Matthew Collings has a long and painfully honest piece about his time in art school and what it might all mean. It kicks off by pointing out that Damien Hirst is a terrible painter, but that's not the point of the piece. I found myself nodding along with his ramblings, though his experience was much different to mine (and about ten years earlier).
Saatchi Online - Blog On News, Views, Diaries, Photo-Journals
So, how do you study to become an artist? Is it boring or exciting to learn the rules? Can you only truly get anywhere if you break them, and if so why learn them in the first place? These questions were very urgent for me 30 years ago when I finished art school, but at the same time I didn't have any answers for them, and finding the uncertainty difficult to cope with I buried the problem. I covered it over with activity that bore a certain resemblance to living the life of an artist but in fact was pathological, an avoidance of facing life at all. I had a studio, I went there several days a week, I earned money to pay the rent and buy materials, and I often stretched up canvases and piled various marks on them, but I could never finish anything. I told people I was an artist -- I told myself the same thing. But in the studio there was never any stack of paintings, nothing ever built up. There were many starts but no finishes. And this went on year after year. I saw all sorts of shows, I wrote about them, I thought about them, I read all sorts of books, I was influenced by everything, I tried to re-do those things that I liked, kind of absorbing them, believing that somehow I always knew them, and that they were in fact "me," but after the first impulsive lunges I didn't know what to do next. I would come into the studio and start again, not knowing what on earth I was doing, and inevitably go nowhere.
