Hello, sculpture vultures, and thank you for joining me today. I haven’t got anything very fun to report on the work front over the last couple of weeks, just been routine stuff and things that you need to get done and things that may not be desperately inspiring, but keep life ticking over in a business. But I have had something on my mind to chat to you about before I begin the interview today, and that is something new that I’ve come across, which is called ‘excusitis’.

So is this a real word? Not really. But according to David Schwartz, author of The Magic of Thinking Big, which is a book that was written in the 50s – and he has actually been a bestseller since the 50s – it’s like a book that has stood the test of time, although some of the language is quite old fashioned. It’s all about white men in boardrooms, so you have to kind of look past the way that it has aged, but the actual nuggets of advice are very relevant still today, and very good. So excusitis, apparently, is something that lots of people suffer from who have big dreams. And I was taking a look at the writing projects that I had wanted to do this year, and realized with a shock, actually, that we’re in the last quarter of the year suddenly, but it really shows you that the year is sliding by rather faster than I would have liked it to. And what he says is that we can come up with excuses for why we aren’t getting on with things that we really care about, and these excuses are sometimes very convincing. They’re not just pathetic excuses, like, Oh, I’m a bit tired, or that you were scrolling on your phone when you shouldn’t have been, and you were watching TV. No, no. These can be really big things in life, like your health might not be very good, things like being somebody that encounters bad luck. Another one he was talking about is this excuse of not being young enough, like, oh, it’s passed me by. My window of opportunity to do something amazing has flown past me.

Maybe it’s because I had a birthday this week, and so, you know, I’m just approaching 50. Another year on, I’m 50, and so maybe this is why it spoke to me so much. But I really did sort of sit and think and take a long, hard look at my way of working. Think, you know, have I got excusitus in some area of my life? And actually, I came to the conclusion that I did, and I realized that one of my excuses for not getting down to my own projects is having too much work to do, which I’m sure lots of people can sympathize with, because when your work is also your passion, there’s never enough hours in the day to solve all of the problems that might come at you. But that can mean that your own creative pursuits, for me, writing fiction, or writing in general, can start to take a back seat, because you know you need to be available to your clients. You need to be there for them, and your projects are important, but sometimes what you’re doing is solving other people’s problems in order to prevent yourself from getting down to the really hard, nitty gritty work of creating and trying to deliver something into the world, Trying to mine your own resources in order to bring some idea that you have into some form that doesn’t yet exist, and that’s a really hard place to be in.

I find editing things, affecting them and improving them, so much more comfortable than I do actually doing that rough first draft work where I’m trying to really make myself put down what it is that has been sort of floating around in my mind, and it’s not fully formed yet, it’s on its way, and that part for me is such a struggle, and I’ve realized that it’s incredibly gratifying and much easier to solve someone else’s problems for them. And that is no bad thing, of course, in a business, but on the other hand, it can limit you, because, when everybody else’s problems are always easier to deal with than your own, that’s just a state of being. That’s how it is in the world. But it’s also really nice, because when you’re helping someone else, you feel good, you feel like you’re being worthwhile, you feel like you’re being useful. But really, sometimes it can be just another form of procrastination. It can be a way of getting out of that really hard stage that actually is part of the creative process. So I’m going to encourage you this week to look at your own work practice and see whether there are areas of excusitis in your life too. I hope I’m not in the minority and not the only person that does this. Let me know. Tell me. Share what excuses you might be coming up with.

© Tanya Russell – Standing Red Deer Stag

Today, I’m interviewing Tanya Russell, MRBS. She is a sculptor who is very well known for her public and private works, particularly those featuring animals. She’s also contributed immensely to the creative community by founding the art academy in central London, and we came across each other when I had to do some conservation work for a couple of her private works that she had sold several years before and needed some conservation. I realized that we had all these very weird kind of connections.

First of all, I knew her client personally, and they had no idea that they were introducing me back to kind of a friend from my past, but my son had been in school with her daughter, and we’d been pretty friendly at the time, and so it was only when I turned up to pick up the sculptures that I recognized the house, and also I realized that I had been in touch with her parents (her father and mother were both sculptors, professionals – Lorne McKean FRBS and Edwin Russell FRBS) because our company had cared for one of her father’s sculptures for many, many years. It’s in Westminster. I encourage you to go and look at it. It’s very lovely. It’s called The Suffragette Scroll, and it’s a sculpture that actually was pretty much the only monument to suffragettes for a very, very long time.

