual property, cultural expressions or artefacts, history and ways of knowledge.” It is perhaps best used to describe the broader process of acculturation from the perspective of a minority or weaker culture.

While I understand the 'pocahottie' issue, I have immediate problems with this wider concept. Almost every term used in that definition has further problems of definition. What does ‘taking’ mean? What is a culture? Can we locate the source of ‘intellectual property, cultural expressions or artefacts, history and ways of knowledge’ at a cultural level? Can the appropriation of objects like works of art be considered in the same way as appropriation of content like artistic styles or culturally significant rituals?

Moreover. as the term has passed into wider usage, its meaning has become confused, muddled and riddled with inconsistencies. In particular it has become used to justify claims that the use of concepts from other cultures is in some way unacceptable, to be avoided and perhaps even racist. Dig into blog comment threads and you will arguments to that effect about judo and other martial arts, yoga, textile patterns, music and a huge range of artistic endeavours. Most of these arguments moreover take the ‘donor’ culture at face value, without looking to see how far it is itself a synthesis. The implied suggestion that these cultures cannot stand up for themselves but must be defended by others and, implicitly, fossilised is also at best patronising and potentially racist.

To take this further let’s look at some cases of alleged content appropriation in the arts.

Jazz and blues are generally considered to have their roots in African-American culture. It has been argued in the past that when non African-American musicians attempt to play jazz or blues they are cannot perform with the right sensitivity and feeling and are also damaging the culture from which they are ‘stealing’.

So far as the first argument is concerned there is plenty of contradictory empirical evidence. Many years ago I saw a TV interview with musicians Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee in which they recounted how, when they first heard a recording by the British artist Lonnie Donegan, they thought it was by Leadbelly, so accurately had he captured the sound and feel.

Philosopher James O Young in his book Cultural Appropriation and the Arts" target="_blank" title="Cultural appropriation and the arts">Cultural Appropriation and the Arts recounts how the trumpeter Roy Eldridge (Young calls him ‘Ray’) bet the music critic Leonard Feather that he could reliably tell the difference between jazz performances by African American and non African American musicians. Eldridge failed miserably.

A third example can be found in the almost universal praise for the work of Eric Clapton from black artists like Muddy Waters and B B King.

The second argument about damage to the donor culture also fails to stand up to investigation. The classic 'St James Infirmary Blues' is a case in point. The words and melody have their origin in an 18th century traditional English folk song called "The Unfortunate Rake" (also known as "The Unfortunate Lad" or "The Young Man Cut Down in His Prime"). There are numerous versions of the song throughout the English-speaking world. It evolved for example into other American standards such as "The Streets of Laredo". Effectively the song is the product of a long process of adoption, adaptation and transmutation into the blues we know.

A similar case is the song ‘Goodnight Irene’ recorded in 1950 by Pete Seeger and the Weavers. This was an adaptation of a song called ‘Irene’ by Leadbelly and proved controversial at the time. It turned out however that the Leadbelly song – which he had copyrighted – was based on a traditional Southern folk song he had learned from his uncle. That song was in turn an arrangement of a waltz written in the 1880s by Gussie Lord Davies, an African America composer who wrote however for a largely white audience. Probably Leadbelly’s uncle had come across it via that non African-American channel. Davis of course had in turn appropriated the waltz from the music of Vienna. The song has now permeated British culture to the extent that it has become the club song for supporters of the English football club Bristol Rovers.

In both cases these songs have been passing in and out of African American culture over an extended period. The extent to which they can be placed within a specific culture is minimal and the extent to which any culture has been harmed by the process is probably zero.

Film is another example of appropriation resulting in positive outcomes. The great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa made numerous films based on Western literary sources. Perhaps the greatest of these are Ran (derived from King Lear) and Throne of Blood (derived from Macbeth). Another of Kurosawa’s films Seven Samurai was in turn remade as The Magnificent Seven, while his film Yojimbo became A Fistful of Dollars.

Shakespeare was himself an arch appropriator, from Holinshed and others. His themes and plots have a mythic quality that stands above any specific culture and so easily slip from one medium to another and from one cultural setting to another. As well as the Kurosawa films, Lear was the inspiration for the film Broken Arrow Lance, the musical Kiss me Kate came from Taming of the Shrew and most well known of all perhaps, West Side Story, from Romeo and Juliet. His work was also the stimulus for the suite “Such Sweet Thunder” by Duke Ellington.

