Afternoon all. After a few utterly depressing months of being bitterly cold and down from a lack of sunshine here at the Eel Cave, it’s good to see a little proper daylight and to work without wearing all my snowboarding thermals…and hat…and North Face coat…and gloves as things start to warm up slightly.
Been speaking to quite a few people lately in person and over email who have all been asking 2 questions. 1. Why are you giving up stencils? and 2. How’s the new direction going? With a feeling that I should be using this blog a little more for thoughts on things like this to try and document my goings on, for those who are interested, I thought I’d spend few minutes to try and explain things, and hopefully at the same time get them clearer in my own mind.
When I announced a desire to take steps towards a new direction to work on other projects, that wasn’t me throwing the towel in, snapping my scalpel in half and retiring from the world of stencil making. It was just a need to step back, take a few breaths and challenge myself with some new personal projects that weren’t stencil related. I just felt so burned out after Africa and realised that I just wasn’t having much fun crawling around on my hands and knees in the studio cutting huge stencils to paint outside. I don’t see myself as part of the street art scene any more, this is true, but I am still a stencil artist and do still enjoy making well crafted pieces of art within the solitary confines of my cold, dark studio.
So I decided to try and explore other avenues of picture making in the hope of putting some of my creative eggs into other baskets. The only problem is the good ship Eelus seems to be sailing at full speed and people don’t want to get off. Job after job and opportunity after opportunity is placed in my lap and it’s been impossible so far to make any kind of moves towards experimenting with other things, as people want and expect the look and feel that I’ve built up and become known for. Which is amazing, not a bad thing at all and the things I’m working on at the minute and the jobs lined up for the rest of the year are really exciting. One project in particular is going to be quite interesting. I’ve been commissioned to produce a range of prints and paintings based around both Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz. So that’s just one of many things that I have on the table that have been put there by people who want the ‘Eelus’ style.
But at the same time, it makes moves into new areas more difficult. At the end of the day, I see my role and purpose on this big spinning rock is that of a picture maker, plain and simple. I make pictures in any way I see fit that are pleasing to me, and in turn will hopefully be pleasing to a few others.
So my Freak Show Projects site is gently simmering away in the background while I attend to the boiling stew that is full of all the other tasty projects that keep coming my way that I’m finding hard to turn down. I guess from here the plan is to find a balance. A balance between not only respecting and nurturing the ‘brand’ I’ve worked so hard to build up and establish over the last 7 or 8 years, to make sure I still have a presence in this strange art world that I seem to have found myself in. But to also find the time to work on other styles and avenues of creativity, which will be the Freak Show Projects side of things. It’s just that age old nut that needs cracking; ‘YOU WILL ALWAYS BE TOO BUSY’. How often do you find yourself saying ‘as soon as I get this out of the way, I’ll be able to concentrate on x,y,z’? ‘I’ll just do this one last job and then I’ll have a bit of free time to write that comic, get those t-shirts out, work on those illustrations, that book, that movie idea, that magazine…’ I’m quickly discovering that that time will never come, there will always be plates already spinning.
So it’s just time I started to spin a few more plates, work on improving my time management, streamline my work flow and hopefully just start embracing everything that I feel is important to me but hopefully without the quality being affected.
Anyway, I’m off to buy some plastic plates. Cheerio!
