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Karen Glykys: An Accidental Artist

Visit Duncan Grant’s gallery

It’s amazing what a word of encouragement can do. I met Karen a few years ago at a MUD event. She had just started painting and told me she was interested in exhibiting and I told her to just have a go.  I didn’t know at the time, but I certainly do now, that when Karen ‘has a go’ she really has a go.

Karen GlykysL La Desee Vert #APersistenceOfBeing Photography/PhoneArt (2020)
Karen GlykysL La Desee Vert #APersistenceOfBeing (2020)

In this guest blog – thank you Karen – she describes her journey from successful actor to (accidental) artist and her triumphs and personal battles along the way. Enjoy!

Battersea girl
I was born into a hub of drips and buzzers and penicillin, in the East Lambeth baby wing of St. Thomas’ Hospital, London, in 1962. My mother weighed approximately five stone and was extremely ill during her pregnancy with me. She was also wracked with tuberculosis, which cut a swathe through London in the 60’s.

Although I was a healthy baby at 8lbs, due to the medication my mother was fed to combat the dreaded TB as she carried me in her womb, I did not open my eyes nor utter a sound for nearly two months. There was some conjecture that I would be severely impaired – brain damaged, deaf or even blind. My grandfather kept a vigil over me day and night, while my mother was taken to the TB wards of Guys Hospital to recover.

Then one day the doctors decided to give me a massive jab of penicillin to ‘ try and wake me up’. It worked! I opened my eyes, then my lungs, and hollered, much to everyone’s relief. And, as my grandfather put it, I never closed my mouth again!!! I was bundled off to Battersea, in South London to begin my life journey.

Home was a big old London Pub, The Fox and Hounds, on the Latchmere Road in Battersea. We all lived there, my mum – a single parent, my half brothers and me.

My grandmother lived with us and was the matriarch of the family, whilst my grandfather lived in Wimbledon with his partner. He was the Daddy of the family. He put a roof over our heads and gave my mother an income. When he barked you jumped to attention, but his bark was always worse than his bite.

Our neighbourhood was a rich melting pot of White, Afro Caribbean, Asian, Persian, Russian, Irish and Portuguese. Plenty of diversity to feed the senses and the stomach! People were ‘poor but happy’ as my great aunt Rose would say.

In the 70’s Battersea was one of the poorest parts of London. By the 80’s it was the new capital of the Yuppie kingdom.

Our street was a hybrid of working class families, struggling artists, photographers and musicians. We all played together in the streets and in each others’ houses. It was an enriching, multicultural experience in every way. The Kings Road and its soon to be Punk revolution was a brisk two mile walk, over the bridge that spanned Old Father Thames. Battersea Park and Clapham Common were a half mile in either direction. Clapham Junction a spit away. There was plenty of green space for young minds to invent strange new worlds.

Growing up in the pub, memories abound of old ladies in big hats and black coats decorated with dead fox collars, complete with head and claws, whose beady, emotionless little glass eyes stared at you. Their coat pockets bulged with hankies, ready to be spittled and applied to the face of any grubby child passing by.

In the saloon bar, the men wore Sunday Crombie coats, pork pie or trilby hats, ties and cufflinks, whilst donkey jackets, hearty laughter and coarsely bearded geezers graced the public bar. Everyone was called ‘Ducks’ or ‘Dearie’, ‘Flo’ or ‘Esme’.

I could glean a pocketful of pennies and boiled sweets – unwrapped and complete with fluff – by ‘doing a turn’, singing a little song, on a Sunday afternoon at closing time. I was born a natural entertainer, or a show-off for want of a better word!