Appropriation of content then has been the source of much great work. The adoption of artistic elements from a culture and their remaking into something new is a positive thing. Examples have been cited from jazz and film, but there are many others. In music, tango, salsa, Tejano, flamenco and high life are all syntheses from a range of cultures. Surprisingly perhaps the Mexican Tejano music includes elements from the brass band music of German immigrants, while flamenco incorporates Arabic and even Indian influences via Gypsy music. None of these examples cited have taken anything away from their culture of origin, in fact by their creation the sum total of human happiness has been increased.

Cultural and artistic change is inevitable. Without it we would still be picking wild berries and fleeing from predators. Trying to prevent change will be as successful as King Cnut. Everyone loses.

I think I have more to say on this, but this post is already rather long.

I went to Tate Modern in London a few weeks ago to see Panorama - works by Gerhard Richter (now closed). As I said in an earlier post, I was a little disappointed and overall had a mixed reaction to his work.

His approach appears very intellectual. Even his dependence on chance in his 'squeegee' paintings does not appear to be for any sensual reason but academic.

The show is arranged chronologically. Much of the early work left me cold, especially the grisaille paintings made from photographs. The exception was the series of paintings about the Baader-Meinhof group. Somehow - for me anyway - the slightly detached coldness of these paintings chimed with the nihilism and the essential empty destructiveness of the groups ideology. For the rest though, nothing...

He clearly has great technical ability. Paintings like The Reader (1994) for example are photographic in their rendering, but I wonder then, as I always do with super-realist work, "What's the point?" Painting, for me at least, is not about capturing a likeness, although that may be an element. It must offer more than that, something I certainly cannot get from a photograph. In the case of a painting like Folding Dryer (1962) I don't get anything. Perhaps for Richter, fresh from East Germany, the abundance of consumer goods available to him in the West perhaps triggered something that led to this image, but away from that context it has no wider, universal meaning. I actually preferred  a series of linocuts, Elbe from 1957. Made while still in the East these have an atmospheric quality, a depth, that the later monochrome works lack.

He also changes his style quite regularly. His grey paintings were followed by a series of colour charts. These paintings, flat slabs of colour arranged at random almost deny painting. There is no sense of brushwork or texture, no pretence o meaning, just flat rectangles of colour. Comparisons might be drawn with the work of Bridget Riley, but Richter is not concerned with playing tricks with our visual cortex. He seems to be saying simply 'This is it, make of it what you like'.

Later he reverted to monochrome with among others, a series of Townscape paintings. These are Impressionist in technique, blobs of paint in shades of grey that only resolve into an image as you stand back.

By the 90s he is back working in colour again. Some of these involve over-painting of photographs - seemingly arbitrary blotches of colour ignoring, even destroying, the image beneath. He also begins to produce a series of Abstract Paintings, experimenting with the use of squeegees and building images through a process of adding and removing layers of paint. Most successful of these I think are a set of four, Forest from 1990, where the title is post hoc, based on the impression created by the paintings, rather than any prior intent.

By now his obsession with chance appears to be coming to the fore. Many paintings from this period include large areas where a layer of paint has been physically peeled off to reveal what is underneath in ways that can only be arbitrary. Others involve applying paint at random to paper then photographing it, selecting details and then painting at large scale those semi-random (in the sense that they were not planned, only selected) details. The technique adopted is however flat and soft, removing any sense of texture or impasto from the image, so that the final painting looks like nothing more than an brutally over enlarged digital image, albeit without the characteristic qualities of digital.

Finally, in this review at least, we come to the last pieces, a set of 6 paintings called Cage, so-named because they were painted while listening to the music of John Cage. These huge works, each 10 feet by 10 feet are wholly abstract, made by a process of layering over a period of weeks. Paint was added using huge squeegees. The monograph on the series shows a unique set of work in progress photos, that vividly demonstrates the way in which they changed and developed over time. I'm reserving judgement on these. Clearly they are a major piece of work, and in fact they have been acquired as a part of the Tate Permanent Collection. I'm unsure however whether there impact comes from any innate aesthetic quality as 'art' and how much comes from their sheer scale.

However, I am reminded of this quote from Sir Terry Frost, which I have used before in relation to the work of Mark Rothko.

"To look at a painting which gives you the opportunity to have solitude, to be yourself and to be able to wander into reverie, is more than hedonistic, it's spiritual".

Perhaps this quality of reverie will emerge the next time I see these paintings.

I didn't do any printmaking or painting over the Christmas holiday period. This holiday for me has always been about relaxing with family, reading lots of books and generally not doing a great deal.

However, trying to pick up again after the break has been hard. I seem to have hit a dry spell. Such few ideas that have struck have not worked out in practice. I've done some painting, but all of it so far has been picking up existing work. Getting inspiration for new stuff has been hard.

