I am (hopefully) off to France tomorrow, for a week or two, so the blog may become a bit sporadic whilst I am out there. Apologies in advance ( not that I expect my..erm..hordes of readers will be jumping up and down with rage, but I like to be consistent).


I've been thinking a little bit about art and ego and how intertwined they are. Sometimes, it seems like such a fantastically arrogant thing to be, or want to be, an artist. It's a sort of childish consistent wish for praise, and attention, and 'look at me! look at me!', and I think you need to be a pretty resilient personality to reconcile this with a way of life.

I was out with a lot of architects from my old job last night, and it got me thinking when I was talking about how different this way of life is. No, I don't have site agents yelling down the phone at me, and constant demands for information, and endless problems which never seem to be resolvable. But I also don't have an 'off' switch any more. Everything seems to relate back to painting - every emotion, every bit of information, every single thing I see. And that has its own form of stresses and tiredness. And the doubt! the endless self questioning, not least of which is if I have any right to do this at all - or if I would be a lot better sitting out the recession with a job down at Tesco, and then waiting for a job in architecture to come back up.

But, I think I'd always kick myself if I didn't paint. I don't really like life when there's no creativity in it - or, I do, but it seems a bit more pointless somehow. It was nice to go out there last night, with all my old colleagues - some of which still have jobs, some who don't, and be able to be a bit proud of what I am doing now, and hear that many of them liked the paintings they'd seen online. It kicked me out of the strop, and the abyss of self doubt I'd been wallowing in since Friday. I think the lesson is it's not a bad thing necessarily to want a bit of praise and encouragement to keep going - the bad thing would be letting myself be cut of from friends and people in general just because I don't work in a big noisy office any more. The hermetic life of the artist in isolation is not for me - or only up to a point. So, anyway,. here's to my friends - thanks for cheering me up last night. Even though I am suffering for it today with a most dreadful hangover..