Some way back...

“Every child is an artist. The problem is staying an artist when you grow up.” Pablo Picasso

“I was 19, I was happy, wasn’t sure where I was going. Not much has changed in 30 years.” 

Those were the first lines written on this blog, Touches of sense…

Here I am in 2022, starting a new adventure, a web site, to be entitled: 

Some way back… 

Simon.Ensor.Art

I have always known that I was an artist.

My father used to ask me to illustrate his sermons. 

My mother told the school I painted like Lowry (I didn’t).

"I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit."

John Steinbeck.

My art teacher was a great teacher, he would give me excellent marks and then fail to convince me to do some work. 

Others told me to concentrate on more serious subjects.

Below is a drawing I knocked off for homework when I was 16 years old. 

The art teacher’s comments have been nagging me ever since.

I am writing now as a 60 year old Anglo-French artist, driven by a single question:

“What happens when I really put my mind to developing a body of visual art?” 

Some way back…

is a means to document and share responses to that question. 

“An artist without faith is like a painter who was born blind.”

Andrei Tarkovsky

As an artist, I have been working passionately for the past 34 years as an English teacher with thousands of students, exploring the medium and discovering the desire and the means to transform it. I have spent years studying and adapting my actions to the complexity and unpredictability of human interactions and learning. Faith and hard work has enabled this artist to see further…

Art has always been a way to lose myself and to find myself elsewhere.

Along the way, 

I have developed my voice as a blogger in Touches of sense…, connected and collaborated as an educator and as an artist with kindred creative spirits from around the world and employed more or less academic genres to communicate and to publish radical educational messages. The 482 blog posts that I have written since 2010 have become progressively more and more concerned with visual art. The last one, Touches of light, preciously preserved marked some sort of epiphany.

“A page escapes to leafy paths[...]Ephemera rendered eternal.Taking a moment to contemplate. Pause, gaze, breathe in, remember. Moving, losing sight, feeling loss.”

Ever since I was born, I have been acutely aware of the ephemeral nature of life and the infinite value of artistic expression. My father’s work was rhythmed by life’s passing seasons and the rituals of baptism, marriage,and death. My mother shared her love for music, poetry, gardening and nature,and an eye for beauty to be found in driftwood, pebbles, and bric-à-brac. 

Some way back…

Is made up of moments of figurative and abstract meaning making. I find flow and express emotions by letting myself be moved by the moment, the media, making marks intentionally or serendipitously. I am drawn to gaze at distant horizons and to investigate universes glimpsed through close focus. At times, images emerge organically with no apparent source. Certain motifs are  recurrent: nature, landscape, seascapes, mountains, rocks, trees, paths…the objective is always to discover new lands to be able to perceive what lies beyond the self, the subject, the page.

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."

Marcel Proust

Touches of sense… has been a means to map out areas I want to explore and to excavate and to study the reasons why they are important.

Each collection, each image has its back story. Some way back will build upon these foundations. 

Between 2014, and 2018 much of my artistic work was multi-media,collaborative and digital, combining poetry, spoken voice and images in assemblages. I owe much to my friends of #clmooc.

 

Since 2018, starting with “A vine branches wildly…”  I have concentrated my art practice predominantly on watercolor painting, ink, charcoal and graphite drawing. 

The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know and how much you need to learn.

When I speak to those who I consider to be master artists, I am comforted when they agree with this quote of George Leonard:

“We fail to realise that mastery is not about perfection. It’s about a process, a journey. The master is the one who stays on the path day after day, year after year. The master is the one who is willing to fail, and try again. For as long as he or she lives.”

I have stayed true to my path day after day, year after year. 

To my surprise it appears that this is its latest twist. 

I am working now on some way forward.

Simon Ensor

Artist exploring the ephemeral nature of life via figuration & abstraction, flow & scribble, intention & serendipity.

P.S.

I have no idea whether this will be the last post in Touches of sense...

It has been quite a while since I felt moved to write here.

The words just wouldn't come...

A letter to the editor.

A faithful and very ancient newspaper reader bemoans.


Dear Sir/(Madam/Other)

I am writing to complain about what I consider to be an unfortunate erosion of values under your watch.

I am sending this by (paper plane) airmail for fear that snail-mail will be a dud.

The Royal Mail is a b. disgrace.

Colour!

Faithful reader of your publication over the last one hundred and fifty years, I have noticed a growing dependence on colour and sensationalism, and news (if that is what one must call it) coming from what appears to be overseas.

Talking of colour, have you started to employ writers from the colonies as some economy  measure or have you dreamed up some new-fangled (ill-considered) scheme to export your (our) daily broadsheet abroad in order to pick up a few cheap readers?

It is a b. disgrace!!

What ever happened to our place in our Commonwealth???

It has become increasingly difficult to find your (our) paper in the diminishing (disappearing) number of reputable newsagents.

More and more people are suggesting that I bite the bullet and go 'digital.'

HA! BROADSHEET!!

What must a man do now if he wants to protect his bald pate from the mid-day sun?

Hold up a bloody iPad?

YOU seem to have forgotten the importance of a BROADSHEET for an Englishman's afternoon nap.

Have you never been to a test match!

Have you never spent a day on Frinton-on-sea greensward in mid-July?

I am told that I will be able to buy, nay 'have' a constantly updated version of the publication 'online'!!