Karen Glykys (then Karen Scargill) as Kathy Cratchitt in 'Scrooge the Musical' (1970)
Me (then Karen Scargill) as Kathy Cratchitt in ‘Scrooge the Musical’ (1970)

Into the ‘world called show’
I hated my primary school and did not settle.  I cried everyday and became a handful. So when my mother was hospitalised with yet more pregnancy sickness, while carrying my brothers, our kind neighbour, Betty, came up with a solution. She suggested that I could sit in the back of the kindergarten at the performing arts school that her grandson went to. There I could paint pretty things and sing and dance in the afternoon. It was a grand diversion for an anxious child, while my mother awaited the arrival of the terrible twinnies.

I could already read, write and recite my times table up to ten when I started primary school. So when I was sent on a blanket audition for the musical adaptation of Scrooge, featuring Alec Guiness and Albert Finney, I naturally sailed though – reading the script fluently, singing and acting my little heart out, as I had done for all the old dears in the pub on a Sunday afternoon.

I secured the role of second child lead, much to the chagrin of the fee paying stage mothers, was hastily enrolled to the stage school and agency, and plunged into the biggest adventure of my little life.

Bunk Dogger single sleeve for Hypnosis (1975)
Cleo Rocos (2nd from left), me then Karen Scargill (centre), Cindy Lass (far right) Bunk Dogger single sleeve for Hypnosis (1975)

And  that was how I became a part of the alumni of the Corona Academy, a famous performing arts school in West London, spawning actors such as Ray Winstone and Nicholas Lyndhurst; Queens corgi painter, Cindy Lass; the original ‘Miss Whiplash’, Cleo Rocos; and a ‘Real Housewife of Beverley Hills’ to boot!

So there was little old me, securing enough TV commercials, voiceovers and supporting roles in film and television, to ensure that I paid my school fees on time and maintained living this magical dream. I can’t recall ever being happier to be honest.

It was at Corona, with its progressive form of education and teachers with sometimes questionable qualifications , that I first garnered an interest in producing art.

Karen Scargill & Nicholas Lyndhurst, 'Come and see us' Sverige Television, Sweden (1974)
Me (then Karen Scargill) with Nicholas Lyndhurst: ‘Come and see us’ Sverige Television, Sweden (1974)

Roger Ruskin Spear founder member of The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, son of British portrait painter Ruskin Spear, taught a mixture of art, philosophy and music business acumen, and treated us like the young adults we were becoming. I achieved an A plus grade in my Art O-level and I lay this squarely at his door.

We also had a New Zealander, a bearded Hagrid, who taught us about Cubism and Picasso, mainly because he was developing his own play called Picasso I don’t care, funnily enough. I don’t think it ever saw the light of day.

Then we had an elderly German gentleman who let us explore contemporary art, cover our canvasses with Polyfilla, and encouraged us to produce everything in mixed media.

There was all of this and the regular curriculum, on top of the singing, mime, stagecraft, acting, ballet, jazz and tap dancing that we threw ourselves into daily.

Corona was one big family, a way of life, and it consumed me like a drug.  It invaded every pore of my being and I wallowed in it. When I left at 18 years of age, I was suddenly bereft and at odds as to what to do with myself.

Karen Glykys: 'Monstrous Vanity' #PimpMyPals photography/PhoneArt (2020)
Karen Glykys: ‘Monstrous Vanity’ #PimpMyPals PhoneArt (2020)

Fashion and beyond
I started working for my second cousin, Brenda Knight, a successful Fashion PR, and her famous designer partner, Nigel Preston of Maxfield Parrish fame. I figured with a full Actors Union card under my belt, I could afford to take a year or two out of the business. Just to see what life was like on the other side.

The Fashion business is a crazy world. I was the original Bubble (Ab Fab). Despatched across London with bags full of samples to present to fashion editors in big magazine houses. Not knowing my arse from my elbow in all truth. It was 1981 and the kids were in America with Bette Davis Eyes.

I encountered many legends of the fashion world along the way, including Diana Vreeland and Anna ‘Nuclear’ Wintour (American Vogue).  For those of you who are not familiar with the fashion world, Anna Wintour is the woman Meryl Streep’s character is firmly based on in The Devil Wears Prada.

