In his Reith lectures Grayson Perry called artists “Pilgrims on the Road to Meaning”. At New Blood Art we wanted to gain insight into our artists personal roads to meaning so we asked them 3 questions:
Sara Willett
The moment when you are at a party (for example) and someone asks; “What do you do?” You think about how to answer and then you summon up the courage to say, “I’m an artist.” Can you remember when that moment happened for you and tell us about it?
Just after I graduated from my BA in painting in 2002, I went with a fellow graduate to a cool Shoreditch gallery opening. My friend was a talented artist and normally quite confident.. The gallery owner started chatting to us and asked her what she did. She started to splutter about having just graduated from art school, but said she did not really think of herself as an artist and wouldn’t presume to call herself one etc. etc. I could see she had lost his attention in the first few seconds and he wandered away shortly after. I made up my mind there and then that if someone asked me what I did, I would say (with as much confidence as I could muster) “I AM AN ARTIST”. Although this seems audacious I realised that if I did not call myself this, no one else would, it was after all why I had spent 4 years in college and what I wanted to be for the rest of my life.
Do you have any rituals or routines to help the creative process? Procrastination can be my enemy so the only routine I have is to just start. Before this however I have to give myself permission to fail, not everything will be a winner, but all is usually valuable in one way or another.
What was the best piece of advice you were given?
I think my answer is similar to the second, someone once told me it was ok to fail and that nothing was wasted. This does help free and loosen things up. Also ‘just keep going’ is another helpful piece of advice.
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