Where to begin?
I am delighted to appear as an interview subject in Pascal Anson’s latest podcast series, The Empty Canvas, in which he interviews a dozen or so artists and other professionals about how creativity begins. The blank sheet, the open space, the empty canvas. “That’s the part most folks struggle with”, he says, with long experience as a designer and teacher; recognisable to many as a tutor in the BBC’s Big Painting Challenge from 2018. The interviews are 45-minute congenial interrogations of the state of mind and practical conditions that enable one to begin making something original, enriched with anecdote and quite searching analytical discussion.
In mine we talk in depth about how I literally got started as an MFA student in graphic design at Yale who hadn’t done any art since O-level; how (exactly) the workshop with Clapton Girls’ Academy produced the Linklaters piano cover design, and how (exactly) a tiny enamel motif in the V&A’s Great Mughals show prompted one big quilt design and Robin Day’s chair legs another. Circling back repeatedly to my preocupations with form and structure (as distinct from meaning), we digress on the technical skills that make patchwork joinery sing; pushing through the ugly phase; and why the world is full of unfinished patchwork.
