I am cutting lino, which I’ve left too long – it is right on the edge of being too hard and brittle to work, so I have to sit on it every twenty minutes or so to warm it up and make it more pliable, and I have to keep stopping to sharpen the gouges. In between trying not to stab myself or fog up the magnifier, I’m wondering if the whole process is just increasing the amount of stuff that’s going to end up in the bin. But I’m trying a couple of technical approaches which might be useful if they work, and there isn’t much to lose either way, so I keep chipping away in the odd hour here and there, chasing the idea of progress. I want to make some reduction prints with at least four or five layers of colour, and key to that is getting better at registration, so this is practicing technique. Other than that it has no point at all, so if any of them turn out OK, they can go in a folder – and if not (with this sort of work, much more likely) they usually get turned into collage or something in an attempt to not waste the paper.
I’ve not even tried to get anything lined up in terms of exhibitions or workshops this year, even the thought is exhausting. Making stuff yes, filling in endless supplicatory forms and sending them off with fees, not so much. So, ignoring the fact that he’s talking about work that was, in fact, commissioned), I take heart from Jimmy Grashow’s film: there is something heroic in making something nobody wants. Time to dig out the cape…