Figure

So this is a finished figure it has taken quite a few days to model this figure and yes there are some flaws in it but overall I’m rather happy with the results. I’m glad I took the decision to leave the front of the figure as it is, all I have done to enhance this is rub brown chalk in to it.

I have also been finding time to do more research and whilst looking at the work of Jan Krizek a Czechoslovakian outsider artist I came across this definition of Art Brut by Jean Dubuffet

“By this (Art Brut) we mean pieces of work executed by people untouched by artistic culture, in which therefore mimicry, contrary to what happens in intellectuals, plays little or no part, so that the authors draw everything (subjects, choice of materials employed, means of transposition, rhythms, ways of writing, et cetera.) From own depths and not from clichés of classical art or art that is fashionable. Here we are witnessing an artistic operation that is completely pure, raw, reinvented in all its phases by its author, based solely on his own impulses. Art, therefore, in which is manifested the. sole function of invention, and not those, constantly seen in cultural arts, of the chameleon and the monkey.

Excerpted from Jean Dubuffet L’art brut prefere aux arts culturels, Galerie Rene Drouin, Paris, 1949.

I feel now more than ever whilst in this period of lockdown that we as artists have to find new ways and materials to express ourselves, thus taking the working practice of the outsider artist with the freedom to use non-formalised ways of creating art I feel that I’m able to express myself. I wonder if I would have come to the conclusion of working and carving mortar if we had not been thrown into this situation? whatever the answer is I have found working in this way very liberating.