RICHARD SWANN ART

Penknife. And flower, obviously.

Exhibition coming up.  Anything you have to lift a page on a calendar to see is too far in the future to be a worry, so sod it, play another level on Candy Crush Saga.  You’ll have done a hundred paintings by then, having in the meantime made that elusive style breakthrough that enables the effortless production of deathless masterpieces by the ton.

And then it’s almost here and your meagre output is not going to fill even the single screen you’ve hired.  Time to get creative –  frame some sketches,  some photos even, call some of your reject paintings ‘studies’, pin up an Artist’s Statement, that’ll fill an A4 space.  In fact if you’d been this creative to start with in the painting department the problem wouldn’t have arisen.  And the resource you have most of, that chalky stack of scribblings that’s built up into a tower of ruined paper…  Resist!  Remember at all times NO ONE WANTS TO SEE YOUR LIFE DRAWINGS.  They have their own stack of shame that’s built up over the years.  In the town where you live there are at least a million life drawings.  None of yours look even remotely human anyway and to be honest we all know what happens to bodies over time and don’t need the evidence rubbed in our faces.

However,  at the backs of cupboards,  hidden under the bed beneath serious layers of dust, lurk warped canvas boards, battered pieces of gessoed MDF, stretched canvases with rusting staples, upon which is written the history of your failure.  It’s important not to throw these away (the people who chuck your trash onto a lorry might see them for a start, have some consideration) because there was nothing wrong with what you were trying to do.  You failed in the attempt, it was doomed from the first, hesitant, uncommitted brushstroke with that colour you instantly knew was wrong and should have scraped off and mixed again.  But you ploughed on, reluctant to write off any of your precious time and effort.  With the passage of time however comes an indifference to the amount of work you put in, and you can now overpaint the thing with the right colours and the bravura that were needed in the first place, happily obliterating hours of toil and most importantly creating some much needed space filler in very little time.

The above is an example.

Yeah I know, but you should have seen it before.