Lions, Tigers and (Teddy) Bears

Having completed my online, animated advent calendar (all made though not all posted as I am uploading a new one each day) a friend suggested making a Hannukah calendar for the 8 days of Hannukah. Why not, I like a challenge and I recklessly completed the first one too early...
But also, being stalled on my current project due to a problem with external suppliers, Iwas looking for a short-term project to complete meanwhile.
WHAT WERE YOU THINKING???
So - what have we learned so far from this exercise? The amount of time it takes to make  8 x 15 second animations increases exponentially when it is such unfamiliar territory. I'm not Jewish, and while advent calendars -  chocolate, musical or otherwise - are an annual part of my experience, I've never celebrated Hannukah. Obviously, I know what it is (I told myself, realising rapidly that didactic knowledge and emotional understanding are miles apart)...but while I feel confident in messing with my own (lapsed, born-again Atheist) traditions and stories, when faced with someone else's I am unsure. I imagine I would give the same sort of wishes, gifts, and suffer the same rituals around Hannukah as I do around Christmas - and I am thrilled to discover the wealth and variety of revolting Hanukkah Jumpers available to buy, not to mention the elf-equivalent Mensch-on-a-Bench. But what if I tread on some cultural-specific toes? what if I just get it wrong and people think "meh! nothing like MY Hannukah".
This is the joy of moving into commission territory. Not the fear of seeming something-ist. Not the egotistical notion that my online work will reach such a vast audience as to command massive outrage or misery. More the realisation that so much of our work is necessarily and irrevocably tied to our individual experience, and trying to gain that experience and understanding second- or third-hand is really really hard work. And very hard to be certain you have got it right. Speaking recently to some overseas students about the multiple possibilities of informal conversational language, I heard myself saying "well, you could say that, but no-one ever does. I mean people would understand what you meant, but most people would say..." But. You would be marked out as foreign, outsider, not necessarily badly treated for all that, but not really getting it, and so perhaps not - in this context - worth listening to. What can I possibly tell someone about, or how can I add to or illuminate, their experience if I can't even share it?
In the end, I'm doing this because I said I would. and because I'm finding the process to be a learning one. and because I'm hoping that there is more - more familiarity to family rituals, and mid-winter affirmations of life, love and belonging - that unites us as people than there are things - religious, cultural or historical - that divide us.

A Quick Tour

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...I finally finished the film-with-the-clockwork-man-in, which is now called Tour. (Pause for existential moment - did I have trouble naming this because I don't really know what it's about?) (No, OK good) Usefully, tour is (in French) a masculine noun meaning a tour or a circling, and a feminine noun meaning a tower. So if anyone happened to know that small fact it would be very appropriate. Mind you, I watched a film in some festival or other, marvelling at the irony of entitling such a dark and apocalyptic image "Gift" and constructing a bridge of meaning before realising it was the German gift - poison. (In my defence it was by an English filmmaker). Fortunately, even in English, it will still mean tour.
There has also been a flurry of festival submissions, (speculative, hopeful) and now I am looking at some randomly assorted possible projects; possible book illustrations , a probable animations, a piece of glasswork I am mildly terrified by the scale of. But this year, for the first time ever, I actually do feel like hibernating instead. It is shriekingly cold, and the house is too comfortable. The workshop shed would be far too cold, even if the electrics hadn't died in there. The downside of having the studio(s; I have the luxury of a clean room for animation/ computer stuff and a dirty room for glass, sanding, glue...) at home is that its too easy to sit down to work in Pyjamas, or get distracted by home things like shopping online or sorting Christmas. Also, there is the temptation to want the studio room to be comfortable...tidy because it is part of a house, and you don't want to clart up the walls with oilpaint or walk chips of glass all over the house. Or annoy the neighbours with incessant drilling... But I have become very disciplined, determined and tried to develop the ability to focus tightly - to concentrate on the screen or the worktable and not notice that other stuff. To be completely immersed in the work to the point of tunnel vision. But it makes me think about the importance of the room we work in, the studio. Woolf's Room of one's own.

workspace at Kingston Art Group

Last weekend was the annual open studios in Newcastle, a chance to take a tour not only of the work people are up to 12 months on, but also the way that they are using their spaces. Some huge and spare like Mervyn Peake's raft of floorboards. Some insanely small, but with an excellent light. Some cosy with armchairs, music and kettles. and some with a very jealous-making array of shelves, custom shaped for the collection of tools and materials kept there... Many artists "when they get to my age" head for the home studio as it is warm, convenient, paid for...and you dont have to put up with all the bullshit studio politics that some places have. It's accessible, open 24/7, and never creepy if you are working at 2 am. The obvious downsides are the lack of community and feedback...but also the lack of edge. Edge flavoured with the filthy, tumbledown, cheap, and repurposed; riotous with activity ...except when tumbleweed is blowing through the studio corridors and everyone is working at their "other" job. Tense with the opposition of immersion and hyper-self-awareness. And this year, I found the work overall less edgy, more design-y...less experimental...well, we all need to make a living and some of the artists had queues for the credit card machine. While others...were not there. The edgy stuff that doesn't sell is not helped by open studios - but then how do we get to see it? I don't want a tour of studios to be a retail experience but a chance to understand and enjoy ideas, work in progress, the process of the practice. For me it's a gallery, or maybe a show-and-tell; something very hard to do in a home studio where the intimacy and domesticity is a tangible barrier for visitors.