Noticing my complete naivety during one presentation of fashion samples to her, Anna Wintour patronisingly remarked that she could, ‘see it was a dress’. I got all flustered and started to apologise. She smiled witheringly at me and said, “My dear how very ENGLISH of you!’. Formidable…. ..she was!!

Karen Glykys: 'Air and Angels' Acrylic on box canvas, Halpern Gallery, Chatham, Kent, UK, (2020)
Karen Glykys: Air and Angels (2020)

Then came the call from my agent, would I like to go to a casting for Granada TV’s Crown Court?

The fashion business was long hours, skinny sleep-deprived models, lots of freebies, launch parties and lashings of red wine, but the pay was pants. I got the part and stepped back into ‘that world called show’, where I resumed my career as a supporting actor for another 15 years.

I also flirted with the music business. My husband, a session guitarist, and I formed a grunge band. I discovered I was a formidable front man/girl, and song writer. We had a small modicum of success and a video on the telly.

Then disaster struck. My mum lost her home, her husband and her business. Ironically this coincided with us losing our peppercorn rent Battersea flat. Everything was put on hold!

A move to Kent and a mortgage ensued and I fell into a ‘day job’. Sales is every actors spare string to the bow, yes that old chestnut!

Logistics, mortgages and then the crash of 2007 ended that sojourn and I found myself working for the probation service – a rewarding but poorly paid job. It was now 2017 and, after a particularly challenging bout of nightmare neighbours, which left me with a stress condition and seizures, I took three months off work with anxiety.

Karen Glykys: Rich Cottee Portrait, oil pastel, Blake Gallery, Gravesend, Kent (2017)
Karen Glykys: ‘Rich Cottee’ Blake Gallery (2017)

A fresh start in art
I was shell shocked and desperately needed a fresh take on life. We had moved towns and left the horror behind, but the echoes remained.

My Facebook friends were reaching out to me, so I made it a challenge to get out and meet as many of them as was geographically possible.

In closest reach were the artists Craig Turner and Peter Reeds, who welcomed me with open arms, told me how much they enjoyed my little blogs on Facebook and encouraged me to start painting.

I then progressed to the Nucleus Arts Centre in Chatham, Kent.

I had a lot of artist and entertainer friends on my Facebook page. As I went to each studio at Nucleus, matching the real person to the posts on my feed, I met artists Jon Gubbay and Nigel Adams who became casual mentors to me.

So here I was, an untrained outsider artist, arming myself with pastels, paint and a whole lot of enthusiasm. I had begun posting my endeavours on my Facebook page, when I heard about a new collaborative artists group that was in its infancy called MUD. I dragged my husband along to the first meeting at a micro pub on Rochester High Street, and made the acquaintance of artists and founders of MUD Duncan Grant, and Derek Wells.

Karen Glykys: Macha, oil pastel, Blake Gallery, Gravesend, Kent (2017)
Karen Glykys ‘Macha’, Blake Gallery (2017)

I’d gone along to the meeting to support the group and left as an exhibitor. ‘Just do it !’ was Duncan’s advice. So I did.

In 2017, I successfully submitted four oil pastel paintings for the very first MUD artists exhibition at the Blake Gallery, Woodville Halls, Gravesend, Kent.

Karen Glykys: 'Big City Head',allcohol ink markers, #sharpieworx (2018)
Karen Glykys: ‘Big City Head’ #sharpieworx (2018)

I continued to produce work in oil sticks and to exhibit work in acrylics. I was also developing a penchant for Sharpies and brush markers. This led to my #sharpieworx project.

In the spring of 2019, my work was progressing to more figurative and abstract fields. I took the bull by the horns and decided to submit to the 2019 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. I submitted an abstract acrylic called Brother Sun, which made the final selection. I made the finals (!!) but didn’t make the hang. However, I was mighty proud of getting that far with what was essentially only the fifth acrylic painting I had ever produced in my artistic endeavours.

