1002 Project 101 explained 1 original

When did I first know I was a creative is a question that will be answered later in the Blog. First there is need to remember the chronological sequence of experiences between 12th July 2002 and 29.th April 2003 which led to knowing how I was going to use the available time of the rest of my life after reaching the age of sixty five.

On July 12th the Baltic Contemporary art centre opened in Gateshead and during the day there was a build up of information on regional news programmes leading to a series of programmes on BBC 2. That such a project had been developed was amazing and signalled a significant change in the cultural outlook of the political authorities on Tyneside, given the general hostility in the mass circulation media and if was being honest, I shared the scepticism about the value and significance of much which was commented upon. And like the majority I knew little and cared even less.

In discussing the Baltic opening, on the Friday Newsnight Arts Review, Germaine Greer summed up my subsequent reaction on visiting the first exhibits. There was no WOW. This was art of the mind, clever art, and art of contemporary skills and materials, but I was not moved, challenged or stimulated. Between the opening and my first visit a few days later I enjoyed a visit to the recreation of wartime Britain at Eden Camp, and to Bolsover Castle and Eltham Palace. I had watched Yorkshire play Durham at a Cricket match in Leeds and taken a thirty mile car journey to watch the film, No Mans Land which trailed a film on the Life of Jackson Pollock.

I had seen some Jackson Pollock original works at the London Tate decades before and my knowledge of him as an artist was based on a Melvin Bragg programme which had become distant memory. Although I had never experienced his brooding depression, the binge drinking and binge sex there was something about the man and his life which struck a chord rather than finding empathy with his actual work. . However I was filled with the need to understand why some visual artists devoted themselves to work which aroused public scoff and scorn, destroying themselves as balanced people, with families and integrated with general society. A few days later I made a special visit to my mother and aunt who lived 300 miles away on the southern outskirts of London, and decided to try and purchase a book or two which might help to understand. Usually I travelled by car but on this occasion the journey was made by train and there would be sufficient time before an evening departure to visit the bookshops in the Charing Cross Road. By good fortune internet research suggested two books which were to change my life, in the same way that re reading the Sermon on the Mount had caused a personal revolution four decades earlier.