We’ve got some gorgeous monuments to suffragettes now, but back in the day, there really wasn’t any. Nobody was really looking at the history of the suffragettes and celebrating it much. And this particular sculpture of Edwin’s was made cold cast. It was resin mixed with bronze powder, and had all sorts of conservation problems because it had been sat outside for a long, long time. And resins don’t just survive indefinitely. They do have conservation problems too. And I was wondering why the scroll had not been cast in bronze, and so I’d contacted the artist, and had found out that it had actually just been down to money. There really hadn’t been any money, any interest in putting up a monument for the suffragettes. Can you believe it? And so they’d scraped together the money, and that was the monument that was made. And this is the kind of research that we always do in conservation. You need to find out about the object that you are looking after. And I really was shocked, actually, that a monument in London, and pretty much the only one to women at the time – you know, you couldn’t see another public monument of a woman around London, apart from a few of the royalty set – they couldn’t even raise enough money, not the artists, the councils, to actually find the money to make a proper monument, a bronze monument, to women.

And so yes, it was with great delight that I realized these connections, and that I’ve had an opportunity to talk to Tanya. So I began the conversation by asking her, what was home like, growing up with two professional sculptors?

Tanya: It was quite a bizarre upbringing I have to say. My parents were quite old fashioned. They were that generation of war children, and they were kind of in that transition between when sculpture was taught a lot more traditionally. They were at the Royal Academy schools together, which is where they met, and they were the last year where traditional sculpture was taught. They had a lot of drive, and they got a lot of really big commissions early, early on. But, you know, they also bought their dream property with a big studio they had to do up. So it’s really weird as an artist, because you get these really big jobs and lots of money goes through, but you actually don’t have a lot of money, particularly at the beginning.

So my dad was very Scottish. He was brought up on the highest hill farm in Scotland. His dad was like 70, and his mum was 50 or something, and he kind of learned to look after himself. So it was all quite bohemian. We had no central heating. I remember some very important clients came and everyone tried to turn the central heating on and all the pipes in the house burst, because we’d never had them on before. But, yeah, it was a little bit bohemian, and they worked ridiculously hard. So, you know, day and night. It was kind of amazing as well. I would help, obviously, with a lot of the jobs and and I think I love the fact that they, obviously, loved what they did, and they would meet amazing people in every job. And that’s what I find. That’s what I love about commissions. Every job is so different, and you suddenly, you learn about a whole new area of life that you’d never had anything to do with before, and you meet incredible people in it. So, yeah. I mean, it’s an absolutely fascinating job, but yeah, slightly bizarre.

© Tanya Russell – Pig & Chicken

Lucy: Was there like, lumps of clay sitting on the kitchen table? Growing up in my father, was a conservator as well, although you didn’t call it that in the old days, it’s like a restorer. But we always had limbs, bronze limbs, you know, in various locations, like they’d be braising or re-sculpting a hand that had been run over or something. And so there’d always be body parts and things around our house.

Tanya: Yeah, that does sound very, very familiar! Yeah, all our freezers were always full of kind of frozen things. And you know, if there was a deer or a rabbit or something, because my parents wanted me to learn the tradition, and I’m so grateful for that. Just actually learning musculature and anatomy and that kind of thing is actually, even if you want to do quite contemporary work, it’s still incredibly useful to know what’s underneath. So we would literally skin things and actually learn and draw. So yeah, there was always actual animal parts around. But also, as you say, certainly clay and bits of bronze.There were two studios, and the entire house was generally full of all kinds of stuff.

Lucy: It sounds like the animal part of it wasn’t a conscious choice. It was more just all around you. So because obviously your subjects are very dominantly animals, was it jus something that was always there?

Tanya: It wasn’t like, Oh, I’ve decided to do animals. No, I always loved animals. And you know, because my parents did always work from models we kind of made real friends with a local animal sanctuary called the Hydestile Wildlife Hospital. And I think kind of in payment to them as well, we would take in all kinds of animals, because we lived in the middle of nowhere. So fox cubs, magpie chicks, all kinds of things. We would take them in, look after them for a while, and then we could release them because we were on Hindhead Common, which is 1000s of acres of national trust land. So it was a perfect release site, with no main roads around. So I think I was always brought up with all kinds of wild and domestic animals. I absolutely love them, and the whole rescue and rehabilitation side is really, really important to me.