After a while I decided to stop trying to force things and do some writing instead, for here and for my other, politically focused, blog. For me though, writing anything over a few paragraphs takes time, because I need to build a logical structure to a piece even before I begin the process of editing and polishing.

So blog posts for here on the idea of 'Cultural Appropriation' and about my visit to the Gerhard Richter show at Tate Modern and for my other blog on a range of topics including the Occupy movement, pop up shops and galleries and on the increasing trend for political power to become increasingly concentrated in a small political class are all unfinished!

Advice for writers on beating writers block is usually to keep writing. It works because if all else fails the only thing you waste is time, and if you work your way through the blog block that isn't in the end wasted. Printing is something else though. My last three sessions at college have been a total bust, with nothing to show at all, while several days work in my own studio have been frustrating and depressing, with nothing produced worth keeping and many false starts, wasting ink and paper.

So how do you get through a creatively fallow period? Do you work on regardless, knowing much of what you do will be wasted or do you change tack, perhaps drawing or taking photographs instead of working in your usual medium? Please share your own experiences and practice - in the comments below rather than in the various fora to which I usually post links to blog posts.

As an experiment in ways to increase the visibility of art on Etsy, I have made a treasury, all fine art and focussing on landscape images. Click on an image to be taken directly to the item on Etsy.

There has been a discussion going on for a while on Etsy they could can improve its coverage of art. The basic premise is that when Etsy refers to art it ignores much of what is on the site, favouring twee or quirky illustrations and reproduction prints when selecting for its front page or in other promotional activity

The thread starts here:

http://www.etsy.com/teams/7714/ideas/discuss/9472004/page/1/

As part of the discussion and in order to widen the scope we are having a 24 hr round the world tweetathon using the Twitter hashtag #etsyandart.

Please join in with ideas, links or anything else that seems relevant.

I'm not looking for comments to this post for once (although if you can contribute no other way please feel free to do so) so if you want to join in the discussion go the thread above and/or join in on Twitter.

Last week I went to the Gerhard Richter show at Tate Modern in London. To say I enjoyed it would not be entirely accurate, but it was thoroughly thought provoking in terms of both technique and subject. One set I did very much like was his enormous 'Cage' series, now permanently at the Tate, six paintings each 10ft square loosely inspired by the music of John Cage. I bought a monograph on these paintings which includes many photographs of work in progress, so that it is possible to see the underpinning layers of paint and texture.

By comparison I found some of the curatorial notes, especially on the audio guide, so platitudinous as to be laughable. For example when you move in close you can no longer see the content of the picture - I would never have known! A shame - I would have liked to hear someone like Andrew Graham-Dixon talking about the work. He has a good voice and he knows his art. His book on Howard Hodgkin is excellent. I was also disappointed to find that the Tate's 'Seagram' Rothko paintings were not on display. One area had building work going on so they may reappear. The Tate has of course a huge collection - I think 17 by Patrick Heron of which only one is currently on display.

I was singularly unimpressed with the Tacita Dean installation in the Turbine Hall.  To me it totally failed to tackle the huge space in which it was located and was mundane in content.

Shows coming up in London this year I'm hoping to get to:

Picasso and Modern British Art at Tate Britain

David Hockney at the Royal Academy

and this one at Tate Modern that looks very interesting: Yayoi Kusama

There is just time too to see the wonderful John Martin exhibition at Tate Britain.

...and if you are feeling masochistic there is Damien Hirst also at Tate Modern, but not for me!

I'm going to write a more considered blog post about Richter soon I hope.

When my press arrived, I started by taking some impressions from existing plates. After that I started playing around with papers, pressures and colours to make some very small monotypes. None of these are much bigger than about 4" on a side. They were fun to make and when I get going will make a nice set of small pieces at lower price points in the shop. In the meantime here they are on Flickr.

I have had two prints in a local show, in the nearby town of Corsham. I went to pick them up yesterday and was pleased to find this one, 'Regatta', had sold.

So, if the new owner finds their way here, thank you for buying and I hope you enjoy the picture!

While reading a book called Writing about art by Marjorie Munsterberg (also a web site), I came across something I found rather shocking. She quotes a passage by John Ruskin in which he describes a painting by Turner.

