On the reading necessary to make art

the covers of the books mentioned in this post

Since 2019 I’ve been reading various books which all seem to circle around the themes and ideas that make up my Acid Renaissance series of artwork. This will be the thirtieth blog post I’ve written that is tagged as Acid Renaissance, and in many of the previous ones I’ve mentioned books that I’ve been reading that have helped inform the artwork and my thinking about it. They’ve covered subjects such as politics (particularly Mark Fisher), the Gothic, poetry (Shelley’s Queen Mab), and utopias.

While the creation of my previous series, England’s Dark Dreaming, also involved quite a bit of background reading and research, creating the Acid Renaissance series seems to have taken that to a whole new level. No one single book covers the interdisciplinary warp and weft of subjects that make up the fabric of the series.

For example, some of the books I’ve read or re-read for my Acid Renaissance series over the past month-or-so include:

Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain by Amy Jeffs
Occult Features of Anarchism by Erica Lagalisse
The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin
The Disenchanted Earth: Reflections of Ecosocialism and Barbarism by Richard Seymour
The Alchemy of Revolution: Gerrard Winstanley’s Occultism and Seventeenth-Century English Communism by David Mulder
William Blake vs the World by John Higgs
Albion by Brenda Vale (which I’ve written about before here)
Magic in Merlin’s Realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain by Francis Young

It might seem strange to people who aren’t visual artists that creating visual artwork (at least for me, but I’ve heard through conversations with other visual artists that it’s not uncommon) requires so much damn reading of words.

Creating artwork which is trying to say something, particularly something which is unwritten (probably unwritable otherwise I’d just write it down) and resides in the interstitial spaces between various disciplines and subjects needs, at least for me (again, I’m speaking purely from my perspective here), the background reading and research as both framework and stimulus.

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A photo of the author, Paul Watson
Posted by Paul Watson
in The Artist’s Notebook
2^nd June 2022

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Because no one can ever remember how to cite a blog post:

MLA 8 & 9: Watson, Paul. “On the reading necessary to make art.” The Artist’s Notebook, 2 Jun. 2022, www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/on-the-reading-necessary-to-make-art. Accessed 04 Dec. 2023.
APA 6: Watson, P. (2022, June 2). On the reading necessary to make art. Retrieved December 04, 2023, from The Artist’s Notebook website: https://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/on-the-reading-necessary-to-make-art
APA 7: Watson, P. (2022, June 2). On the reading necessary to make art. The Artist’s Notebook. https://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/on-the-reading-necessary-to-make-art
Chicago: Watson, Paul. “On the reading necessary to make art.” The Artist’s Notebook (blog), June 2, 2022. https://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/on-the-reading-necessary-to-make-art.
Harvard: Watson, P. (2022). On the reading necessary to make art. The Artist’s Notebook. Available at: https://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/on-the-reading-necessary-to-make-art [Accessed 04 Dec. 2023].
Vancouver: Watson P. On the reading necessary to make art [Internet]. The Artist’s Notebook. 2022 [cited 2023 Dec 04]. Available from: https://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/on-the-reading-necessary-to-make-art
MHRA: Watson, Paul. 2022. ‘On the reading necessary to make art’, The Artist’s Notebook <https://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/on-the-reading-necessary-to-make-art> [accessed 04 December 2023]