Lucy: So was there any question that you wouldn’t join their tribe? Was another career in the offing ever?

Tanya: I had a few rebellious moments, I think. The animal side, I decided when I was very young, I thought about farming until I quite understood what farming was about. I thought how nice it would be to be a farmer or have a ranch in Canada. I think I always wanted something very romantic and lovely. But I don’t think there was anything else really that appealed to me at all. I love, love, its flexibility. You’re your own person. You can do what you want. You’ve got to work incredibly hard as an artist, but, you know, it’s very self determining in a way. There’s a lot of choice in it, to a degree.

Lucy: You know, my eldest son is university age now, and quite a lot of his friends came to their parents and said, you know, we’d like to work in art. And they, the parents, were horrified, absolutely horrified. And now my son is coming to me saying, I’m thinking about working in law, and I’m horrified. What do you mean? You’re not going to work in art? You know, it’s such a funny thing. It’s when you’re so familiar with it, to me, I don’t understand why the parents are thinking . . . I suppose they’re imagining starving-in-a-garret kind of artists. But they don’t see how much work there is in the field. There can be, it’s a wide field. Whereas, you know, to me, the idea of working in an office for very long hours under someone else’s beat of their drum is just, I don’t know . . . I’m looking at him like he’s an alien. So, yeah, that feels quite unnatural to me.

Tanya: Yeah, I obviously have spent quite a lot of time on the computer, but as soon as I go to the studio, I feel at home. It’s like everything inside me just kind of relaxes and it just feels a much more natural environment. But I totally agree with you. and certainly when I was running the Art Academy in London Bridge, that was one of the biggest things I had to deal with, was students coming – young and old – who’d been told by their parents or by people their entire lives that they couldn’t possibly be artists because it wasn’t possible to make a living, or all these ideas that people have. But it was so beneficial for me because I had two artist parents who obviously had made it work, you know, made it work very well, that obviously I knew it was possible. But I also knew what you had to put into it to make it work. Because obviously, there are loads of people who go to art school, and maybe they’re not taught the whole package and as an artist, you’re running your own business. There’s a whole professional side, let alone the mental discipline that you need just to keep working – and work in the right way – in the studio, let alone on the business side. You’ve got to keep doing stuff that you don’t really want to do, and you’re the only one making yourself do it.

© Tanya Russell – Leopard Portrait

At the Academy, people would ask me whether the people who had the most talent would make it. But in my observation, actually, it was the ones who wanted it the most and were prepared to work hard enough – talent definitely was not enough. Because we did teach the whole professional side of it, and we taught the skills so they had all the tools they needed to make it work. But there were still a few who were very talented, just really, it was always a kind of a mental approach where, for some reason, they just couldn’t apply themselves enough to really make it work. They needed the outside discipline of working with other people or in a company or something, which was fine, and, you know, they could still do art on the side, but to really make it work professionally, it takes an awful lot of different things to come together.

Lucy: I couldn’t agree more, actually. I think running a business – and part of any creative endeavor is running the business if you’re going to make money out of it – you have to have the two aspects.

Tanya: Very few people have the luxury of just creating and doing no other part of it, you know. And I think maybe as the world has progressed in time, that’s even more so now, because you have to be able to market yourself in a way that I don’t think in my father’s day was true. Certainly my father used to say he didn’t even want to have a company name on the office. He said, No, I’m so exclusive that if people work hard enough to find me, then I might work for them. Slightly different attitude – like ‘I am so good at what I do’, he believed, that people have to work hard to find me. You know, that’s just really impressive, isn’t it? Gosh, I don’t know how we ever ate, but we did.

Lucy: So I wanted to ask you more about the Art Academy. Why was it needed? Why was it a thing you had to bring into existence?

Tanya: I think it was working with my parents for so long, even as a child, they actually used to have apprentices. Proper, traditional apprenticeship where they lived in the house, they were paid nothing, and for the first few years, they literally did the grunt work, you know, cleaning stuff, making armatures, hugging the clay. And then gradually, you know, they started helping on the big jobs. And then towards the end, seven years, towards the end, they started developing their own work. And so at the end, they were literally doing their own commissions before they left. And it was amazing watching that process over and over again, and how incredibly invaluable it was to actually work alongside professional artists. I literally watched them absorbing the talent. Friends would come who apparently had no particular talent, but, you know, after a few years, you literally see it emerging, just because they’re in that environment where they’re just absorbing everything. And you know, that professional side of it is just something you learn on the job, just through years of observing it and being part of it, watching the trials and the errors and being there for the conversations.

