On Working with New Materials

[Click image for small gallery of photos for piece.]

Christopher David White
Good Til the Last Drop, 2017
Ceramic, acrylic and polymer on wood base, 12.7cm x 12cm x 25.4cm
From the artist's website

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Have tilted into deciding to go for an expansive new series of pieces (details to come when it's further along), but the catch on the whole business is that it involves working with materials that will be all new to me. And not just in a piddling tack-on way, but as in almost everything (or actually everything, depending on the piece) about the materials and manual process will be completely unfamiliar.

We live in a world where specialization is the natural tendency, and bucking this trend by making a drastic change that opens you up to whole new fields of endeavor can lead to some of the obvious consequences (aka the reasons people specialize instead): 1, the new thing takes away time that could be spent furthering existing skills, 2, it splinters your portfolio (although that is more of a marketing concern - so question is when you're a nobody, is the 'nobody' status a license to experiment or an urging to pull your work together to create a forceful impression?), 3) it costs money to set yourself up with the basic 'kit' needed for the new material. In my particular case, the material(/s) I'm contemplating is also not something I ever thought of doing — it's fairly common to work with, say, acrylic and want to open up to oils or watercolor, but crossover between *hugely* different materials is less common, because usually unsuccessful. So just to recap, in a likely outcome where it all goes wrong, I/our-hypothetical-unfortunate-soul-who-goes-for-the-big-interrupting-change risks losing time, money, confidence, and also TIME triple-underlined again and including all those opportunity costs.

But. Beyond the obvious broadening of skill sets if you can pull it off, change/expansion can also be a massive creative recharge. Specifically, and most crucially for me, it can reengage the ability to play...you know, since you're already certain to fuck up a lot what with everything being different, so you just kind of know that in advance and can relax about it. Risk as reward, basically...otherwise known as 'fun'.

And then too sometimes you get a project in your head that just won't let go, and just needs the materials it needs, that's that and everything else is justification. 

One of those reasons. Not kidding about the fun though.