31.12.12 - 9.12.12



NOTES PAGE AT END OF DIARY.



31.12.12 - and so it's new years eve and midnight is about to go by - the end of the year is usually all fireworks and celebrations.  Not here.  I'm not under the illusion that anything is going to change now unless it's me that changes it.  It gives me a chance to start a new diary, slimmer, more compact and purely for organizing  rather than making a collage a day (as I do that anyway) - if the new diary ends up looking cool I may post pages of it on here as usual.  Everything changes but only due to my own schemes and plans - if I didn't have a system of doing things every year would just be another year of doing nothing and staring at walls wondering if the cream white has started to go yellower.  Someday I hope to be able to choose what colour I want my walls to be. 

 

30.12.12 -  difficult to determine how harmless this path is.  The future does look completely ambigiously threatening.  So not ambigious at all.  More knowingly and menacingly vague perhaps.  The future is unavoidable.  What if our intuition is our heads remembering when we've lived before - our minds screaming warnings from repeated lives - ''stop smoking before it's too late I died last time''. 

 

29.12.12 - marriage sounds like a great idea and really would quite like it to happen but like with everything I can't help but ask questions like How much would it cost? Isn't it all a bit me me me? (or us us us).  Getting married is cool and you get to wear an outrageous suit and it can be a celebration of love but is it all just for the sake of it and do people do it because they are supposed to? 
More questions in constant rotation grinding through the answerless.  I think I'll just keep doing my work and allow things to happen when they happen rather than critiqueing myself over how normal I am and where I'm going with my life.  I'm going somewhere.
I hope.



28.12.12 - The above looks like a moomin being sick and having horrible visions that make it go crazy... which is perhaps why it's being sick.



27.12.12 - and then shooting out of Doncaster back into Manchester first thing in the morning - all vestiges of Christmas gone almost as if it never happened so this bleak frightening image should have no reference to it.  Except for maybe that bit of red tinsel in the corner - does that symbolize hope?

26.12.12 - Boxing day.  Similiar to Christmas so this is virtually the same collage.  I didn't get the train back to Manchester as trains weren't running to Manchester at all.  In fact no trains were working.  I'm sure I've got the train home loads of times before on Boxing day.  Difficult to remember though.

25.12.12 - MERRY CHRISTMAS.

24.12.12 - Christmas Eve in the office and then catch an immediate train back home to Doncaster.  Generic work collage soon to be followed by generic wrapping paper collages.

23.12.12 - cleaned up the left over xmas and then spent a very productive evening getting everything done ever.  The flat ended up being tidier than anywhere I've ever seen apart from my mum's house and as well as getting loads of art done I've also managed to watch quite a lot of television.  Was wanting to stay up all night drinking strong coffee and going mental until I have to go to work first thing in the morning but don't think my constitution or endurance is up to that these days.  I'm such a 31 year old.  It's such an effort to stay up after one in the morning these days and I used to love staying up late on my own so much.

22.12.12 - my first xmas in my flat with Rachel Jarvis before I go away for the other ordinary xmas with my family.  The best present I've had for ages is this.  Though admittedly the shirt covered in woodland animals was very good.

21.12.12 - wrapping up Christmas presents for my first Christmas before the main Christmas.  Two christmases this year.

20.12.12 - wrapping up Christmas presents for my first Christmas before the main Christmas.

19.12.12 - explosions null and dull in contained spheres of activity biased away from helping anyone much unless they are nice people.  In a position to judge.  Not a good thing.

18.12.12 - the sheet full of school admissions information that i've been drawing on since I first got transferred into the contact centre - been wanting to cut it up and stick it in my diary for months but then i wouldn't have the information anymore.  So I took the trouble to photocopy it finally.

17.12.12 - Christmas shopping afterwork.  Suprisingly quiet and fairly inexpensive to say I bought quite expensive things.  Maybe a paycut for a slightly nicer job wouldn't be worth it.

16.12.12 - headache meets claw hammer.  "Fight pain with hammer but too much hammer would make me dead."
These two labels have no relationship to one another - but putting them side by side does look unusual.