Karen Glykys: 'Brother Sun', acrylic on canvas board, Royal Academy submission, 2019
Karen Glykys: ‘Brother Sun’ (2019)

Then in July of that same year I was struck by a hemorrhagic stroke, paralysed down my left side, and packaged off to a neurological rehab centre in Ashford, Kent. It was like a boot camp, but I quickly got with the programme and started to regain the use of my limbs.

My brain bleed affected the creative part of my right lobe and I didn’t attempt to draw for a while. Then one day I got bored with staring at the white board in my room and drew an Italian looking lady on it in red marker.

‘Oooh who did that?’ the nurses all exclaimed. Phew I could still draw!

Karen Glykys: Untitled, Sharpies/alcohol markers (2019)
Karen Glykys: Untitled (2019)

 

After three months I returned home and started producing a lot of erotic art. I had always drawn female nudes, but now there were men as well.

I got back into the swing of things and ordered a whole heap of paints and canvasses. I started to experiment with abstract form and expressionism. For once I was producing a lot more works in acrylics than pen.

I also started to concentrate on developing my Android Photography PhoneArt : #TinyEyeProject.

Karen Glykys: 'Going Back to the Garden', photography/PhoneArt #TinyEyeProject (2020)
Karen Glykys: ‘Going Back to the Garden’ #TinyEyeProject (2020)

I have been exploring the medium of Phone Art for three years now. It is a new and accepted art form and I am totally absorbed by it.

 

My parameters are very strict:

  • Everything must be photographed, enhanced and edited entirely on my mobile phone
  • NO Macs or Photoshop, and
  • I trawl the Android world for free digital apps to manipulate my work with.
Karen Glykys: Untitled #APersistenceOfBeing Photography/PhoneArt #TinyEyeProject(2020)
Karen Glykys: ‘Kiss Me Quick’ #APersistenceOfBeing (2020)

This has resulted in a catalogue of amazing images.  It also resulted in a project featuring myself titled: A Persistence of Being. This is a series exploring female sexuality, its projections, and feminism.

I have recently also started another PhoneArt project featuring my friends titled: Pimp My Pals. This is a collaborative work, as I take existing photos from friends albums and ‘pimp’ them digitally. I am currently building this into a series as well, in the same style as my Persistence of Being project. Both are a hybrid of photographic and acrylic works, taken from the detail of the photographs.

Karen Glykys: 'Eternal Flame' Photography/PhoneArt #APersistenceOfBeing (2020)
Karen Glykys: ‘Eternal Flame’ #APersistenceOfBeing (2020)

I hope to have both these both ‘in the bag’ by Spring 2021, with a view to featuring them in solo exhibitions.

I am fascinated by how digital media pervades everything we do and dictates how we look, behave and perceive ourselves. We have essentially become ‘avatars’ or ‘parodies’ of ourselves. Social media platforms are becoming an extension of our personality and being.

Why sexuality? Surely it’s been done to death?

Sexuality has always been historically a very important component of art. There is the male and the female gaze. It features very strongly today across many social media platforms, with women unwittingly pushing back the margins of feminism, with their trout pouts and bum enhancements, twerking merrily as they display themselves as sexual objects.

In my project I explore this. I have used traditional poses, but also direct poses that are designed to make the viewer somewhat uncomfortable, such as in Kiss me Quick. It’s the ultimate feminist statement, in that as a woman I am taking charge of my sexuality. And indeed this has had that effect on some male viewers, who have likened this picture to that of a gun fighter and acknowledged it as somewhat challenging.

Karen Glykys: Gulag Acrylic on box canvas, Halpern Gallery, Chatham, Kent, UK (2020)
Karen Glykys: Gulag (2020)

My stroke has definitely taken my work to another level. I know my brain injury has changed me in subtle ways and in the beginning, I felt like a part of me was missing. But it also took me to a different viewpoint. I have expressed this through my art, and it has helped me work though it and discover who I am.

