برچسب: artist

Reflections on my artist residency with the Berghof Foundation 2: How to begin?

My vision for this work is best described as bringing my art practice alongside conflict transformation in the belief that something positive can happen in that shared creative space.

I don’t claim to know what will happen or even how. My experience does convince me that opening up my painting practice offers opportunities for other people to feel energised and more vibrant. And that feels like something valuable to offer to people engaged in the vital, difficult work of conflict transformation and peace building, the people who do the field work and the people who produce resources for them.*

So there I was with these ideas offered to the Berghof Foundation and received with interest. How to proceed when the pandemic prevented me travelling?

Home studio

As an artist, paintings emerge out of my, almost daily, studio practice and are intrinsically connected to my lived experience: what I’m reflecting on, what I’m reading, who and what I’m seeing day by day. In my original vision, residency artwork would come out of taking that studio practice into dialogue with the new environment, responding creatively to the work of the organization through empathic engagement with its people, practices, and processes.

Instead I began this engagement online, watching interviews and documentaries on the website, attending a Zoom staff meeting where I introduced myself and the idea of the residency. To these ‘watchings’ I took along my sketchbook, capturing words and images that resonated for me, later adding colour as I reflected on what I’d heard and see. The tempo of a voice might prompt a line moving across the page. The emotion heard behind a related experience might prompt a colour.

I started a series of online ‘Studio Interludes’ with staff, inviting them to my studio to see what was in progress, talking about art and conflict transformation, and about other artists. (More on these in la later post.)

In the summer of my missed visit, BF sent me a copy of their 50th anniversary book that celebrates the work they have done since being founded in 1970. The carefully wrought texts and images in the book helped me immerse myself further in the work of the Foundation. And as I continued my studio practice at home in Scotland, I began to see how these very pages could be the beginning of residency artworks, as ‘found poems’.

Next time, the process of creating the found poems…

*It seems likely that art can be of benefit to conflicted parties during the processes of negotiating and building peace. I’m not yet in a position to claim that or to offer many strategies for doing it. I am collecting examples of such work.

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13/04/2025
Becoming an artist: responding to Simone de Beauvoir (3)

In The Second Sex, Chapter 14 The Independent Woman, Simone de Beauvoir offers a devastating critique of the problems facing women who want to be artists and writers. Much has changed since she wrote it in 1949, but also much has stayed horribly familiar.

In earlier posts, I’ve shared how I’ve worked with her words since first encountering them, constructing ‘turnings’ from her original. These turnings are not statements of ‘how it is’ but rather motivations/values/desires. In this summary, I group my turnings under four themes. Her critique turns into something like a personal manifesto and/or set of affirmations.

Speech Flowers, acrylic on canvas, 100 x 100cm, Lynne Cameron, 2018

the woman, the work, the world, and transcendence

My wings are not clipped

I go beyond the given through artistic expression

I throw prudence to the wind to try to emerge beyond the given world

I dare bold flights towards goals, and thereby risk setbacks.

I do not lack audacity to break through the ceiling

I adopt in front of the whole world, the disinterested attitude that opens up wider horizons.

I can be counted on to blaze new trails

I dissipate mirages and do not exhaust my courage – I do not stop in fear at the threshold of reality

I penetrate other shadows beyond clarity

I go beyond the pretext

I traverse the given in search of its secret dimension

I project my spirit with all its riches in an empty sky that is its to fill

the woman, the work, the world

I fully assume the agonising tête-à-tête with the given world

I abandon myself to the contemplation of the world: I am capable of creating it anew

I set the world apart. I question it. I denounce its contradictions. I take it seriously.

I approach nature in its inhuman freedom, try to decipher its foreign meanings and lose myself in order to unite with this other presence

I feel responsible for the universe

I think myself authorised to work out the fate of all humanity in my particular life

I make my history, my problems, my doubts and my hopes those of humanity

I attempt to discover in my life and my works all of reality

I enrich our vision of the world

the woman and the work

truth itself is ambiguity, depth, mystery: I acknowledge the presence of this enigma, and then I rethink it, re-create it

I passionately lose myself in my projects

I commit myself entirely to my enterprise. I am not tempted to give it up

I do not settle for a mediocre success. I dare to aim higher

I forget myself and generously aim for a goal

I aim for an object rather than my subjective success

I envisage art as serious work

I do not consider it to be a simple ornament of my life

I acquire technique. I do not balk at the thankless solitary trials and errors of work that is never exhibited, that has to be destroyed and done over again a hundred times. I do not cheat or hope to get by with a few ruses

I work

I do not attach too much importance to minor failures and modest successes

I have the courage to displease

I dare to irritate, explore, explode

I disown reasonable modesty

I refuse to orchestrate the mystification intended to persuade women to ‘remain women’

I can be a creator

the independent woman

I may feel alone within the world: I stand up in front of it, unique and sovereign

I posit myself as a freedom

I refuse to be object and prey

I will not waste my time on shopping and dress fittings and such

I do not deny my intelligence… or my age

I will not repudiate everything in me that is ‘different’

I have this madness in talent called genius

I will not stifle my originality; I trust it

I am solidly sure that I have already found myself

When the struggle to claim a place in this world gets too rough, there can be no question of tearing myself away from it; I emerge within it in sovereign solitude to try to grasp it anew

I learn from the practice of abandonment and transcendence, in anguish and pride

I dare to construct myself (and cherish myself)

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11/04/2025