![[Trace Dance.jpeg|250]] Part of an ongoing attempt to think more carefully about the world. # **An Artist's Practice** *A constellation, not a method. Notes that can be read in any order.* --- ### Against method I don't have one. I am wary of the ones on offer, and I am especially wary of the ones I write down. [[Paul Feyerabend]]'s scandal, in [[Against Method]], was to say plainly what scientists already knew: that the rule-following story is a story told *after* the fact, and the actual work proceeds by historical accident, hunch, and rule-breaking. "Anything goes" is not a licence for chaos. It is a refusal to let any single instrument claim a monopoly on the real. What follows are postures, not stations. They can be entered from any direction. --- ### Practice precedes theory The doing makes the path. Theory may describe the work later, but it should not be allowed to replace it. When the description of a practice becomes more vivid than the practice itself, the description has begun to do damage. This note is suspect for that reason. Read it as a residue, not a recipe. --- ### First blush Some of the strongest work of any career arrives early, before fluency — when you don't yet know what you're doing. The first blush of love only comes once. Ignorance brings something knowledge can't. > *The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies, for the pattern is new in every moment.* > — T. S. Eliot Competence, when it arrives, is the danger. The eye that has not yet decided what it is looking at is the eye that finds the work. --- ### Depth and surface [[Anton Ehrenzweig]] described creative work as an alternation between a focused *surface mind* and a diffuse *depth mind* that scans the whole at once. [[Iain McGilchrist]] made the same point about hemispheres: the right is the master, the left the emissary. Modern culture has confused the two. The practical consequence is small and unromantic. When the work starts to feel competent and recognisable, let the surface mind off duty. The vase cannot serve its purpose until it is empty. --- ### The eye, reconsidered It is tempting to call the eye the irreducible thing — the way of seeing that survives every method, every tool. I have written this before and I half-believe it still. But [[Robin Wall Kimmerer|Kimmerer]] would reframe it, and she would be right. The eye is not a possession. It is a *meeting*. What the work calls *my* eye is the residue of everything that has agreed to look back at me — light, soil, faces, weather, the hedge outside the window. The eye is given, not owned. Phrase it that way and the whole grammar of the practice changes. --- ### Listening to the work The paint, the paper, the surface, the temperature. They are telling you something about what wants to happen. *Listen first, decide afterwards* — but notice the verb. Listening keeps the work as a subject; deciding restores me as the only agent. In a grammar of animacy — Potawatomi, [[Aboriginal culture|Anangu]], plenty of others — the material would not be giving me preferences. It would be a person with whom I was negotiating. I cannot adopt that grammar honestly. But I can stop pretending the negotiation is one-sided. --- ### Chance is not my servant [[Odilon Redon|Redon]] wrote that *chance is my servant, not my master*, and I have leaned on the line for years. The line is a beautiful piece of self-flattery. Read against Kimmerer, against [[David Abram|Abram]], against anyone who has worked with material long enough to be surprised by it, *chance* is a Western euphemism for the agency of things that do not belong to me. The discipline I exercise on the work is real and worth keeping. The work's discipline on me is at least as real. Honour both. --- ### A borrowed cosmology I use [[Jo-ha-kyū]] — the three-movement rhythm from Japanese theatre — as a way of describing the arc of a piece, a session, a season. *Jo* (gathering), *Ha* (exploration), *Kyū* (resolution). The frame is true to my experience and I have no intention of dropping it. But I should be honest that I have borrowed a cosmology and used it as a technique. The Noh actor inside the form is not just timing themselves; they are participating in a particular metaphysics. I have taken the rhythm and left the ground behind. This is what [[Vine Deloria Jr.]] meant when he complained that Western thought packages other people's insights as portable tips. The packaging is mine. The tip is theirs. --- ### Where this is being practised The practice happens in a particular place — a particular kind of light, a particular climate of attention, a particular history of clearance and enclosure. *[[Old Ways for New Times|My own note on TEK]]* names hedge-laying, coppice cycles, commoners' rights and the oral histories of farming families as the nearest local equivalent to placed knowledge. They are thinner than they were. They still exist. A practice that does not name its ground is a practice that floats. Most studios float. Mine has been floating. Putting it down somewhere specific is part of the work. --- ### Conditions over technique The strongest work tends to emerge during stretches of manageable workload, decent sleep, low external demand. Creative intensity needs nervous-system stability. The conditions matter more than the technique. Exhaustion produces repetition; rest gives the work room to differentiate. This is also a political observation. The conditions are not always available, and pretending they are is one of the more polite cruelties of the contemporary advice book. --- ### The four axes, occasionally When the work feels stuck it is sometimes — not always — a quiet confusion between modes. Is the image being drawn from inside (imagination outward) or from in front of me (observation inward)? Is the mark leading (the body negotiating the medium) or is the interior state directing the mark? [[Harold Rosenberg]] and [[Clement Greenberg]] gave us this taxonomy and it is still useful. Use it as a question, not a station. *Where is the work asking to be answerable just now?