15.12.12 - the first signs of Christmas canter through the fog in the form of a postage stamps.

14.12.12 - A really bad headache enables me to have a day off work but also disables me from being able to do much of anything else.

13.12.12 - the many unhappy and happy face icons that appear on screen when dealing with traffic and parking penalty charges - the ones with eyepatches are for bus lane penalties.  I really like the pixelisation. 

12.12.12 - an hour or afternoon scribbling in different colours (limited to blue, black and red) sometimes wonder what my artistic output actually is - i do seem to produce an awful lot of work - it's getting to the stage where I'm not actually remembering each image - think this is the folly of producing mostly small work but in vast quantities - perhaps the work is less memorable due to it's volume but also perhaps that gives my body of work a vaster sense of scale and also does my constant critique and questioning of my self and the actual relevance and worthiness of the work actually make it more honest?  More questions unanswered and to be followed by more questions until I forget every question asked in the first place.  Leading to the same questions being asked over and over again.  Which explains (does it really?) why my life and artwork feels like one big recursive loop.

11.12.12 - statistics swallowed and spat out into an insignificance.  Calls per hour, Adherence, Total service requests, Latenesses, Absences.  All of these are irrelevent in a job I'll possibly never be very good at due to lack of wanting to be good at.  Is this disrespectful in the economic climate where supposedly no one can get a job and your meant to keep your head down and carry on being unhappy in a position you weren't born for?

10.12.12 - character design for the book I'm working on at the capacity of 1% a year. 



9.12.12 - another typical Sunday to do list.  Next year's diary is a lot smaller being 4 days per page (with a notes section at the end of each week) so will likely use loads of tippex so I can write more tasks in once they are done.  This will probably make the pages thicker but not as thick as when they are covered in bits of card and paper.

cellular within groundless landmass dark sleeping dominance arrange tangled illogical drops of self

Here are four more images I've uploaded onto EBay.

drops of self bring dark to the arcade

CLICK HERE TO BID

New Years Eve is coming up soon.  Not to be a killjoy but I'm not particularly interested in going out.  'Drops of self bring dark to the arcade' is a description of what happens when you combine me with a party or nightclub.  Perhaps because my teenage years were quite antisocial somehow I just feel really false and empty when I go out into these sorts of places - simply because I miss all kinds of social cues everyone else is wiser to.  I've tried clubs and parties quite extensively but didn't really get into them because, for me, they were a bit rubbish and made me feel like more of an outsider. 

breathing tangled landmass of illogical organs

CLICK HERE TO BID

Outside what though?  And how is the outside and the inside defined and which people are where?  Sometimes I have sudden flashes of what is either complete empathy with everyone or complete self projection over everyone everywhere.  All of a sudden it appears like everyone in the world feels exactly like I do and is dealing with the same disorientation, dislocation, discontent as I am.  That all of a sudden every conscious mind is staring at the same focal point of nothing and feeling total despair.  I don't tend to get this feeling much these days think it's stopped due to not going to nightclubs anymore and also not travelling on long bus journeys.  I've pointed out the similarities between the two in a previous entry for an image called ''heads multiply in limited tubes of ruin'' which is a description of this possibly shared sensation of being trapped.  The above title is also a description of confinement but confinement of a different sort.  It's different to a shared experience of being trapped inside a bus or night club and more along the lines of being trapped in life.  Being trapped in life is much nicer than being trapped on a bus though - and much more colourful and exciting - but it can make me feel ever so slightly dumb and hazy - almost as if every movement I/we make is done badly and that I/we should be thinking things through before I/we allow it to keep moving but despite my/our entanglement the world keeps moving along regardless of my/our dumbness.  The only alternative is death.  And death is proper rubbish.  So it's better to carry on living and enjoying the bright illogic and just hoping to see as much different types of it as possible before the inevitable.

9 spokes arrange in the groundless

CLICK HERE TO BID

I've also covered death on this blog before - here it is - think I've probably covered most things that go through my mind a lot - though I've not covered ''9 spokes arrang in the groundless'' because I'm unsure of exactly what that really means....