I can’t say I’m really influenced by any one particular artist. I have eclectic tastes in nearly everything. I don’t use life models except for myself, and I produce a lot of images directly from my head, with very little reference material.

I have been described as an ‘automatic artist’, in that during my creative process I make no preliminary marks or sketches. The same goes for my photographic work, I just shoot and see what comes out.

As an untrained artist, I enjoy being at liberty, devoid of boundaries or parameters. I have an experimental nature and noone can really tell me, ‘You can’t do that!’.

My work is very rarely planned unless I’m working to a brief, even then I will put on some sounds and let the muse take me.

My inspiration comes from many sources, Literally whatever makes my brain go pop!

Karen Glykys: 'Waiting for the Spark', Acryic on box canvas, Peter Pears Gallery, Suffolk, UK (2020)
Karen Glykys: ‘Waiting for the Spark’, Peter Pears Gallery (2020)

Regardless of the Covid 19 virus, I managed to squeeze in three exhibitions this year, including at the prestigious Peter Pears Gallery in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, and despite suffering a badly pinned hip fracture.

So finally, why the accidental artist ?
Well….. had it not been for attending that first public MUD meeting in 2017, meeting Duncan Grant and being told by him to, ‘Just do it!’ I would never have dreamed of exhibiting professionally and taking my art any further than a hobby to calm my anxious mind.

It was an act of fate, a leap of faith and sheer determination!!

Further information
You can buy Karen’s work  and read her artist statement on her page in the Plogix Galleryhttps://gallery.plogix.com/en/kareng
Her work will also be available shortly from her Instagram pages.
You can DM or message Karen via her Instagram @karenglykys or Facebook Art page

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Dick Want: Cloud-walker

Visit Duncan Grant’s gallery

Meet Dick Want – artist,  sculptor, engineer and craftsman. I’ve known Dick’s work for a good few years now and have been lucky enough to exhibit alongside him at two group exhibitions in Kent. Here he is talking about his art. Enjoy.

Cloud-walker

When, as a mature student, Dick Want studied for his Masters in Fine Art, at the University for the Creative Arts (UCA) Canterbury in Kent , his dissertation was titled The Nefelibata Diaries. Nefelibata, he explains, is a Portuguese word meaning ‘cloud-walker’.

Dick Want: Spiritual self-portrait No. 11
Dick Want: Spiritual self-portrait No. 11

According to the dictionary, a cloud-walker is a person who lives in the clouds of their own imagination or dreams – someone who doesn’t abide by the rules. And, in many ways, that description fits Dick very well.

Dick has lived with poor mental health since he was a child, although his condition wasn’t diagnosed until he was 42.  He explains that his mental state dictates the art he creates and the way he works.

Dick Want: Rod for my Back 1
Dick Want: Rod for my Back 1

‘I produce art exactly as my heart tells me to, to express my moods at the time – I’m never in the same place two days running,’ he says. ‘I’m on this roller-coaster in my mind, and when I’m trying to control it, I channel it into making things.  When I start on a canvas, there is an intensity to it.  I’m literally locked in my house and I do nothing else for two or three weeks, which means the rest of my life goes to shit!’

Dick grew up in Romney Marsh, which straddles the Kent and East Sussex borders. As a child, he spent many days on the Marsh, birdwatching with his parents. And he still loves it there.

‘It’s one hundred square miles of flat land surrounded by the Downs and the coast and it sticks out into the English Channel, which gives it its own little microclimate,’ Dick explains. ‘Because it is so sparsely populated, the ground light is fantastic and because the land mass has nothing on it, you get a big sky, which is always a good thing as a painter.’

