About

It’s all about making art.

The Making Art blog and website are about helping you to hear your own ideas and using those ideas to make art.

The website focuses on helping you to generate ideas, sift through them and make art following those threads and to help you get into the creativity habit . The blog shows you this journey in progress.

Making art can be complex or simple: anything from the power of artists to follow their individual path, making art that speaks to them and realises their inner vision or intellectual concept to just mucking around with some paint.

Making Art believes that art making is for anyone, not just for a chosen few. Trained or untrained, any medium. Any age, any race, cool or uncool. What’s important to me is the process of making art, the enjoyment of it, the stimulation of it. For some artists it’s the constant pull of each new idea growing in our mind, for others it’s the mastery of a particular medium.

I also believe that the current focus of art in Western media on galleries and curators is unhealthy and unhelpful for most artists. Focusing on art stars and their equally pop star like curators, has little to do with the creative lives many of us lead or would like to lead.

For thousands of years, [maybe 50,000] people have been expressing themselves, creating ritual objects, recording events with their art, and there is no reason that should be inhibited by the judgement and taste of a few. Remember: without artists, the galleries, curators and critics would be out of a job.

Making art is about a process, an urge, a need to create, not about trying to twist yourself out of shape to please some imagined audience. And of course mostly its about enjoyment.

One thing you will not find on this blog or on the Making Art website is art criticism or review. If I am talking about an artist it’s because I like their art or a technique they use.   I am however, not promising that I won’t criticise museums, galleries or curators.

I think the best environment for making art is a non judgemental one. So I like to think of myself as an Art Coach. Helping you to gently [or viciously if that suits you better] tease out your ideas and make them real.

I have been to art school and it is a load of fun, but I don’t believe it’s the be all and end all of becoming an artist. The best thing about art school is being surrounded by people who want to make art and focusing your time and energy on making stuff.

I have also worked in various art galleries and know what cheekiness they get up to, and how blinkered their views can be.

And like most of you, I have held down other jobs when I’d rather have been making art.

Teaching a bit here and there, I found to be a joyful experience, if draining. But it was always within some institution’s guidelines and ultimately required giving students a score which I am not really into. So, this is my forum for saying what I didn’t get to say before.

I will talk a lot about my own art making, but mostly to let you know how or why I was doing something. So it’s not  really about my art [ some of which is good and some of which isn’t good].

I want it to be about you. About helping you to become an artist.

I hope you will start making whatever it is you want to make,

kindly

Nick Lee

The Artist