out in the open…

“Exhibition preparations” 2022

Storms were forecast.

Organizing a first exhibition, out in the open, was suddenly raising a whole list of concerns.

What would happen if it rained, how could I protect the artwork? What if there were high winds?

I am pretty good at imagining catastrophes.

I wasn’t really too concerned about the weather conditions keeping people away.

Having agreed to doing an exhibition, I laid out some artwork on the living room sofas and with the help of my son, I set about selecting a small collection of nine paintings.

Not knowing how much space I would have, thinking about the practicalities of framing, thinking through the logistics of transport, deciding that I would be making prints of a small number of paintings, enabled me to limit the collection.

I really enjoyed the process of selecting and rejecting, making choices based on unity of theme, contrast of subject, vibrancy of colour.

With the exception of one painting, “Rockflow Scape”, all the artwork was inspired by recent walks in the Auvergne.

First Exhibition Selection.

Working on this website while preparing for the exhibition helped me to focus on practicalities: how I would pack the artwork, the printing of Certificates of Authenticity, the labels to describe each painting, the pricing.

In doing this work I discovered many parallels with past experiences:

• preparing for conference presentations

• the technical aspects of theatrical productions

• the organisation of film shoots from my days as a production assistant in London.

Now, writing this, I find joy in the creation of this website, excitement in getting ready to be “out in the open”.

I have learnt so much in such a short period, I feel that taking this time, developing the framework for this site, learning to work with these web applications, finding work-arounds to constraints, is not separate but an integral part of making the art that I choose to share. In 2010, when I was preparing for to speak at my first national education conference, I spent hours writing an article in French, building a website and then starting a blog.

When something is important to me, I put my heart and soul into the venture.

Perhaps nobody will visit this site and read what I am writing or see the art that I am doing.

I am stoic, I am only concerned with what I must do, I am giving everything that I have.

There is a quote of Andy Warhol that I love:

“Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone decide if it is good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding make even more art.”

Open day.

Everything was packed into a large plastic box, I was as ready as I was going to be. When I arrived at the exhibition site, I was pleased to discover that the organizers had provided covered market stalls, tables, chairs, and wires to hang artwork on.

First exhibition set up.

With a little help from my friends.

With the help of my wife and daughter, Thomas de Ligneris from the Association des Artistes d’Auvergne, and Flora Gueton a neighbouring artist, we got the exhibition set up.

I was struck by the generosity of the people and the camaraderie of the people on the different stalls displaying arts and crafts.

As the day went on, I was able to take time to talk with the other artists exhibiting, and had long conversations with a few passers by who took the time to look at my artwork and who gave me very complimentary feedback on what I was sharing. I always find the perspectives of others fascinating, it’s always great to come across people who have surprising reactions.

What I really love is meeting and learning from others.

Even if there weren’t many people who came to that market, and nobody to my knowledge sold very much or anything at all, time didn’t go slowly, I was much too busy talking with the others, learning about where they were exhibiting, learning about how they lived their art.

There’s something that Flora said to me which resonated, even if it is hard making a living, her meetings with other artists had confirmed to her that she was on the right track.

This was my first exhibition, out in the open.

There were many lessons learnt, no sales, many meetings.

I don’t know where my path will lead me, but this was certainly a memorable step.

unexpected twists…

“Reaching down” May 2022

May 2022

I sense that I am seeing and drawing things differently.

Initial hesitancy or sketchiness is increasingly replaced by bold, sweeping lines.

Over time, I am beginning to take a measure of the man making the marks.

Status update.

Don’t you just love bureaucracy and form-filling? I know I do (not).

After four months of phone calls, emails, form-filling, toing and froing, twisting and turning, I now have an official professional status as an “artiste-peintre”.

(How did that happen?)

I will be able to derive income through any sales of my artwork while maintaining my job as a university teacher.

Not having to make a living from my art gives me the freedom to create.

Freedom to sell?

I never set out to sell my artwork. It was always an activity I did freely.

I had always associated money with constraint rather than freedom..

Then I was faced with a conundrum.

SPACE-TIME-FREEDOM (money)

I had never created so much art as in the last four years.

What on earth was I going to do with it all?

I started by giving it away to family and friends.

I didn’t want to burn all of it. I couldn’t keep it all.

When push comes to shove, what’s the point of keeping your art or your artist identity in the closet?

Art Cupboard 2020

In January 2022, I weighed everything up. I wanted to spend less time doing academic research and publications and more time doing art.

There was no way around it, I would need more SPACE, more money for art supplies, a website, a studio SPACE which would allow me to create with bigger formats and make more mess.

I wanted to do exhibitions, I wanted to sell my freely created artwork. I didn’t want to do commissions..

Unexpected twists…
I was setting up for the weekly life-drawing class, ready for another relaxing session.

Suddenly, somebody asked, “Who wants to do an exhibition on the 3rd of June?”.

I heard myself saying “Me.”

Exhibiting.

I hadn’t really considered the practicalities of getting an exhibition together (at short notice).

It was also apparently, of course, the right moment to start the building of a website, I decided.

(Why? Why? Why?)

I have got myself tied up in knots so many times.

I should know better than to trust my worst/best instincts.

I know I won’t not trust my instincts in the future.

I am hard to live with at times.

the path ahead…

“The path ahead” preparatory drawing December 2021

It was time.

I felt ready for a new adventure.

Throughout my life, I have constantly asked myself these questions:

“What’s important?”, “What do I want to do with my time?”, “Who do I want to spend my time with?”,

“Where do I want to spend my time?”, “What do I want to work towards?” “How can I achieve my objectives?”.

It came at the right time.