So after seeing how important that was, when I wanted to train, I did go and look around all the traditional colleges at the time and I’ll say I was fairly underwhelmed. These amazing facilities, but when I walked in, there was hardly anyone ever there. And then, just this one example, I went to a college and there was this girl trying to make something, and it kept falling down. I was like, what’s the problem? And she was like, Oh, I keep trying to make this, and it just keeps falling down. And it was kind of stuff that I’ve learned in the first week of my apprenticeship. And I just, I felt so bad for her, you know? She obviously had so much talent, creativity and enthusiasm, but she just didn’t have the tools to make what she wanted. So to me, giving people the skills of their craft and also the professional side of it was really important. But I also wanted a cross between the traditional college system and the apprenticeship. What we didn’t particularly get with the apprenticeship is enough room to explore our own ideas and different things. Certainly the whole kind of art history, contextual studies, exploring different mediums, we didn’t have. So I wanted, obviously, to have those in as well, because I think that’s really, really important. When I was doing my apprenticeship, people used to come and say, you know, where can I get this kind of training? And there just wasn’t anywhere. So it just seemed like the right thing to do, to set something up.

And I think I also because my parents used to have clients who would come and they actually wanted to use young people. And they would say, I’ve just been around all the colleges to find someone – we’re talking about big public commissions. They really wanted a young person, and they were like, I literally can’t find anyone who I trust actually does have the skills to do something that will actually stand up and be professional enough. To have that professional knowledge in the skills, the application and just all the other stuff, the insurance and the installation and the health and safety all that, to actually have the confidence to commission them . . . So I think for that reason as well, I also felt that artists do have a responsibility, like any other subject. You know, we are professionals, and we therefore have a responsibility to the public to give the absolute best we can in all areas, obviously, you know, with the skills, but also conceptually. Sorry, I’m talking quite a lot, but I’m quite passionate about this.

© Tanya Russell –  Octopus on Rock

The other aspect I also feel really strongly about is that people are really honest about what they make. I think it’s probably a little bit better now, but when I was looking around the colleges, the conceptual drive was so strong that it seemed to me that a lot of people were just trying to do something different for the sake of it. They were trying to be too clever to me. They were trying to do something that they thought looked good and interesting and contemporary, but, for me, it lacked a soul. I think, you know, like when someone speaks, if they’re really passionate about what they’re talking about, and they really know about their subject, they’re fascinating, you really want to listen to them. And I think exactly the same with art. I think if we speak in our art about what we are really passionate about, what we care about and what we know about, then people will want to look at it, engage with it, and it has that depth to it that is there when you listen to someone talking about something that they really know about, and you could just listen to them forever. There’s just kind of layers and layers and layers within it. And I think it’s the same with artwork. So for all of those reasons, I wanted to set up an art school.

Lucy: But it’s a big jump between wanting to set something up and believing it’s something that’s needed in the world to actually doing it. My goodness, the actual doing of it. I quite often think how fantastic it would be to integrate more of the conservation into the art world. Because I feel, like a lot of sculptors, they produce their work. They’ve no idea how these objects are going to age. So they say to you know, we’d really like a white pattern on this contemporary piece. And I’m like, Okay, if you sit that outside in an urban environment, for a matter of months, it’s going to be completely different, and that owner then has to take on that responsibility of upholding something that’s chemically very unstable outdoors. Which is why, in the ancient, classical times, colors like green and black and brown were used so much, they’re very stable. But sorry, I digress slightly. What I’m saying is the actuality of bringing that vision to reality, I think, is hugely impressive. I mean, how did you do that?

Tanya: I have to say, I do look back sometimes and I think if I had known what I know now . . . I was quite young at the time. I mean, not massively young. How old was I? 28. I remember because while I was literally starting, there was a Prince’s Trust grant I was trying to get for which you had to be under 30. So I think I was 28 when I first had the thought. I had no idea what I was getting into. I didn’t have any idea what particularly it would involve. It was more like remembering that this was something I really had to do than, like, an idea. It was just when it came to me, it was just, Yeah, this, this is what I have to do. And it was pretty important. There was never any question in my mind about it, and there was a real kind of energy behind it, I think because I was so passionate about it. I love art. I love what it can do for people in society, and, you know, everything about it. So I think that kind of just carried me through.