* Then drop the compass and keep working. --- ### Subject and Self [[George Lakoff|Lakoff]] and [[Mark Johnson]] described the way we speak of ourselves as if we were two: a *Subject* who decides, judges, endures; a *Self* who feels, intuits, wanders. In studio terms: the disciplined maker and the expressive being. It is worth holding lightly, though. The Subject/Self pair is itself a metaphor — an image schema, [[Mark Johnson]] would say, long before it is a fact of the psyche. The studio inherits the figure of speech and then works inside it as if it were furniture. Neither is sufficient. Excess discipline suffocates vitality. Excess authenticity dissolves form. The interesting move is not to choose between them but to recognise the conversation between them as the work. Doubt is not failure. It is dialogue. --- ### The journal as lineage A journal per project, not one master notebook. The journal holds the intention (in language that pre-dates the painting), the unknowns (the chance marks, the strange fragments), and the record of revisions. In the old version of this note I called the journal a *contained* document. I now suspect that was a Western reflex. The journal is more honestly a *lineage* document — a gift from the present project to the next one, carrying forward obligations rather than archiving them. The cross-pollination is not residue; it is the point. --- ### Demoting the title [[Toru Takemitsu]] held that two-thirds of a piece is finished by the time it has been named. The title creates emotional weather; the work orbits it. This is true and useful. It is also extremely Western — language first, image after. [[Aboriginal art]] does it differently. The symbols *are* the story. They read differently to different audiences. A single painting can be a public depiction, an instructional aid, and a ceremonial document at once. The title does not precede the work because the work *is* a stratified text. I will keep using titles. I will hold them more lightly than I used to. --- ### Chance and discipline Begin with unplanned marks. Let associations surface. When an image declares itself, pursue it rigorously. Serendipity generates material; discipline gives it form. *Direct the chance, but do not deny it agency.* The art world is full of disciplined people who have lost their chance, and full of intuitive people who have lost their discipline. Both halves are needed and both halves require staying inside something uncomfortable. --- ### An output that is not a work Some sessions should not produce a piece. They should produce a *return* — pigments back into the earth, time given to a place rather than taken from it, a sketch given away rather than archived, an hour spent looking at one tree without making a mark. Reciprocity is the missing fifth axis. Without it the practice runs on the same logic as everything I criticise elsewhere — extraction with better lighting. --- ### A day that produces nothing Once a season: a working day that the system cannot use. No inputs, no processes, no outputs, no feedback. [[David Abram|Abram]]-style attention. The hedge, the river, the floor of a wood. This is the part that [[Timothy Morton|Morton]]'s *[[The Violence We Were Told Was Natural|agrilogistics]]* cannot tolerate, the unenclosed time. If the practice can host that without immediately metabolising it back into *Jo*, the practice has actually moved. If it cannot, the practice is still a perimeter defending a yield. --- ### Iteration as ancestry The longer pendulum keeps swinging. Each piece does not reset to a blank — each piece is a gift to the next one, with obligations carried forward. *Iteration deepens* is too neutral a way to put it. *Iteration accrues* is closer. What survives a working life is not the artefact pile but the slow refinement of attention, the lineage of looks, the relationships with materials and places that one piece passes on to the next. --- ### The Western signature None of the above abolishes the fact that this is a Western practice, written by a British painter, framed by twentieth-century Western philosophers and a few borrowings from elsewhere. The hand on the page is the hand it is. [[Albert Marshall]]'s *[[Old Ways for New Times|Two-Eyed Seeing]]* is the honest move. Keep the instrument I have. Open a second eye — for relation, for place, for reciprocity, for ancestry — and let it correct what needs correcting without pretending I have crossed into a tradition I have not earned. --- ### Wander, arrive, return The work must wander. It must also arrive. And then — and this is the addition the older version of this note did not have — it must *return*. Something has to go back into the soil. Something has to be given. There is no rigid method. There are postures, occasions, conditions, and obligations. The rest is attention. --- `Concepts:` [[Art]] · [[Philosophy]] · [[Indigenous Knowledge]] `Adjacent practice:` [[The Shadowed Grove]] · [[Poetic Symbiosis]] · [[Production System]] `Companions:` [[Artist Statement]] · [[An artists eye 🧿]] · [[Journey of the Artist]] · [[Jo-ha-kyū]] · [[Odilon Redon]] · [[Toru Takemitsu]] · [[George Lakoff]] · [[Mark Johnson]] · [[Philosophy in the Flesh]] · [[Anton Ehrenzweig]] · [[Iain McGilchrist]] · [[Harold Rosenberg]] · [[Clement Greenberg]] · [[Paul Feyerabend]] · [[Against Method]] · [[Robin Wall Kimmerer]] · [[David Abram]] · [[Timothy Morton]] · [[Old Ways for New Times]] · [[2026-05-13-indigenous-critique-of-artists-method]]