January 2022. I was participating in a free course run by United ArtSpace (UAS) entitled “Your Best Year Yet.” As suggested in their course notes, I had reviewed the past few years, a task made easier by regular documentation of my activities, thoughts and feelings in my blog touches of sense… , I then set about scribbling mind-maps. These maps will not make immediate sense to others but for me they don’t just contain written or graphic information, like all the art I make, they enable me to retrace the emotional, embodied story of their creation.

Mind map, January 2022

Key words from my artist’s statement:

“exploring the ephemeral nature of life via figuration & abstraction, flow & scribble, intention & serendipity” appear boldly on the page:

• Exploring-Exploration.

• Rainbow/Time-Ephemeral nature of life.

• Figuration-Figure/Mountains/Portrait

• Abstraction-Spiral/Converging Ellipses

• Flow-Flow/Water/Flow life

• Scribble-Scribble/Scribbled map (scribble and flow converge)

• Intention-Intention/Attention/Observation

Having sketched out the background:

• Walking outdoors in the countryside

• Paying attention to panoramic views and the details found in nature

In the middle ground there is an illustration concerned with technique:

• Palettes,

• Dimensions,

• Moving a board or a page and enabling flow.

Foregrounded are practical issues:

• Connection with an association

• Creating a website

• Exhibiting my artwork on an easel

• Sales

January, 2022:

I became a member of the Association des Artistes d’Auvergne.

I started investigating the feasibility of working both as a teacher and as a professional artist.

I started researching the local art market, galleries, artists, fairs, exhibitions.

I started regular life-drawing classes.

First life drawing workshop since 1988.

More time…more space

I spent more time sketching, drawing, and developing my watercolour painting.

I started making more time for getting regularly outside into the countryside.

I found more space at home by moving from the dining room table and a small cupboard containing art supplies on the wall to a dedicated art-space in the basement.

Art cupboard 2021

The path ahead…

I took quite a while to readjust my bearings.

Now a path lies ahead of me…

I don’t know where I’m going.

I have set out and I have come quite a way already.

There’s no way back now.

some way back…

touches of sense…

“I was 19, I was happy, wasn’t sure where I was going. Not much has changed in 30 years.”

Simon Ensor, 2010 

“Every child is an artist. The problem is staying an artist when you grow up.” Pablo Picasso 

I have always known that I was an artist.

My father used to ask me to illustrate his sermons. 

My mother told the school I painted like Lowry (I didn’t).

"I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit."

John Steinbeck.

My art teacher was a great teacher, he would give me excellent marks but fail to convince me to do some work. 

Others told me to concentrate on more serious subjects.

Below is a drawing I knocked off for homework when I was 16 years old.

The art teacher’s comments have been nagging me ever since.

He will probably never know that the seeds that he sowed, so long ago, are growing here.

I am writing now as a 60 year old Anglo-French artist, driven by a single question:

“What happens when I really put my mind to developing a body of visual art?” 

simon.ensor.art

is a means to document and share responses to that question in artwork and in accompanying blog reflections. 

“An artist without faith is like a painter who was born blind.”

Andrei Tarkovsky

As an artist, I have been working passionately for the past 34 years as an English teacher with thousands of students, exploring the medium and discovering the desire and the means to transform it. I have spent years studying and adapting my actions to the complexity and unpredictability of human interactions and learning. Faith and hard work has enabled this artist to see further…

Art in whatever genre has always been a way to lose myself & to find myself elsewhere, otherwise.

along the way, 

I have developed my voice as a blogger in touches of sense…, connected and collaborated as an educator and as an artist with kindred creative spirits from around the world and employed more or less academic genres to communicate and to publish radical educational messages in conferences, articles and book chapters.

Over a period of 12 years, blog posts became more and more concerned with visual art. The last one, touches of light, preciously preserved marked some sort of epiphany.

“A page escapes to leafy paths[...]Ephemera rendered eternal.Taking a moment to contemplate. Pause, gaze, breathe in, remember. Moving, losing sight, feeling loss.”

Ever since I was born, I have been acutely aware of the fragile nature of life and the infinite value of artistic expression.

My father’s work was rhythmed by life’s passing seasons and the rituals of baptism, marriage, and burial.

My mother shared her love for music, poetry, gardening and an eye for beauty to be found in driftwood, pebbles, and bric-à-brac. 

simon.ensor.art

Is made up of moments of figurative and abstract meaning making. I find flow and express emotions by letting myself be moved by the moment and the media, making marks intentionally or serendipitously (accidentally). I am drawn to gaze at distant horizons and to investigate universes glimpsed through close focus. At times, images emerge organically with no apparent source. Certain motifs are  recurrent: nature, landscape, seascapes, mountains, rocks, trees, paths…the objective is always to discover new lands to be able to perceive what lies beyond the self, the subject, the page.

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."

Marcel Proust

touches of sense… has been a means to map out areas I want to explore and to excavate and to study the reasons why they are important.

Each collection of artwork, each image has its back story. reflection accompanies creation. 

Between 2014, and 2018 much of my artistic work was multi-media,collaborative and digital, combining poetry, spoken voice and images in assemblages. I owe much to my friends of #clmooc.

Since 2018, starting with “A vine branches wildly…”  I have concentrated my art practice predominantly on watercolor painting, ink, charcoal and graphite drawing. 

The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know and how much you need to learn.

When I speak to those who I consider to be master artists, I am comforted when they agree with this quote of George Leonard:

“We fail to realise that mastery is not about perfection. It’s about a process, a journey. The master is the one who stays on the path day after day, year after year. The master is the one who is willing to fail, and try again. For as long as he or she lives.”

I have stayed true to my path day after day, year after year. 

To my surprise it appears that this is its latest twist. 

I am working now on some way forward.

Simon Ensor