Dick Want: Militay Road, Appledore
Dick Want: Militay Road, Appledore

Dick grew up in an artisan household. His father was a joiner, who later went into teaching and then became a Methodist minister. His mother, Mary Want, was well-known locally as a watercolourist. https://www.posterlounge.co.uk/artists/mary-want/

Dick inherited his dad’s technical ability. By the time he was 10 he was working with wood and taking bicycles to bits and rebuilding them.  He also inherited his mother’s talent and passion to make art.  Dick remembers her as ‘a free spirit trapped in a theological world’.

‘She was like the quintessential vicar’s wife, but mad as a box of frogs for her painting at the same time,’ Dick recalls. ‘I can remember coming home from school and there’s mum sitting in the flowerbed outside the kitchen painting the flowers. And I walk through the kitchen and the frying pan’s on the cooker blazing away.’

‘Mum somehow juggled domestic life with an intense urge to make art,’ he continues.’ And I grew up seeing this intense urge and understood it somehow.’

Fat Freddie's Cat 85
Fat Freddie’s Cat 85

The combination of Dick’s undiagnosed mental health issues and being contantly ‘at loggerheads’ with his father about his strict religious upbringing came to  a head in his early teens.

‘I went pop when I was about 14 and I didn’t land again until 2001,’ he says. ‘The 70’s, 80’s and 90’s were taken up with doing just exactly what I pleased. It was an extremely rebellious period in my life. I didn’t have a clue what was going on. Instead, I’d self-medicate.  If I was climbing the walls, I’d just get drunk. It wasn’t until I crashed completely that I found out what the problem was.’

Motorcycles and tattoos
 When he left school, Dick started work as an apprentice engineer.  In 1982, he got a job as a precision engineer making components for Speedway and Grasstrack motorcycles at Godden Engineering.  It was a dream job for Dick who, by that time, was building his own motorcycles.  He still rides Fat Freddie’s Cat, which he built in 1985 and he now also owns a Harley Davidson Dyna Glide.

Dick Want: Kate
Dick Want: Kate

‘My bike building really took off while I was at Godden’s and I built some really special motorcycles,’ Dick says. ‘It was purely self-indulgent – they were bikes for me to ride – but they were also an artform. I was mixing aesthetics and engineering, making something that was pleasing to the eye and also engineeringly functional. It was a form of self-expression at the time.’

After building bikes during the day, Dick spent his evenings working on his  surrealistic paintings.

An interest in pen drawing eventually led to a new career as a tattoo artist. Between 1984 and 2001, Dick had two successful tattoo studios in the Medway Towns. He made his own tattoo machines, drew his own design books and, for nearly twenty years, worked freehand, drawing directly onto customers’ skin from mental images.

‘At  that time, tattooing was a complete sub-culture, a kind of anti-fashion,’ Dick explains. ‘I got into tattooing as way of saying yah boo to the system. I liked the mixture of technical drawing with engineering. I am intensely organised and I liked the discipline of what you were working with. You couldn’t make mistakes. ‘

But as tattoos became more fashionable, Dick became disillusioned.

‘When people started coming in asking for copies of David Beckham’s tattoos, I thought it’s my time to get out,’ Dick says. ‘It had all become about media and fashion and that’s not really what I got into the business for. Also, it was very intense. People put a lot of trust in me and, in 2001, after 20 years of tattooing I had quite a big mental breakdown.’

Dick had been seeing a psychiatrist for several years but it was not until this point that he received a diagnosis and it came as a relief.

‘Actually having someone say, “I’ll tell you what your problem is” was really refreshing because I didn’t think anybody would believe what was going on in my head at the time,’ Dick reflects. ‘Giving it a name means you’re not such an oddball. Someone actually recognises the trauma you’re going through.’

Dick Want: Reclining Nude
Dick Want: Reclining Nude

The academic years
As part of his rehabilitation following his breakdown, mental health services enrolled Dick on an Art Foundation Course at UCA Canterbury. One of the tutors there had a profound influence on the direction of Dick’s art.