I can hazard a guess.  In the image above there are 9 lines emerging from a central pivot.  Although the central pivot can't be seen within the chaotic colours - so the chaotic colours are the groundless and the nine spokes are arranged and organized in this groundlessness.  

That was pretty much a description of what the image looks like and what I think it's depicting but as far as I'm aware it's not really meaning anything at all.  I could extract or conjour further meaning from this title and the image though i would be inventing it after the production of the image meaning that it wasn't part of the work during the creative process but invented afterwards. 

Is that really bad form and should all my art mean something? Does it make me unworthy as an artist?  Answers on the back of a postcard. 

dominance without but within ascendance

CLICK HERE TO BID

The image above is something about power but a pure sort of power - along the lines of what God has, or would have.  A kind of selfless dominance rather than a silly kinky dominance.  Ascendance is the key word in the title to distinguish this as a purer control.  Though if anything were truly pure it would likely work against the way the world worked.  It would, perhaps sweep the world away on a massive tidying up mission because it likes it's house clean.  The above image is sort of like me when I'm getting ready to hoover. 

sleeping cellar cellular

CLICK HERE TO BID

This image began as a piece of notepad paper from a few years ago.  I've collaged over the top and coloured over the words I found least interested and allowed the words that stood out to my unconscious to remain.  It's like automatic selection - similar to automatic writing except it's words being selected rather than being written.  A word/image experiment.  The words selected are ''ascension ascending feeling marked out pushing simultaneous whirlpool self audience over ever third every toy''.  Read what you will into that.  Whatever it means I'm sure it's good.

blocks of the internal over the spires of the external

Two more Ebay images for sale.  Click on the link below each image to view them - all auctions are ending over the weekend.

meteor of the INTERNAL spinning and suspended over the spires of the EXTERNAL - I hope the outside melds to the inside in an explosion of permanent comfortclick here

 This is quite a traditional image - sort of apocalyptic in it's depiction of a populace under the looming presence of a catastrophe in the sky - also the writing in the sky looks vaguely prophetic.  According to Mayan prophecies the world was supposed to end yesterday.
I remember being so convinced the world would in the year 2000 that when it didn't I came up with a theory to cover up the fact I was wrong.  That perhaps the end of the world was so traumatic and horrifying that everyone was in denial of it ever happening and had convinced themselves we were all carrying on as normal.
In theory this could still be happening - or perhaps it only started happening yesterday.

a choice of no choice as blocks of no endclick here

I didn't believe my theory for very long - perhaps the best part of a minute.  The theory is easily disproved or begins to lack any weight when I consider what life has been like since the year 2000.  If the 21st century was a wishful fantasy in my dead brain then the world would be a lot more like Back to the Future Part 2.  Or Lexx.  Also it would be a lot more exciting and more than likely broken up into 45 minute episodes.

Instead of life being a series of neat DVD box sets it's much more continuous - actions lead to inaction and inaction leads to more inaction until it's time to take action.  This is why I feel it's really important to write to do lists as I don't ever want to wake up and find that nothing has changed.  The most terrifying idea for me is that my life isn't moving at all despite my efforts and that everything will keep going on the same = forever. Worse than that, it will carry on the same except my bones will lose all their calcium and my mind will get stupider and my whole being will become a whole lot deader even before I become dead. 

Nothing to worry about yet though - as long as I have my to do lists I feel like I'm getting something done to make my old age slightly more interesting.  Best to end my tirade on a positive note or people would think I'm getting a bit gloomy.