It is a sunset on the Atlantic after prolonged storm; but the storm is partially lulled, and the torn and streaming rain clouds are moving in scarlet lines to lose themselves in the hollow of the night.  The whole surface of the sea included in the picture is divided into two ridges of enormous swell, not high, nor local, but a low, broad heaving of the whole ocean, like the lifting of its bosom by deep-drawn breath after the torture of the storm.  Between these two ridges, the fire of the sunset falls along the trough of the sea, dyeing it with an awful but glorious light, the intense and lurid splendour which burns like gold and bathes like blood.  Along this fiery path and valley, the tossing waves by which the swell of the sea is restlessly divided, lift themselves in dark, indefinite, fantastic forms, each casting a faint and ghastly shadow behind it along the illumined foam.  They do not rise everywhere, but three or four together in wild groups, fitfully and furiously, as the under strength of the swell compels or permits them; leaving between them treacherous spaces of level and whirling water, now lighted with green and lamp-like fire, now flashing back the gold of the declining sun, now fearfully dyed from above with the indistinguishable images of the burning clouds, which fall upon them in flakes of crimson and scarlet, and give to the reckless waves the added motion of their own fiery flying.  Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast upon the mist of the night, which gathers cold and low, advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty* ship as it labors amidst the lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, and mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight, – and cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea.

[Ruskin’s note]*She is a slaver, throwing her slaves overboard.  The near sea is encoumbered with corpses.

What I found shocking was not Ruskin's verbosity, which is characteristically High Victorian, but Professor Munsterberg's comments on it.

Ruskin drew upon an immense vocabulary, using many words that are unfamiliar today.  Even his Victorian contemporaries regarded his style of writing as exceptional.  It shows the influence of the King James translation of the Bible and, in this particular passage, Shakespeare.  These are references that Ruskin assumed his audience would understand, although any modern reader needs a dictionary and specialized knowledge to follow them. (emphasis added)

I accept that detailed knowledge of Shakespeare is rare these days (although I picked up the Shakespearean reference without too much difficulty), but reading the passage again I though that there was at most one word - incarnadines - that might cause problems and that the long sentences required care in navigation but otherwise the passage was not especially problematic.

Bearing in mind that the book is intended for degree level students (so far as I can determine from the City College of New York web site) are literacy levels of undergraduate students so impoverished these days? The book overall (especially the examples of assignments) seems to me not so much about the language of art and how to use it, but almost remedial level English.

Am I missing something? I do hope so.

It is common for artists to be told of the importance of developing a consistent and coherent style. Galleries of course like this since it makes marketing so much easier if an artist can be nicely packaged up. I've never been entirely convinced of this - at least from the creative perspective. In a comment on this I said:

I regularly see advice to 'develop a consistent style', but I still don't see the benefit to me as an artist. If I have to keep rehashing the same old thing to please buyers I stop developing and stop growing as an artist. I make art because I am driven to do it. If I have to make art to please other people then I'm not making art, I'm running a production line. I'll leave that to the Chinese...

I raised this issue on Etsy, provoking this response from artist Victoria Webb:

Ian, I'm with you on the idea of experimenting as an artist. While some of that article by Ms. Woodward has good advice, the notion that to get 'seen' by gallerists or collectors requires a stand out 'style' is just nonsense. The best artists change all the time, and that includes giants like Picasso.

This conflict between artistic creativity and the demands of the gallery system has affected some major artists.

It wouldn’t be too far off the mark to say that pretty much every professional relationship that I had cultivated throughout the 1990s collapsed as a result of what happened to my work in Mayo. When people looked at the paintings their jaws dropped. It was as if I’d betrayed them. How dare I take another path?

Stuart Shils about the problems he had when his style changed following a visit to Ireland in 1998.

The artist Patrick Heron had similar problems after a change of direction.

[The gallery director] wrote to Heron complaining that he was just beginning to find a market for his still lives and now Patrick had to hit him with this. Most artists have to put up with gallery owners who would like them to stick to the latest selling line…

Patrick Heron by Michael McNay, Tate Publishing

In order to set up my new press I did a series of test prints with some old plates.

An original print made on the presses at college is shown first.

These two are made on my own press.

I made a series of test prints also from a plate made on a solar etching course. Each one was made with varying levels of ink, wiping and pressure. It would have been better I suppose to use the same colour but by the time I realised that it was too late. The one shown is the best of the set. The others are on Flickr here

Some things just cannot be improved. That isn't to say they are flawless, because that would make them inhuman and it is, perhaps paradoxically, in the flawed that we find the most sublime art. Can you imaging for example, Billie Holiday's memorable album 'Lady in Satin' sung by Ella Fitzgerald?

The search for perfection does lie of course at the heart of much human endeavour - but acceptance, even delight, in the imperfect leaves us in the end richer.