As a rule, I’ve tended to find that the work that I’m happiest with (in an artistic sense) is the stuff that I’ve done when I’ve tried something unfamiliar, where the work emerges almost unnoticed as I flounder about trying to get the software, tools or materials to work for me. When I’ve gained some sort of mastery of the techniques, somehow the work doesn’t have the same freshness and vitality. It’s like I’ve controlled all the life out of it. I guess that once I’m in control of the process, I can turn my attention to the product, and the work becomes a bit tame as a result.
Some of these prints suffer from too much control, too much of me trying to achieve a particular effect or an end product. Sometimes I’ve drawn something on a bus already thinking that it’ll make a good print (usually it doesn’t) Some of them are so carefully drawn, planned and cut that they feel a bit dead to me, a bit too fixed and lifeless.
Then again, some of the ones where I just went for it and bashed them out with very little design or thought beforehand, well they can turn out a bit disappointingly too… :-)
In the end there’s little rhyme or reason behind which prints work well and which ones don’t, and that I guess has been one of the joys and the frustrations of the project. Maybe it’s a case of slowly edging towards a better understanding of how to do stuff well rather than making huge strides forwards.
And then I come back to the original intent to get beyond the idea of success and failure and just be comfortable with making stuff and learning… :-)
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