So I think the first thing I did was just, I knew I just had to talk about it, just tell people. So I got people together and told them, this was what I was going to do. And I was really lucky at the time. I had a group of friends as part of a philosophy school my parents were part of, called the School of Economic Science. They’re amazing people, incredibly supportive, and I talked to some of my really good friends enough about it, and they were really, really encouraging.

I got the Board of Trustees together, turned into charity, and I had a lot of help. You know, people were amazing. When I told people about what we were trying to do, people just helped. I had a fantastic Board of Trustees, some who were still there, and I just had a lot of help from people.

Then I started getting the artists together, and that was really exciting. One of my trustees was a property surveyor, which was incredibly helpful. A lot of the developers in London really liked him and owed him some favors. And it was a time where there was quite a lot of property sitting around just waiting for redevelopment. So he managed to find us these amazing premises in Waterloo where we paid almost nothing. I was right by what was then the Eurostar terminal. I obviously had absolutely no money at all – any money I had I put into it, so I lived in the office. There was no central heating, no hot water or anything. I absolutely loved it. The terminal would blare alarms all night as well, but it was amazing.

© Tanya Russell – Running Wild Boar

Because I really wanted it to have those elements of the kind of apprenticeship system I talked about, that really working alongside really top professional artists – people who you’d call, traditionally, masters in the art – people just came. These fantastic artists, you know, painters, drawers, sculptors, and we gave them studio space in exchange for doing some teaching. And that was how it started. It was a real family, and we got our first group of students in. So it just kind of really built slowly. In some ways, I think it was really good that we didn’t have a lot of money behind us or anything, and it was all done from what we all felt was really needed, so because we were responding to what was needed and what was happening, it kind of grew in a way that just worked. And we could respond really easily to changes and tweak things. And, you know, when new people came in, we could keep growing and developing. So it was very organic and I think that’s kind of why it worked as well.

Lucy: But did you manage to do any creating during that time at all, or did the making of this academy suck the creative aspect out of you because of the fact that, I mean, it’s very hard to pour your energy into more than one big thing at a time?

Tanya: Well, I think yes and no. Obviously my time was extremely limited. I did do some work during that time –  I got some commissions which actually helped fund the place, which was incredibly helpful. But I think as well, it was very inspiring for me, because I had really only had that one influence of my parents. With all these artists coming in and hearing them teach, and involving things like art history and contextual studies. And I love the group we had with the students, where we talked about their work and their kind of creative process. And because I was having to put lesson plans together and courses. I did a lot of research, and I explored all kinds of different things which I hadn’t done before, which was incredibly inspiring for me, and actually for my creative growth as well. I think I did actually learn vast amounts, which I still see developing in my work today. So definitely the influence of other artists, the students and my own exploration, definitely moved my work along in a way which I don’t think it would have done if I hadn’t done that.

Lucy: And so do you have a general creative process? Is there a sort of sequence that you see yourself going through each time you have a commission?

Tanya: It’s slightly different, obviously, commission to commission, or when I do get to do my own work as well. I do think that any work has to involve all the aspects that I think are important. So I think it’s almost like a tree growing from a seed, that seed, that emotional depth, I would call it is the kind of the seed where it has to come from. So you’ve got to really feel it in yourself. If I’m doing a commission which I don’t necessarily feel connected to, say it’s a slightly more conceptual one, I will keep researching and I will look and explore until I feel that kind of emotional depth for the subject myself, and I do think, conceptually, it’s got to work. So, you know, I will think about it. Does it need a bit more of this, a bit more of that, to make the story of it work? And then it’s like, how do I make it? It’s the form / function thing. What is the best material to use? What’s the best pose? I’ve got my feeling. I’ve got my concept. What is the best way of making that visible so that the outward form perfectly reflects the inner intent. And that’s the form and function thing.

So as I say, what’s the pose, what’s the medium, what’s the size, what’s the scale, what’s the base, what’s the location . . . all of these things affect the impact of the work on the viewer.

So obviously, at the moment, I’m talking about work that is going to be seen. Artwork, of course, can be purely for yourself, therapeutic or not. So I’m particularly talking about work that is kind of being viewed by an audience. So I think all those things are really important. And then obviously, you know, you’ve got the kind of the form that you want to create, and then it’s How am I going to do it? And I always try and do that after, because I’ve seen quite often in my particular sculpture, because it is really technical, you’ve got to be really careful not to let that influence your original inspiration. So I try and work from the bottom up. And so then once I’ve got the point about knowing what I want to do is, then, okay, how am I going to do this? What’s the best way of doing it? And then I’ll go through that whole technical process. And then, yeah, creating, finishing, displaying, equally important that last bit, you know, how is it presented? The patina, you know, all that kind of thing, the base, the plinth.

