Joan Mitchell x Claude Monet at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, February 2023

It feels somewhat like a pilgrimage as we head across Paris for the Fondation Louis Vuitton. Sirens wail and the streets are dug up, crossings severed and misplaced. We navigate across the Périphérique and scale a wall to access the Bois de Boulogne. Crisscrossed paths traverse through the trees, the leaping red squirrels making more confident progress than we do. 

Finally, we approach the scribbled sketched idea of Frank Gehry, made real in steel and glass. It is strangely sympathetic to the surroundings with its organic curves, and arcs echoing the squirrel’s leap. The un-hidden girders are majestic; an abstraction in architecture with no requirement for a horizontal or vertical line. This building finds no reason to colour inside the lines. 

“I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete. It’s so fuckin’ heroic.”

This quote popped up on my studio calendar today by the late George Carlin, a stand-up comedian, actor & author. It paints such a great visual picture in my head. When you paint you tend to notice all the little things, like weeds growing out of tiny cracks in a dirty urban sprawl and yes they blow my mind with their beauty and sheer determination. I could talk about how nature prevails, despite mankind trying to concrete it over, but this morning I just thought wow, sometimes that’s how I feel as an artist. 

There are plenty of far more heroic professions, but being an artist often feels like you are working so hard, trying to do all the right things to help you progress, but everyone’s too busy to notice these beautiful things you’ve created. You are trying so hard to find and then squeeze yourself through a tiny crack in the art world. It can be an endurance test, an ill-advised financial gamble, an impossible practical task, a ‘non-career’ vocation, a drain on your social relations, a crushing or occasional ego-boosting rollercoaster with no predetermined methods or incremental steps up the career ladder to guarantee success. You may or may not get training and a qualification for this job; you may or may not find that useful to your career. So why the heck do we put ourselves through this?