"Every child is an artist..."

 For my next project, I've set myself my biggest challenge of being fun. As contradictory as this sounds, I am finding it near impossible! A lot of my ideas come from serious places like women's rights, gender roles, consumerism, racism, which are all rather serious and powerful topics. For me, the biggest challenge is to loosen up. And in order to do this I decided to become a child again.
Children have the most innocent and perfect view of the world: sheltered from prejudice, money, the pressure of knowing what to do with your life.. children have the most beautiful and most honest perception of the world. Pablo Picasso was well known for his believe that "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up", which I am definitely relating to at the moment.

Jeff Koon's Swan Inflatable

To say the pressure of university, growing up and having a career is terrifying me would be a massive understatement. Will I be good enough? Have I used up all my creativity? What if they don't like my work? Like most adults, we fear a loss of control. As children, we never gave up learning to ride our bike because we fell off the first time. We didn't shy from pulling a funny face at friends for fear we might look silly. We revelled in silliness, craziness and absurdity. What I want to know, is how to we get back to this?

Jeff Koon's inspires my approach to this challenge I'm overcoming at the moment. The artist uses  inspiration from Pablo Picasso: in an interview with Linda DeBerry, he talks about Picasso being 88 years old and painting with such freedom and life: he says this empowers him and he believes he can do anything. Jeff Koon's is known for his sculptures of shaped inflatables, bright colours and bold statements. In his work I see a definite sense of freedom and boldness that communicates this idea of being completely free of all worries and restrictions, exactly like a child.

He describes the approach to his artwork as “Removing judgments lets you feel, of course, freer, and you have acceptance of things, and everything’s in play, and it lets you go further”. Where is the love in art if you cannot enjoy it? Recently I feel so afraid of making a mistake! There are no mistakes: a phrase I feel like printing onto the inside of my eyeballs right now. THERE ARE NO MISTAKES!

Another artist I'm really inspired by at the moment is Martin Creed, an artist who recently toured his exhibition in my local gallery the Harris. Creed confronts this aspect of fun that I am trying to channel in my work through his abstract paintings of celebrities from memory, the minimalist approach to sculpture and paintings and his bizarre (bordering on vulgar) 'Sick Film'. Creed encourages people to feel and think for themselves: "...stimulating the senses and the emotions, as well as the mind." For example, the piece titled "The Lights Going On and Off" is supposed to disorientate and make the viewer more aware of their own body as they make there way into the space. I like this idea of disorientating a viewer and bringing them into a world of my own in the same way as Creed.  As minimalist in style this sounds, it actually causes a bit of controversy leading to another artist actually throwing eggs at the walls of the exhibition room, claiming it was not worthy of a gallery space. I like the idea of a work challenging the norms of the art world and stretching the limitations of what can be deemed artwork.

"He genuinely wants to invite us into his world, to envelop us and, yes, to provoke, but in the best sense of the word." the Evening Standard tells us.

Martin Creed's neon lighting 'Small Things'