Two images relisted

click here 

Also the blog entry where I've written about these images is found here

points conjoin with collective sharpness - a barrier over screamed repetition drowns an outline of brightness

Three more items finish for auction on Sunday evening.  This is becoming something of a habit.  In the new year I hope to post more and more of these images onto Ebay as I have actually been saving up quite a bit of money from them and think that if I make a massive concerted effort then I may be able to get somewhere with it.  Especially if I look into ways to promote my work other than Twitter and Facebook... bit of market research wouldn't go amiss as my business sensibilities are very limited.

sharpness drowns brightnessclick here

The idea is unfeasible and completely far off in the future but if I was to become self employed and fully devoted to living off my artwork then  I would have to get my brain back into gear.  At the moment it feels stuck in reverse and that I'm repeatably crashing my head into the a wall.  In short I feel a bit stupid.  I've never really felt stupid before and I'm sure it's something to do with old age and the horrible job I have at the moment.  I still think things and I'm probably much more capable at making fast decisions and using my initiative... and I still think my work is still getting better and I'm really happy too - but for some reason I feel much stupider.  Perhaps I'm tired and older.

the insect's consciousness spreads aware in a collective hive mind seeing through hundreds of eyes but blinded by coagulated blood cells creating a barrier over everything - although their skulls light up as an outline so significant
click here

Working full time and practising art is draining and over the years sheer determination has kept me going... I think the problem is that at some point during my determined push I actually dropped some important piece of paper - a note that had my entire mission statement written on it.  A few years ago I had some fairly well defined purpose for doing what I was doing... there was a reason.  But now I've simply become what I do.  I make odd and cerebral abstract collages - so many that I've lost focus on what they actually are... they are like dead bits of skin I pull off myself and put into little plastic bags.  This isn't to say I feel that I produce sub standard work - I never stop working on an image until it's done and until I feel that it's finished (or in the case of a lot of my diary images over the last year - I stop if I simply can't do anything to make it either better or worse - so simply leave it as it is and hope that it encapsulates the mood of that day/week/minute.)

localised focal points conjoin with screamed repetition
click here

In an attempt to be very generous to myself I often think of my work as a form of church.  Just for me not for anyone else.  I don't think of it as art because art is meant to be saying something - it's more a place.  Somewhere cut off from the outside - all warm and cosy but also full of hidden meanings and subtexts.  It's the church of my head where ego is usually left outside.  Ego comes into the creative process much later when I exhibit my work or in any some other way attempt to integrate it into the real world.

Is it wrong for something as personal, intangible and real to be made into a product or a display?  These can't be simple pictures - they need to be taken in as a whole and extrapolated into some future.  I have plans for my work beyond eBay.  I hope to get all my materials used up over the next year... which will take some time but it will be worth it... and with the many images I've developed using my materials I can create more work.  And so developments will continue.  I don't know what it is going to develop into but for some reason I don't care - as long as I get my solace from the real world.

8.12.12 - 16.10.12

8.12.12 - a whole friday night and saturday morning spent scanning my diary and uploading them onto this blog ready to have annoying captions written underneath each page... looking forward to starting a weekly per page diary next year as this page a day idea has proven to be very exhausting.

7.11.12 - a stress letter sent to the big manager.  This isn't a stressed out letter sent by me but I have permission to use it. 

6.12.12 - this node monster is moving directly towards us - coming towards the camera or viewpoint of the viewer.  Right up your eye.  It has certain questions that need an answer except it doesn't have the words to ask.

5.12.12 - just about destroyed my school admissions booklet for the sake of art - I rarely need it though which proves I'm good at my job.

4.12.12 - a collection of seeing whilst all  I'm supposed to do is hear.  I love the reflectivity  of biro ink when it's scribbling onto glossy paper - the black circle on this image is pure biro and it looks great when it get's scanned.

3.12.12 - first day back off work - was suprisingly enjoyable - which means I must be getting sick.

2.12.12 - uneventful end to my week off work.

1.12.12 - static wavelengths fail to interrupt the hope of coming to some finality though the activity never ends.

30.11.12 - went to the opening evening at The Bowery - left a big pile of business cards and spoke to some rich looking people then decided to leave so I could get back home early and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  It was nice to have a look though and took some cheeky photos of people looking at my work not realizing I'd actually made it.

29.11.12 - the ghost tower.

28.11.12 - the beacon signals for me in the distance but is obscured by broken machinery and various piles of junk.  A long time can be spent just trying to get through stuff to get somewhere only to forget your destination during they journey... this is why lists are important - paper can be more trustworthy than my mind... if i don't write lists then within a two weeks I'm living under rubbish.  Literally and metaphorically.

