focus duly forgotten

...or how art sometimes happens.

Recently a lot of my visual poetry has begun this way. Sketching in a notebook or on loose sheets of paper.

There's almost an element of brute force to this at times. Just throwing ideas at the paper to see if anything sings. And if it does, however faintly, pursue that theme until it's clear that nothing's going to come of it.

Sometimes, but by no means all the time, one of the forms will be compelling enough to demand revisiting in a more finished version.

Here it was not the form I initially thought but the one immediately below, although only after looking at two others in more detail first.

The first of those other two was the one immediately below, which as you can see from the last but one image got its own page.

The second of the two images developed before returning to the first was the one you can see developing below. The order of these sketches runs top left, top right, middle right, bottom left.

I then decided to return to the first form identified as worth revisiting, and after two attempts managed the final ink piece below. It's called red j 1.

Now I can show you the final spread from my notebook. Having also made ink versions of the second and third forms identified as worth revisiting above, I had a brainwave.

For those of you too lazy to biggify the image, or unable to read my writing the text says:

14/5/10 oh oh oh - better idea - box with delicate cuts in one or more surfaces

letters? visual poetry shapes? other forms?

I think visual poetry shapes.

And so I made the box - with, you'll notice, the image carelessly reversed. Although I like it that way too. [Edit 15/5/10] The box inevitably is called red j 1 box.

A more direct view.

And another shot, just because.

There will be more of this sort of thing. By which I mean these boxes (6cm x 6cm if you're interested) with visual poems cut in the side.

You see, I try to make myself more disciplined (see previous post), then do something silly like launch on a new project. There's just no helping some people.

Update 15/4/10 An interesting question (to me at least) is how far projects like this, and the 'sound actions' mentioned in the previous post, are poetry. In many ways it doesn't matter a great deal, and it certainly doesn't affect how I approach my work which is more or less exploratory and reactive. What is interesting about the question is how much risk there is of my wandering into areas that are beyond my competence.

For instance, I am quite happy with a lot of my visual poetry, and accept that I am good with simple graphic forms while not being able to draw especially well. Likewise I think I make pretty effective sound poetry, but constantly try to emphasise that I am most certainly not a musician. The negotiation in all of this work is whether I remain a reasonably skilled maker of effective visual poems and small objects, for instance, or start to become a ham-fisted chancer trying my hand at drawing and sculpture and being badly shown up.

This is not a new interest for me. When I was a teenager, producing hundreds of paintings a year, writing comparable numbers of poems, short stories, philosophical reflections and descriptive vignettes, and writing (and sometimes taping) dozens of songs and song fragments, I was interested in how and why artists became specialists. I genuinely believed at the time that everyone has the capacity to become anything they wanted by application and force of will. So it was interesting to speculate why and how artists developed particular specialisms, and why other artistic endeavours they were presumably also skilled at during their youth should be subsequently neglected.