“No Questions Asked”

The website, My Name is Ferdinand have asked me to answer the following questions to post in their section, ‘NO questions asked.’ So here goes. Have a browse through their website, its a really interesting venture.

http://mynameisferdinand.wordpress.com/

Okay, the questions and answers:
My name is?
Tom de Freston
What is art for?
I sometimes really do wonder if its for anything. It always seems to be one of the last additions and first subtractions in various cultures. This surely makes it the least necessary and most dispossable. Perhaps thats a bit cynical.

I certainly don’t believe arts purpose is that which is outlines by curent educational, institutional, governmental and museum theory. It is not just their to serve some measurable sociological venture. Such instrumental ideals are utterly flawed.

 Art can’t live int he losed roo idealism of Modernism but its socail impact is both indirect and unmeasurable by empirical and statisitcal means. When art is only shown or taught about becasue of its ability to have such a role, then we are missing the point.

I digress. Art’s point? To make sense of things from a particular vantage which need not be constrained to answers. To move clsoer to an understanding of our place in this world, both present and historical.
Which types of media do you work in?

I paint. This is then filtered through an interest in collage, found imagery and some computer based stuff. But primarily it invovles taking various substances and laying across two dimensional planes.

Who or what was your first artistic influence?

I want to say something terribly impressive, but im pretentious like that. But I think my first artisitc influence was my brother. He is quite a bit older and I have never lived with him. When he visited my Dad in Colyton one year I saw him drawing some chess pieces. Memory seems to suggest this led to me wanting to draw him. I remember getting this real buzz out of the ability to move a pencil across a page, to create lines, to make shadows, which could be builot up to look like this thing that stod in front of me. Its quite a basic fascination but the realisation of the mimetic power of a pencil amazed me. I suppose I was about eleven.

 In terms of first artistic influence I remember falling for John Bratby’s work when i was quite young. The headmaster of the school I was at owned a number of his works.  Chunks of paint arrogantly pulled around to capture kitchen sinks and mundane domestic still lives. I am not sure how much I like him now. But all the things I liked about his work, subject matter, approach and style, do seem to reoccur in many artists I like.

And your most recent?
Matthias Weischer, Daniel Richter and Neo Rausch have been a major influence since Andy directed me otwards them and Charlotte Mullins book on the figure in contemporary painting provided a great starting point.

Last ngiht I went to Brian Graham’s new show of works. I wrote my dissertation on his last show ‘Layer by Layer’. The remit of our discussion for the dissertaion spread wider than expected. He made me realise the importance of subject matter, the need to keep eprsisting and believing, the importance to follow your own goals not what you feel you should be painting and a belief that it is actually possible to start creating images which get somewhere near that unseen/unknown point on the horizon you are heading for.
Are you in it for the money?

Don’t be silly. Anyone who is in it for the money, certainly who paints, probally does not have a very good economic brain. There are so many easier roots to making money if that is what drives you.

Money, though, can’t be ignored. If I start making a decent amount form my paintings then that obviously means I can focus more time, energy and money into its production. So there is no point in living ina totally idealistic world which ignores the sytem we live in. 

I certainly would never make work with money as my soul aim. I don’t do commisions as such. I make art in attempt to reach for some particualr values, which whilst I am not always sure what they are, are central to my practise. The moment this is displaced for some production of an object for money alone then I may as well be doing something else. I would sooner be teaching another day in college, and getting paid, then churning out some work of art I dispise to get a few quid.

Politeness or rudeness, which do you prefer?

Politeness in life, although I am perhaps too polite at times due to weird social paranoias. Perhaps somewhere inbetween in my work. I certainly would not like the idea of my work being called polite, but eqaully I don’t think it is brash or rude. Perhaps it is rude in that occasionally it makes me promises or offers up solutions then never follows them through. That annoys me and seems rude.