‘He was really into his art history and he took us right back, touching on all the major art movements and showed us a different world,’ Dick remembers.

In response to this new knowledge, Dick started painting his way through art history.

‘I fell in love with Georges Braque’s cubist phase,’ he says. ‘His artwork was so sensitive and I wanted to paint like that. I loved the fractured images. Breaking up images with geometric shapes is all the stuff that is going on in my head all the time. I have to vent it somehow and it comes out on my canvas.

Dick Want: The Empty Chair
Dick Want: The Empty Chair

‘I looked at Suprematism – Malevitch’s Black Square and that era of Eastern Bloc art. Then I met Kandinsky who introduced me to using my colour palette to express myself and that brought out some geometric abstract paintings.’

But Dick’s first encounter with the university system was bruising. The surrealistic pictures that he had been painting over the previous 15 years were shunned as ‘too established’.

‘I think I did the surrealist thing too well,’ Dick reflects. ‘There was nothing they could pull apart. They couldn’t use their normal destroy-somebody’s-dream-and-then-build-them-up-to-something-else technique, which is what I felt the university system was about.’

Dick Want: Automatic drawing
Dick Want: Automatic drawing

Undeterred, for his final dissertation, Dick  focused on the work of  French surrealist  André Masson. The thesis, called ‘I am thy Labyrinth‘: An analysis of Self as a Surrealist Subject (2011) explored the labyrithine qualities of the human mind. Dick’s subsequent artistic practice has been profoundly influenced by what he learnt.

‘All my artistic practice is autobiographical,’ Dick says. ‘You can’t do anything without ‘the self’ interpreting it. The surrealist self is really your absolute innermost emotions that are totally unguided or uninfluenced by anything else around you. It’s a very hard place to achieve.’

To help him to achieve this, like surrealists before him, Dick started to experiment with automatic drawing while listening to music.

‘You focus absolutely,’ he says. ‘So when I was drawing, I wasn’t thinking about my hands, I was thinking about the sound. It’s like drawing with your eyes shut. You are feeling the movement and the action. The outcome is not necessarily a drawing that makes sense to the eye, but there is invariably a rhythm that comes out on paper.’

Influenced by John Cage’s experimental composition 4′33″ , a ‘silent’ piece consisting only of the environmental sounds the audience hears while it is performed, Dick built a sound-sensitive drawing desk that could ‘record the sound a drawing makes’.  The desk used microphones to amplify the sound made as the pen moved over the paper, so that it could be recorded.

Through the work for his dissertation, Dick sought to draw parallels between the ephemeral nature of sound and the ephemeral nature of time. He sought to capture the time passing while a drawing was completed through recording the sound of the drawing process itself.

‘The ephemeral nature of sound means that, unless it is recorded, it vanishes with the passing of time and the only record of its passing are the things that came into existence during the seconds that have passed,’ he wrote in an ‘artist’s statement while at university. ‘With my sound drawings there are two possible automatic aspects. The first  is the drawing that should be made entirely without conscious thought, the second is the sound produced whilst making the drawing. The drawing becomes evidence of the ephemeral sound and, if recorded, the sound becomes a record of the time that has passed.’

Dick Want: Royal Military Canal, Hamstreet
Dick Want: Royal Military Canal, Hamstreet

After his first degree, Dick went on to complete a Masters degree in Fine Art, again at UCA.

‘I never thought of myself as academic but I hadn’t finished with the system,’ Dick explains. ‘When I finished my first degree, I felt so beaten up by the system that I wanted some time where I could enjoy studying art to the level that I’d discovered I was capable. I hadn’t got quite as far as I thought I could.’

But before he could get started, once again Dick’s work came in for some harsh criticism from his tutors.

‘I got slated again!’ he exclaims. ‘They said you’ve got to develop something that is your own. And I thought I can’t make it any more my own, so I went off and painted landscapes of Romney Marsh. I studied the Royal Military Canal. I started at Hythe and painted my way along it.’

