William Dalton: Inspiration & Research

@wdresearch

Anything that catches my eye, discussed.

92 posts

A documentary about the American folk artist Leonard Knight, who devoted the last 20 years of his life to creating Salvation Mountain, a tribute to love and Jesus. He's a true outsider artist, working for himself and his own personal satisfaction. I wish I could do that.

A parody of YouTube cooking channels called Will's Kitchen. It's meant to be rubbish, and funny, with terrible music and terrible transitions. I love doing a project that focuses on corny and cliché things because it means I can actively make bad things, like this, and that really pleases me. Just to make something as crappy as this, that's entertaining but cynical but also just plain bad; and then call it 'art'.

A painting I saw at a show I went to with my sister while back home in Bromley. I love it for its kitsch corniness - just look at the colours of the trees in the background, and how the heron is right at the bottom of the rainbow. All it needs is for the heron to be a unicorn and it'll be perfect. One day I want to fill my house with this sort of art.

A card found in a junk shop on Bacon Street. I love the way it's written, and it would be great to parody something like this for my show. Even the phrase 'With you well for 2007' is fantastic and corny. But the question is, if I do replicate this, do I buy a card or make one? Oh, or I could send fake cards to people pretending to be their aunt or some distant relative??

Call me crazy, but I got this book out of the library for research. I figured since I've been painting for the Minimalist and Maximalist paintings (and at some point the Angry Painting), it might help for me to get an idea of what acrylics are and how to use them. There are lots of interesting techniques in here that I will probably use over the summer, but there's also so many rules! Why do books like this feel that they have to dictate compositions, techniques and colour schemes? It advises that compositions are asymmetrical, but why are these deemed 'rules'? Why does anyone have to do what this book says? It annoys me a bit that in this little community of painters there are rules such as those.

A blurry photo of an impromptu mini-show I held in my kitchen, with the Minimalist Painting and one of the Petits Filous sculptures. It was nice to present it, but not have it as the primary focus of an event or evening. It was just there to look at if you wanted to try and interpret it.

Children are developing constantly. We develop more in the first eighteen years of life than the following (hopefully) fifty or sixty. Children's drawings are a useful method to monitor the devel...

An analysis of children's drawings at different ages. This is very important research for my fridge drawings, as well as other parts of the project that intend to replicate kids' craft (like the Petits Filous sculptures).

After reading Waiting for Godot, I've moved onto Pinter and have quickly read Party Time, The Caretaker and No Man's Land. I don't yet understand Pinter completely but there is something to his work I want to understand. The surface exhibits discussions about class, identity and Britishness, but beneath that is a darkness, an uneasy darkness. In No Man's Land a pretence is played out in which the characters act like they know each other. But do they really? And why are they being so polite? And why does no outside world exist other than in their lamentations?

The uneasiness and ambiguity in Pinter's writing is a far cry from Ibsen, who I was reading recently and who is one of my favourite playwrights. But I feel like I'm getting into something new and I like that. It'll probably influence my project somehow.

It doesn't matter who talks.

A Beckett ethos mentioned in the Sophie Calle book M'as Tu Vue

A photo from the book M'as Tu Vue by Sophie Calle. I find I have a love-hate relationship with Calle's work: her methods of displaying her findings are brilliant, and the books she creates are excellent blends of art books, autobiographies, photobooks and novels. What is really true and what is exaggerated in Calle's world? The only constant is Calle herself, who is evident in every piece. But sometimes Calle goes too far, in my opinion, creating something that could have been great art but instead just ends up being obsessive. There is and always will be a fine line.

Cao Fei's RMB City, an aritifical city created within the game Second Life. It's a strange utopian version of China, according to some critics, and even features pieces of Chinese architecture ripped from context and thrown into a massive pile. The Bird's Nest Stadium is half-submerged, and Rem Koolhaas' CCTV building floats in mid-air underneath a trail of smoke. I love the idea of creating art within a video game, but for me it has to have a physical representation too, like the book that I first discovered RMB City in. Maybe do something like this in Minecraft...?

A cover shot by William Claxton for Jazz West Coast Vol. 3, which I found in a book about LA art and for some reason it's stuck with me. Why? I'm not sure. There's something brilliantly musician-y about it: there's no hiding behind a band, or the pretence of art, of the pretence of an album as a concept. It just says, 'this is a jazz album, and it's music and nothing more', but it also sells the product.

Taken in the Sainsburys near where I live. I love these community noticeboards: it's where all sorts of graphic design meets. If I could find one in the suburbs then I'd definitely try to recreate it. It's a whole (the noticeboard) with lots of small, varied elements that are created in different ways. I guess these sorts of things can be found in newsagents' windows and in public libraries too, and in the noticeboards outside churches. Those would be great to parody.

A brilliant interview with an electronic musician called Oneohtrix Point Never, who brings together found sounds to create atmospheres that replicate early 00s tech. He's a cultural magpie in the way Koons is with the balloon dogs and cereal-box paintings. He also, unlike some other electronic musicians, treats his work strictly as art. And what he says is very relevant to any artists, such as his comments on taking things out of his control (using chance/maths): "[I did] a lot of sitting down with an organ or a keyboard sound or piano sound and just writing. So you overdose on your own taste to some degree – within a threshold, you want some kind of letting go as well."

The 'blank' force of Dada was very salutary. It told you 'don't forget you are not quite as blank as you think you are'

Duchamp

What is sculpture? Sculpture is what you fall over when you step away from a painting to get a better look

Some big words from Ad Reinhardt, who painted what he called the Ultimate Paintings. Quoted by Joseph Beuys.

Life is far more interesting [than art]... art is not the most precious manifestation of life

Tristan Tzara

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