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.

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

Simply by sailing in a new direction

You could enlarge the world

Listening to the radio on Sunday evening, these words from a poem leapt out at me. They captured why art is so important. It isn't about pretty pictures, attractive colours and shapes but about enlarging the world in which we live. Great art does this for us obviously, but so does all art. As we make art we enlarge our own world and thus our lives and the lives of those we share it with. So the next time anyone says to you that art is unimportant compared to famine, politics or whatever, remember this quotation.

I didn't catch the poets name at the time, but googling the words, they turn out to be from "Landfall in Unknown Seas" by Allen Curnow.

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 wonder though 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 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.

(First posted in a slightly different form here)