Lucy: So you seem to have managed to mesh the type of sculpture you love to create with a kind of wider context. You do quite a lot for animal charities and things. Can you tell people a little bit about how you do that?

Tanya: Yeah, that really makes it all worthwhile to me. I mean that’s what I absolutely love about art – as I said at the beginning – that it’s an opportunity to explore what you really love and to help you know. Art actually has the power to create change.

Going back a bit to why I wanted to start the Academy, I think that is kind of my, my core passion for art, that it actually can do something so obviously – you know, a picture says 1000 words – a sculpture can actually change people’s perceptions, change the beliefs, and therefore the kind of the ideas that shape society. Of course, you know, it’s a kind of reciprocal process, but that’s just one aspect of it. Probably, well, equally important, obviously, is the fact that materially, things need help. Yes, inspiration is incredibly important – opening people’s eyes. And I would love, at some point, to do more work about animal welfare and that kind of thing. It’s always there in the back of my mind. You know, you can do it from a positive side, which can be really inspiring, but you can also show the not so positive stuff. And I have done both, and I would like to explore both more. You know, the slight shock factors, like, actually, I really didn’t know that was going on, but you’ve presented something in a way that is easy for them to see, but also, you know, art has the power to open people’s hearts, and when people’s hearts are open, it creates change. So yeah, that side of it is really important to me, but as I say, the other side, the actually being able to practically help, has become more and more obviously important.

© Tanya Russell – Polar BearPortrait

There are so many charities and organizations doing such fantastic work, and we love supporting them in any way we can. So 10% of the proceeds of everything that we make go towards animal charities. The three particular at the moment that we support are The David Shepherd Foundation – actually the founder of that, David Shepherd’s wife, Avril, was my sister’s godmother. So my grandmother and David were really good friends.He’s a wildlife painter and they were really good friends, so we still support that. They do amazing work for wildlife across the world.

And then we do a local one called All Creatures Great and Small who do domestic animals, and some wildlife as well. And then we do Dogs Trust. So yeah, 10% of our proceeds go to all of those. But also, almost every week, I would say we’re asked to give something to an auction or create a little sculpture for a charity or something, and wherever possible we do say yes and give, or loan, what we can. We’re about to loan a couple of our big dogs to a couple of quite big charities for an event they’re doing.I think there are lots of ways that you can help practically and emotionally as well.

Lucy: So quite a lot of the listeners are emerging sculptors. They’re on their way. Have you any advice you’d give them?

Tanya: That’s brilliant, because it’s the best thing you could do. Really enjoy it. It’s so much fun. And practically, well, I’ve been saying that there are the two sides. It’s one – follow your inspiration in your heart. Don’t ever be told by anyone to do anything that doesn’t feel right to you. You know you are the only one that’s important. Do what you’re passionate about, but at the same time, you do have to learn to see clearly what you’re doing, and that kind of objectivity about what you’re looking at is really important.

I’ve learned that over and over again. I will still always get people in to look at my work, my poor husband. I’m calling him in all the time, and I try and get other people, because when he walks into the studio and starts looking at what I’m doing, just the very fact of him being there makes me step back and look at it a bit differently. Him making comments, sometimes I might get a bit cross – did not say what I wanted to say, poor thing – but it’s always incredibly helpful, even if a little bit upsetting, at times. When you feel you poured your heart and soul into something, you really think it’s working, then he comes in and shows you that it’s really not . . . But I get over it quite quickly. But yeah, getting other people to look at it is really important.

But there is the one-three-ten rule – one person you know you really trust, three people who you really respect, or 10 people who may not know anything about art generally. If 10 people say a similar thing, then it’s quite trustworthy. But really the important one is yourself, even if everybody says something and actually you still think it’s doing what you want it to do, you know, go with yourself. It’s the most important thing. Follow your heart and your passion, but also it really is just worth learning a trade. It’s like a pianist wanting to play a wonderful Sonata and move people to tears, but he hasn’t actually learned how to play the piano or learn the scales, you just can’t do it. So learning your skills as broadly as possible. So whatever you want to make you’ve got the tools, or you learn the tools.