What the hell is that about?  

Am I to radiate myself with one of those light boxes that I hear commuters now glue their eyes to?

How am I supposed to hide my proud carriage grimace behind a five-inch rectangle?

How am I supposed to avoid speaking to my better half at breakfast behind a five-inch rectangle?

How am I supposed to light a fire with a bloody piece of aluminium and glass and plastic and various bits of toxic handmedowns?

Have you lost hold of your senses man (woman/other)?

Furthermore, moreover, and what is also the case:

Subeditors.

I buy a newspaper to inform me at reasonable intervals of what a trained and trusted group of professional journalists consider to be an essential synthesis of our nation's days events; not to give me a bloody running commentary on some ruddy American football match.

What the hell is American Football???

Quality, a quality broadsheet that is what I deemed to buy.

Quantity, or frequency dear chap (madam/other) is no compensation for weak quality!

Furthermore, moreover, and what is also the case:

What do I care about a horde of shabby migrants vagrants queuing up in Calais to invade the home counties?

What do we have the armed forces for?

Chat-show!

The other day, there was even some 'LIVE CHAT' ladida with some obscure FRENCH actress.

Juliet Binwash or something.

What are you thinking of?

What will my better half think when she sees me tapping up some floosy over my kippers?

British standards.

Might I add, I even had the shock and disappointment not to have any reading matter to accompany my cod, chips and mushy peas the other day.

While the meal was wholesome enough (no thanks to you!!), it was wrapped in an offwhite piece of blank paper and with the grease held in some sort of plastic carton.

Whatever happened to the Fleetwood Gazette NEWSPAPER which wrapped it before???

I understand that half the bloody press is now owned by some vulgar pom basher from down under.

Well frankly, is that any wonder if these are your standards.

Yours, frankly

Disgusted from Frinton.


PS. digital like digitalis is toxic!



Footnote.

Disgusted from Frinton unfortunately featured in this week's online obituary column.

He/She/Other will be greatly missed by a few selected mourners.

No flowers please.

Wasting time with Warhol.

At the back of the cupboard lay a muddle  of Dinky toys, a bundle of ancient felt-tip markers and a set of cards kept together with an elastic band. 

What were these strangely faded picture cards? 

I picked them up and studied them.

Each card seemed to have a pair of identical blurred landscapes printed side by side.

As I was about to lose patience with the cards, I came across a pair of flimsy beige plastic glasses held together with Sellotape. 

I put on the glasses to see what I might see and then realised that they were connected to the faded cards.

On moving the double image of the Grand Canyon, it suddenly clicked.

These were 3d glasses. 

I viewed the whole set of cards, travelling to the Taj Mahal, past plains Indians, all the way to Hong Kong harbour. 

I haven't looked at those cards for 48 years but somehow they left a lasting impression...

I was reading Susan Watson's though-provoking post 'Randomness of video apps' http://teachingbeyondtropes.blogspot.fr/2015/07/randomness-of-video-apps.html

And then proceeded to uncover Terry Elliott's linked comment (blog post) 'The Comment No One Will Ever See Because It Requires You to Leave the Site' 

https://hackpad.com/The-Comment-No-One-Will-Ever-See-Because-It-Requires-You-to-Leave-the-Site-QGfVctwDnuC

Now all of this got me thinking. 

Susan was talking about the randomness of some apps which basically hijack your photos or videos, doll them up fancy-like and leave you dumbstruck at 'your' artiness. 

We could add any number of photo-tweaking apps which keep you sweet and engage friends and various Facebook friends or Twitter followers at 'your' technoarty prowess. 

Its all painting by numbers gone crazy. 

Click, click, click, I'm a bloody genius!

Click, click, click, I'm bloody Warhol!

Click, click, click, I'm bloody Warhollow!!!

Click, click, click, I'm bloody click-bait!!!!

I have been feeling rather uneasy with all of this digital 'making' lark, like, liking.

What is it we are really sharing?

Our need for love?

Our need for fellowship?

Our need for recognition for our heart-felt endeavours?

I spent hours on that drawing. 

It was black and white on A4 sketch pad.

It was all that my soul could muster. 

It was met with a beautifully gloved hand and an embarrassed smile. 

I was devastated. 

It wasn't bloody brilliant.

It was mine.

I am often disappointed by my intentions.

I am often astonished by what is unintended.

I have largely given up intending.

I am crap at intending.

I am more 'skilled' at unintentional.

The photomontage above came from messin' with apps. 

I am good at messin' with.

I didn't code the bloody app.

I am a slave to its genius.

I juxta-posed a video I took today of a river with an iconic image of cinema-goers wearing 3d glasses. 

I fed the video through a 5sec gif app. 

I mixed and tweaked all of it with Fused app. 

This image has a resonance for me here.

Those 3d glasses helped me to contemplate an unknown world with different eyes. 

I didn't create anything.

I was a captive audience.

I spent a few hours playing. 

Those hours are reappearing here.

They were not wasted. 

I spend hours wasting time like this.

I waste hours thinking about randomness, intentionality, creativity, frames...

I wasted a few more minutes here thanks to Susan Watson and Terry Elliott. 

I hope they will appreciate their role in my  time wasting. 

Andy Warhol gets in here as a footnote.

.