videos

RESTLESS _ Notes on video - 2020

Isolate they said, lockdown they said. Since then we’ve had a constant flow of news and information which has created a fear of isolation in many. Fill that empty space, create, exercise, occupy the mind. I need and enjoy, even thrive in, isolation because I think I bring something to it. I need that time to realise and make ‘art’.

Apart from my friends the rooks which shout at me through my isolated days, no longer competing with the traffic noise on the nearby road nothing much has changed. As a painter with a large rural studio I worry, not only about the people stuck in hospitals or bedsits and flats but also about the blonde turnip and his cronies at the steering wheel.

I’ve become an expert pacer, up and down the studio. Scribbling or maybe it’s doodling with intent, give me a blank sheet of paper and I’ll torment it with observations and half formed ideas.
I am acutely aware of a blank white canvas flat on the floor, not huge, comfortably large with a plank laid across. In my pacing I circumnavigate this like it is an out of bounds island only occasionally crossing the plank like a bridge. In the past I have spent many hours on this bridge with it’s ever changing view; my working platform from which I make the big paintings. Now it remains stubbornly empty, like the world outside my lockdown, I am restless in a situation which is activating ideas and then…… well it’s all foreplay and no climax. I don’t really know why, maybe put simply, the shut down world was my source, subject and raison d’être. Now it’s like looking in a mirror and finding no reflection.

The video was made in response to my complex and mixed feelings in this strange situation. I was enjoying it, I was frustrated by it, Ross Wickins a very talented professional video maker and photographer, close friend and neighbour, collaborated with me. Our intention was to make a meaningful statement about the effect of the lockdown on an artist.

John Loker 2020

RESTLESS _ Notes on video - 2020

Isolate they said, lockdown they said. Since then we’ve had a constant flow of news and information which has created a fear of isolation in many. Fill that empty space, create, exercise, occupy the mind. I need and enjoy, even thrive in, isolation because I think I bring something to it. I need that time to realise and make ‘art’.

Apart from my friends the rooks which shout at me through my isolated days, no longer competing with the traffic noise on the nearby road nothing much has changed. As a painter with a large rural studio I worry, not only about the people stuck in hospitals or bedsits and flats but also about the blonde turnip and his cronies at the steering wheel.

I’ve become an expert pacer, up and down the studio. Scribbling or maybe it’s doodling with intent, give me a blank sheet of paper and I’ll torment it with observations and half formed ideas.
I am acutely aware of a blank white canvas flat on the floor, not huge, comfortably large with a plank laid across. In my pacing I circumnavigate this like it is an out of bounds island only occasionally crossing the plank like a bridge. In the past I have spent many hours on this bridge with it’s ever changing view; my working platform from which I make the big paintings. Now it remains stubbornly empty, like the world outside my lockdown, I am restless in a situation which is activating ideas and then…… well it’s all foreplay and no climax. I don’t really know why, maybe put simply, the shut down world was my source, subject and raison d’être. Now it’s like looking in a mirror and finding no reflection.

The video was made in response to my complex and mixed feelings in this strange situation. I was enjoying it, I was frustrated by it, Ross Wickins a very talented professional video maker and photographer, close friend and neighbour, collaborated with me. Our intention was to make a meaningful statement about the effect of the lockdown on an artist.

John Loker 2020