A Gallery Post

You did get carried away...why not , a good analogy . I think we all go through times when the b****y thing will not do as it is supposed to do. But life would be boring if we reached perfection every time.

I've always said that one learns more from failure than from success, which means I should have learned just about everything by now given my failure rate but still they come!

I've come to believe that having doubts is part of the painting process. Often, I need time to pass before I can decide whether one of my own pictures is OK. Some that I had the most doubts about, I've come to like (and vice versa, of course). Robert Hughes said, 'The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.' He was an art critic, I tend to take more notice of what artists have to say about art...but there's sense in his quote. Doubts don't make you a great artist, of course...but making pictures is an imperfect art anyway. I suppose that's what prompts us to have another go.

Robert Hughes was one of the very few art critics I paid much attention to - he wrote very well, and his judgement was usually acute. He was invited once to a tycoon's luxuriously appointed sky-rise apartment to give his opinion of a painting on which the poor man had just splashed nearly $1 million: the artist was a "name", and still is. Hughes looked at it, then wandered over to the window overlooking the park and cityscape below. "I much prefer the view from your window." Had a phone call a while ago from some young man who was very keen to get me to invest in artworks - his entire talk was about investment potential, growing market, etc. I was quite rude in the end: in five minutes of babbling about money, I told him, you've not once mentioned the bloody art; and thrust the phone down on him. I thought of Robert Hughes then. As to 'confidence' and dissatisfaction - I gain a little bit, a very little bit, when I've not seen one of my, um, oeuvres for a long time; I can then see it as (I hope) others might see it; and now and then, I preen myself and say 'd'you know, that's not bad!'; but this is rapidly followed by the question 'could I still do it?'. And by far the more common reaction is 'oh God this is grim, hide it!'. I do think one needs to give oneself a bit of credit now and then if a thing has more or less come off: otherwise you just get depressed about the quality of your work and resolve never to do any more. But that's not confidence, as such - still less satisfaction.