New Day Rising

New-Day-Rising

I leave NTU on 31st December and am now starting to realise what a significant and life-changing decision this may be. I have battered through a number of genres and roles..academic, teaching, community arts etc etc but always with a vague notion that one day it would all fit together.

Since the decision to resign from teaching a course that is not my subject I have finally started to pull together what does really interest me and I might be able to find a way to take that forward finally.

The career break in 2014-15 was a chance to stop and look back on ‘artistic’ career and to take stock but also a way of exorcising past demons and mental blocks.

In the process I found out that I have no interest in an English Literature academic career..never did to be honest…If I had wanted to be a Poetry Professor I would have knuckled down and fitted in long ago..I contemporary of Robert Crawford and that the kind of career I talking about. Who knows with proper application I might have been Oxford Professor of Poetry now (it seems the bar has been set rather lower lately). So academic poetry does not interest me. That does not mean that the inspirational stuff I consumed and influenced by in 20s and 30s has lost its impact.

I still heavily shaped by influence of Heaney and co..Al Purdy and regionalist poets in general including the Canadian Prairie School, The Scottish Nationalist Poets etc etc.

I also in an explosion of abstract expressionism and colour laid the painting career to bed too….The paintings I created last spring were a final nail in the abstract expressionist coffin. Were fun to do but led nowhere but back to where I was ..freezing cold in a bedsit in North London and painting in a  studio with snow coming through roof in 1987.

Again I still treasure the painters I loved…Pollock and De Kooning, Seurat, Klee, Gorky and avidly consume art history on the pre-war art movements BUT…..

It is an art historical interest I no longer connect with the physical act of painting like I once did. I didn’t continue to practice enough to develop and keep the flame alight. Life got in the way and aside from some hobby level daubing I do not see it reigniting. I have submitted one painting to John Moores simply because I never have…and that folks may well be it.

So Academic Poet…gone…Painter..gone….what is actually left???

Which brings me to the album sleeve above which for those who Husker Du fans know has a first track with one lyric…’New Day Rising’…repeated throughout.

Over the past twenty years I have obsessively (according to Mrs B) maintained an interest in songwriting and music.

I have also maintained a growing interest in word and image …printmaking ( current and historical), bookmaking, transmedia theory and practice ( Keiller and Reiser) , mapping and psychogeography. Technology ( web and analogue) and how art is disseminated. I have also been increasingly drawn to the history of Film and Photography.

It is from these elements that I am currently drawing together a series of PhD applications over the next year. I may or may not get funding but even if I do not I will finally get the ‘New Day Rising’ chance to reset my compass and move on with something I feel passionate and committed to. Sadly teaching animation at NTU was not that….never was…I leave that to those who do feel that.

I also hope to get more involved with community art/politics again and hopefully link in some real-world applications of my theory and practice possibly in the treatment of Autism if relevant. I am excited about the new day rising and also confident as never before that I have been paying bills at NTU but not actually going anywhere….

Time for New Horizons 🙂

Like some of my dreams I am headed WEST

didcot

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