27.11.12 - then a close up of the beacon.... the sharp pain erupts in different parts of my legs - the price of standing up for a whole day yesterday.

26.11.12 - set up my exhibition at the Bowery in Leeds.  It took about between 10am and 5pm to set up - really hard work.

25.11.12 - a sky full of mysteries made of gas nebulas and having all kinds of colours and patterns and even lifeforms.  How to explain something with no relevance to real life and to make it gripping?

24.11.12 - first day of my week off and I accidently format my computer - which leads to all kinds of regrets - though after a few hours I suddenly feel free, like the shackles of ''important'' data had been broken... like getting rid of loads of baggage... and loads of writing and pictures too but I've run data recovery software since then so my data... and baggage are slightly restored.

23.11.12 - and finally I leave work for a week off so I can get some proper work done.

22.11.12 - and we're all in danger of growing up into blank and hopeless faces.

21.11.12 - children are born into the world and forced into schools by law - before this they are forced into life by nature. I'm hoping to be very careful if I ever decide to have children and hope that they live a life that people deserve but rarely get.  I doubt I'd be able to provide this kind of life at the moment.

20.11.12 - ideas and plans develop under the uneventful shadows of living slowly.  A house somewhere ready to be moved into and made perfect, a family yet to be created but thought of and creating fear in the stillness.  How does one cope with gradual changes and looking back on what happened before and realizing that it'll never happen again and how lucky they were to begin with.  Though it didn't feel that way at the time.

19.11.12 - then a scrap of self blossoms alters into something else - perhaps ideas and thoughts bubble off to somewhere else - they get lost from the normal world and disappear into some ethereal somewhere - still bits of skin and hair and face and soul but somehow drifting away so they become pure and alive in a way that isn't defined by evolution and biology.  

18.11.12 - unimaginative caption and drawing and sticking of bus ticket into diary equals not sticking bus tickets into my diary anymore.

17.11.12 - the flyer design for my exhibition at the Bowery at the end of the month which is ongoing until 15th February. 

16.11.12 - the system eats itself and somehow this gives it an inexhaustible supply of food - like imaginary money an absence can keep multiplying.

15.11.12 - it collects itself at the hour of the blood tide sit's banner of it's serial code held up so it can be taken away and serialised and syndicated with it's own theme song and end title music.

14.11.12 - lines connect down into the words and images below - one page of a school admissions brochure doodled on for days on end is sufficient covering for two pages of diary.  I really hated school and don't agree with the way the British education systems works but now I work for it. 

13.11.12 - some creature made from spare parts of a dead imagination - the limbs just drop off from a central core the same size as every other bit of it.  It's not really a creature just a collection of falling brokenings.

12.11.12 - the eye stares down at the compartments and makes notes.

11.11.12 - Collage material - photocopies of skin in black and white.  Colour photo copies of skin can look quite pornographic.

10.11.12 - Collaging tool - The Marker Pen.

9.11.12 - went to Doncaster to visit my remaining family.  Looking out of train windows does make me feel incredibly mortal - like the moment I step on I've already stepped off at some point in the future and that moment on the train become other moments on the train all blended together into one journey back and forth to Doncaster or Wherever.

8.11.12 - the angle angel setting out different parts of addresses and names into seperate containers (all packed together though, in one big cargo crate above it's head) once it reaches the top level of the world it will jumble them together into happier combinations and then discard them because happiness isn't allowed anymore.

7.11.12 - 2nd time my card has been lost in the past two months.  Unremarkable inconveniences repeat.

6.11.12 - on lazy days I catch the tram and the bus simply because it's hard to get out of bed before half 7am.  I hear that I should eat more salt.  Apparently salt is good in moderation and makes you happier to get out of bed.  Problem is I think salt is horrible.

5.11.12 - a collage tool.  The Glue Stick.

4.11.12 - hope is in self employment or at least part self employment - the key word is ''self' - hope is myself.  Everything could be made really good by me as long as I keep doing things.'

