Beyond the frame - Stepping outside your normal artistic process.

It is nigh on inevitable that as an artist you will explore more than a single medium or methodology in your work. Whether it be the ever closely linked pencil and paint, or the more obscure journey from architecture to performance art, our practice mirrors life, it is a journey.

And much like life, walking one path, no matter how long for, need not exclude you from starting another, or revisiting one long since overgrown. What’s more, by exploring and mapping out these other paths you enrich your central route. You understand it more from the context the surrounding landscape gives, and as you observe it from differing perspectives you may even discover ways in which to improve it.

I know at first it seems overtly challenging, your skill set may appear to barely transfer, you’re worried the time spent on it won’t see practical returns as collectors only want your mainline works, starting from square 1 when you were just at 100 is a daunting prospect.

But I urge you to remember the eye you have will always transfer, your ability as an artist to compose visually and metaphorically stays with you. Your ability to learn and study technique and practice are already there. You aren’t starting from square one, you’re just starting a new square.

What’s more important sure you have had ideas that you knew would be better served by one medium over another, ideas that may in fact only truly work in very specific mediums. Don’t deny yourself these ideas, don’t let them wither on the vine amidst a storm of worry, of would-if-i-could, of well what about this excuse or that.,. Just try, once you’ve tried, tried failed and tried again, then put that path aside for now, but please try.

You don’t know where that path may take you, irrespective of commercial success or critical acclaim, that path could enrich your life in ways that matter beyond the pragmatic. You may discover joy, a reinvigorated love for creation that was at risk of choking under the weight of expectation, you may discover new perspectives and all the growth that comes with it.

This has certainly been my experience, setting aside social anxiety and negative self talk, last year I picked up a camera and took to the streets. Now this was by no means my first foray in to diverse mediums, my back catalogue can attest to my artist explorations. From braille typewriters to receipt printers and laser engravers, i had explored. Yet I was still working in service of my primary concept. My mediums had changed but my methodology much less so.

Picking up a camera freed me from this. I could shoot instinctually, unbound by research or concept (this isn’t to say I didn’t study photography in this time, but I didn’t have to undertake the sort of research per piece I do in my mainline work) I found such joy in this.

This instinctual pursuit of passing beauty, the everyday ephemera that reminds us of the vastness contained in our own minutia. The sheer scale of skyscrapers only truly given life and context by the smallest of individuals passing by it on the street.

It has enriched not only my art but also my life, and reminded me of just how capable I am. And we all need that some times, the exhilaration of a new success. The context given is by new perspectives.

So go explore, you’re an artist not a xerox.