During that two year period, as advised by his teachers, Dick developed his own personal painting process and style.

‘I went from the total abstract that I’d been painting in oils at the end of my degree to quite formal landscapes in acrylic,’ Dick explains. ‘I ended up out in the countryside with metre-and-a-half by metre canvasses, painting wild. It was great fun. I worked with a brush in one hand and an atomiser in the other, running the paint off the canvas.’

His Masters dissertation The Nefelibata Diaries, was about  capturing the point where reality meets abstract, meets surreality.

Once again, he linked the concepts of painting and time, contrasting the speed necessary to capture a good landscape in ever changing conditions with the time taken to complete a painting as indicated by the rate at which the paint alters as it moves down the canvas.

In 2014, Dick posted a series of images of The Fairfield Project, which illustrate the process he used to achieve that effect.

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Dick Want: Brompton Cocktail
Dick Want: Brompton Cocktail

Now free from the constraints of his undergraduate programme, Dick’s Masters project helped to reconnect him with his creative roots as an artist and a craftsman.

In contrast to a busy curriculum where the emphasis was on thinking and working quickly, painting the Royal Military Canal offered a complete change of mental pace.

Dick spent hours out on the Marsh on his motorcycle researching and recording images to inform his paintings.  A feature of his mental health condition is an inability to relax the intensity with which he scrutinises everything. For this project, Dick used it to his advantage and channelled it into his art.

‘I can’t paint an object without studying the detail,’  he explains. ‘The images I collect don’t get used in my paintings but they give my mind the information I need to be able to paint what I’m thinking. On the Masters course, I was left to my own devices to study my own worth, and it  was quite therapeutic. It taught me that it’s OK to spend time thinking about what you are producing. And it’s OK to be a craftsman and to really know your own skills and tools.’

Dick Want: Ode to the female form
Dick Want: Ode to the female form

A man of many talents
Now with his MA under his belt Dick is back in his home studio, using his skills and tools, painting, sculpting and carving wood. He describes himself as ‘a workaholic’.

‘I like working with my hands, and making stuff is really where I’m best,’ he says. ‘Engineering was great because it taught me things like welding, electrics, mechanical design, all of which you can apply to wood, building, sculpture, whatever you fancy working with. At the moment  I’m carving wood constantly.  I’m making some hop finials which are proving to be a much bigger job than I anticipated and take up every minute of spare time.’

Recently, Dick has also built a  mosaiced, six foot  cement  and brick sculpture in his garden, experimenting with the material until he achieved a consistency that he could work with a trowel like plaster, but which set like Portland Stone as he  built up the layers.

Dick Want: No Escape
Dick Want: No Escape

And he has returned to surrealistic art, painting intensively, once again using oils.

‘I’m enjoying the proximity with history, working with oils, and the traditional way of painting,’ he says.

Because of his mental health, Dick is reluctant to speculate about where his art might take him in the future.

‘I have to take each day as it comes because you can’t guarantee a run of anything in my world,’ he explains. ‘Because of my mental health, everything else I’ve done in life to do with families, relationships and dealing with the public in general has been a disaster. Making art and riding my motorbike everyday are the only things that really keep me going.  My art is almost like my umbrella and so long as that front door is locked, I can manage with making art. That’s where I am.’

Dick Want: Covid 19 Apothocre
Dick Want: Covid 19 Apothocre

 

 

If you would like to see more of Dick’s art you can follow him here:
Facebook: Richard Want Artist https://www.facebook.com/Artwant/
Instagram: dick_want_artist https://www.instagram.com/dick_want_artist/?hl=en
Blog: http://artwant.blogspot.com/

If you are interested in automatic drawing you might also like to revisit this blog from December 2019 https://duncangrantartist.com/2019/12/29/luna-zsigo-capturing-emotional-landscapes/