3.11.12 - and the artificial red is absent from the neutral colours of my office world - except here.

2.11.12 - the sharp shredding of senses constructs an in intense burning dwarf stars of non event which burns through space time and becomes everything everywhere.

1.11.12 - weekly travel shredded into segments of staring boredom into mobile phones - the best part of the working day.
Started writing a novel on Nanowrimo at the start of this month.  November is some kind of international Novel Writing Month - would rather write a novel than grow a moustache.  Anyway the notes on this page are scrawled ideas for what's going to happen in the 1600 words I have to write everyday. 

31.10.12 the blurriness on the edges of my diary - near the spine - are uncontrollable when scanning.  I weigh them down with as much as I can but I don't want to press too hard in case I damage things.  Anyone is welcome to have a leaf through the genuine article after new years eve.

30.10.12 - I once added a random sequence of numbers together into 26 and then thought that something terrible would happen to me at the age of 26.  Is 45 the new 26?
No.
Unless I want it to be.

29.10.12 - the stars gathered together close into simplified orbs of flatness.

28.10.12 - went to Spooky World and got chased by teenagers dressed up as clowns and other popular monsters.  It wasn't very scary this year - last year it was much more intense so not sure if the acting quality was worse or if I was just too familiar with the corridors from last time.... think it was a bit of both. 

27.10.12 - another to do list.  I like this one.

26.10.12 - they age they died perhaps.  I had a project on graves when I was at art college.  I wasn't a goth though I did have quite an emo haircut about 6 years before emo existed and wore a big baggy Robert Smith jumper.  I really did believe in a lot of things back then - I think as I get older I perform less and less pontifications - and draw less grave stones.

25.10.12 - a wheel in an iris.  A eye turning through it's old smudgy mark pennings.

24.10.12 - Animesh Garg sounds like a great name for a sci fi character.  Though it's just a combination of two children's names.  I've started cutting up my school admissions book and notes made at work.  Collaging at my desk is a very wonderful thing - great artwork can be produced in call centres because I think the creative ganglia is stimulated by hours of boredom and self hate.  Though I doubt my diary is actually ''great art.''

23.10.12 - The big eye watches whirlpools bore in the ground through it's gaze alone

22.10.12 - on a Monday morning we all need hope - or at least I do in my current horrible job.  This fortune card didn't give me any hope though as it seems completely at odd's with my life's trajectory and my situation.   IRRELEVANCE.

21.10.12 - BLACKPOOL.  Really good fun.  Love the annoying people trying to sell me joke books and read my fortune.  Hands were firmly in pockets in case they got picked.  Went to the Dungeons and was ''humiliated'' and also experienced a simulated hanging.  All that sounds sort of kinky - but it wasn't.  Also went up the Tower and visited the wax museum, slightly disappointed that there wasn't a waxwork of Matt Smith.  The highlight of the whole adventure was the Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum.

20.10.2012 - another amazing to do list.  I love getting stuff done on lists.  Saturday is the best day for writing long and difficult to accomplish lists - the listing itself is the best thing - just writing everything that I have to do down and thinking about how east it is to achieve it all.... and then it's all done and I'm really really happy and content and ready to sit down and watch tv.  Unless it doesn't get done in which case I move the task forward a few days into the future.

19.10.12 - I have a good story in my head - an alien post apocalypses on some other planet suspended in the middle of a nebula.  The story seems really good but it's a real effort to write anything because as soon as I do I realize how unworkable the idea is and then adjust everything so it makes more sense meaning the book never get's written... though a made up world's history, religions and cultures get sifted about over and over again.  I hope one day it'll all fall into something that isn't so hopelessly complicated.

18.10.12 - hopefuls build houses on stilts as tall as can be - taller and taller digging needles into the hard earth of stairs going up to nowhere.  A new up is attempting to be defined.

17.10.12 - the 1st time I get a new bank card during this segment of diary entries.

16.12.12 - anyone familiar with my blog will know how much I hate buses.  I have to buy one of these passes every week to get to work.  I do miss the tram but feel good that the slowness of the buses does allow me to get some reading done.