I mean, that’s the amazing thing about sculpture. Almost every sculpture is different. So every job that I do, I would say I am for definite, learning something new. And just take that trouble to do that. That’s part of that mental discipline. Don’t just go with what’s easy because you’ve done it before, and you’ve got the materials right there and you know how to do it. That’s not what it’s about. It’s like, oh, do I really want to do what’s going to really express what I want to express and really push yourself to try new things and difficult things, and it probably won’t work . . . But that’s great, because every time it doesn’t work, it’s a step towards it working. It’s definitely not going to work every time, but that’s really part of the process. If you don’t do at least 10 things a year that don’t work, you’re definitely not exploring.

Lucy: That’s such good advice generally, not just for sculpture, I think just in general. Tanya, thank you so much for joining me today. I hope, just before you go, you could just tell the audience where they can find out a little bit more about you.

Tanya: Oh, thank you. Yeah, it’s been a real pleasure to talk to you. I do have a website, tanyarussell.com, and I think on there, there are links to social media, Instagram and Facebook as well. Yeah, it’d be lovely to hear from people, and any questions via any media is absolutely fine. I’d love to see what you’re doing and talk about it.

Lucy: There are some people that may say that being born from two sculptors, there was a kind of inevitability that Tanya was going to be successful. I don’t think that’s the case at all. To me, it is in her mindset, her very singular approach to her work, that determination that it’s just going to happen that it’s going to be here, it’s going to be brought into existence, and it will succeed that she has, that has made all the difference.

So when talking about how she opened up the Academy, she said ‘I didn’t have any idea what I was getting into. It was a fully formed idea, and I never had any question about doing it that carried me through’. And then she goes on to emphasize that, of course, she did have very good help, and very good people involved too, but she knew that she had this knowledge from her own apprenticeship to offer. And then she went about it in this way where there just wasn’t any other option – this was going to happen. And I’m sure she didn’t mention even one of the many hundreds of problems there must have been in setting up something so huge. I mean, you know, money just for one. She sort of glanced over that, you know, having to do projects to help fund it, and getting people involved. And there must have been absolutely untold problems. And there was no question it was going to happen. That’s the kind of mindset that a professional needs.

Going back to my musings in the introduction about when I asked Tanya about how she managed to do her own creative work alongside that mammoth task of setting up the academy, you know, she didn’t say, Oh, my own stuff just fell by the wayside, which is the kind of thing you could totally understand, because she must have had so many calls upon her time from other people. You know, she may have ended up with virtually none of her own time to work. She didn’t. She said, I allowed the ideas and the energy of others to help fuel my own creative work. So she harnessed what was around her. She didn’t make excuses about not getting on with it because she was busy. She made the time, and she used the energy of those other projects to sort of move into her soul and help to generate fabulous works, which ended up generating money in order to help the Academy. It’s all sort of a beautiful cycle there. She also tied her success into helping a bigger cause, and it’s not just about pleasing the patrons that she’s working for. It’s about something much bigger than that. It’s about helping animals, particularly through animal charities, and she makes a really significant financial contribution to that. I mean, that’s pretty amazing.

The final little bits of advice, final little pickings I wanted to mention was what she talked about with her advice to emerging sculptors. So she says, get eyes on your work. Get criticism. Not always comfortable, particularly when she asks her husband to help, but getting opinions, not being afraid of criticism. If you can stomach it, it will make your work better. I’m totally in agreement with that. I get as many people as possible to read my books before they’re released. I don’t always agree with everything people say, but quite often, you can see a nugget of something that actually is worth listening to, especially if the people that you’re getting involved are people you trust or people that you admire.

She also said it’s a career which as a professional will suit an independent mind. It’s a self-determining career. I think that’s quite significant – an independent mind. Something that I think is actually relevant for all creative businesses. You can’t just be good at the creating. You have to have that sort of mindset, that kind of independent thinking, to help you carry you forward.

And finally, she said, what she took from the Academy was it was the ones who wanted it most that succeeded. It was never enough just to be talented. I kind of think that that’s something to hold on to. You know, it’s really easy to doubt yourself . . . Am I talented enough? Maybe not. You’re never talented enough. There’s always someone more talented than you, somehow, when you compare yourself. But actually, if you really want it badly enough that’s something that can give you the edge over talent. To me, that’s incredibly reassuring, and that’s the advice that I’m going to hold on to.

Please Support The Show

Buy Me A Coffee