A Note about What I Do

I often wonder how these blogs relate to what I do in the studio – densely lexical and elaborate it’s often hard to compare them directly to the visual of what I am practicing. I often also wonder how these writings are going to relate to my reading of the History of Art at BA, as a search out where I should study in order to suit my greatest interest and approach. This blog for me has been an indescribable, but surprisingly well sourced and structured ‘blah’ on art. I did not think I had a definable or exacting approach to thinking and writing about the history of art and what I am noticing about this deep ranging and reaching culture.

I have been subconsciously introducing you (in my following,) to the New Art History. A regeneration of the History of Art that many I am sure would believe is like ‘the rear-view vision of the art historical machine, which remains fixed on the great dead,’ and that Mark Roskill’s 1974 publication What is Art History would have you believe is ‘about style, attributions, dating authenticity, rarity, reconstruction, the detection of forgery, the rediscovery of forgotten artists and the meanings of pictures…’

It is a discipline I’ve only just read and even heard of, yet it is what I have been doing for the last numerous months I’ve been committed to blogging. I’m an art historian of my age – through no specific education; I have brought myself to be concerned with the contemporary in artistic thought. No doubt somehow only my journey I have been trained in this post-modernist style, even though I’ve always considered myself rooted traditionally.

Gombrich, a considered traditionalist, reminded us that the study of the History of Art is not dead - it is never left in the relics of the past - “But is not this constant need for revision one of the thrills of the study of the past?” And so the relationship between what I do here when I write, what I do when I paint and surround myself with 21^st century amateurs and professionals is assess the present so I can critically predict what later will be a contribution to the well-received, past – The History of our current arts.

The New Art History is a collection of essays under editors A.L. Rees and F. Borzello