Saturday 26 January 2013

scrunched fake windows in segments - told again - frozen numb structure

As usual at this time of week more art for sale on EBay.



Bear in mind that EBay is not going to be my future forever.  I have other things planned and other hobbies.  It's become an enjoyable routine now - like a second and better but less well paid job.

Rooting through all my masses of collage materials and mass producing small images to put into little plastic sleeves.  Little windows into the vagueness of my dwindling soul.  Zoomed closer to the minute quivering and seeing the sparks that exist underneath it's anxious surface.

I still exist and I'm not dead and I'm still working towards a larger game plan.  This is another step towards the end point.  It's not forever.




Some days all the randomised computations make sense - they converge into one definitive mission statement when I know why I'm doing this and all the vagueness and fog that surrounded me before disperses and I see the point very clearly.....  That's when I should be putting my thoughts into words - when I should pull out a notepad and grasp exactly what it is that I'm aiming for and write it out as a cohesive and simple To Do List.




Problem is truth is flexible and mutable and the self isn't fixed.  Dreams and hopes can create a false path which becomes so obviously wrong later in the planning stages.  The truth and self have mutated beyond any recognisable form.  An image is cut from the masses of materials and isolated into a box and treated as if it's something true and valid but then it collapses into something lazy. Losing it's essence and magic.  Some art becomes lazy.  It's no longer right and it's no longer me.




So at the moment I'm a mass production machine - ramming things together or cutting pieces away. Prefabricated imagery.  Showing vagaries of myself depicting nothing new or unusual.  Like a statue full of living organs.  A mind stuck inside a hollow shell of cement.  There is no shame in this and it doesn't make me feel inferior and it doesn't make my artwork feel any less.  Each attempt is an experience and the output I'm making isn't anyone else's.  Someone could buy a hundred images from me and cut them up and paste them together in a different configuration and make something that looks aesthetically better.  I could program a machine that uses my artwork and permutates all the images I make at a rapid rate producing a image every minute.  

Would that be a hollow version of myself?  Like I was turned inside out and the stone surface was suddenly on the inside?  That there would be no heart, disparity, self doubt or humanity in the images?  

Or would I transgress biological boundaries and is my heart so strong within my work that my spirit or soul would survive mechanization?




The work that I'm most pleased with since starting my EBaying are images like the above - these images don't seem to sell as well as the images that I think as being more average and typical.  

I'd love to reproduce the image above or something like it on a larger scale.  For me everything about it works and it keeps working despite. 





So best not to take my self criticism or self appraisal too seriously.  I change my position often on a day to day basis - mistakes are all part of the process and it's better to make your own judgement on what's good and what's bad.  Don't allow what I say to have too much impact on what you like and what you don't like because in all honesty I'm not really that clever.  Despite my big words a lot of the time I'm not applying those big words properly.  The text on my blog can be completely ignored and you are welcome to deduce my feelings and motives for yourself.

Saturday 19 January 2013

clockwork archway multiple solidified.... squares repeating dirt

More images on Ebay.  As usual click on the images or the links below to bid. 


Been thinking that my artwork is less detached from reality than I thought - that perhaps the intention is to depict life the way it is and the way it will always be.  There's a variety and also a sameness which coexist and blur into a solid unpredictable predictability.

Having objects on a table is different from having the same objects in a bag but the actual act of gripping an object and moving it from one place to another is a bodily function.  My house keys have become an appendage - apparatus for an everyday physical task.

Our object, hands, faces and brains link us to the world like chains - creating a peculiar prison of repeatable experiences.  Life is a collage of objects, bodies and souls.  None them seem to go together well... they all contrast against one another... confused and alone but coexisting in the best way possible.

It looks like a real mess when you look at it all at the same time.  So it's probably best not too.



Limit perception and into smaller compartments.  The grass is over there and the sky is up there and my house is over there.  This doesn't take into account the surprises and you need to always be on the look out for.... intruding elements from compartments your trying to avoid - like muggers.  Therefore it is folly to isolate all the nice elements and eliminate all the intrusive elements.

The above image is pleasant green but full of paranoid potential pit falls that can be defined even if they are not there...  See the red squares accumulating transparently.



And in the night it's even murkier - dangerous shadows and bin bags that look like people.  Private detectives parked outside your house with listening devices.  Faces at the window whilst you sleep.



Then in sleep the brain jellyfies into some shapeless thing and starts throwing together all the compartments of your head into some kind of melting pot where everything ever combines into some mess of imagination.  The awake and nervous idiot is smelted inside a pancake for what will never be an eternity.



And then the whole of everything - all the buildings I've ever passed drop down with me into this vat of illogical fluid.

Watch them float and recombine in better orders.

Heavy lines drawn around their borders all in imitation of their necessary shapes.



Though all the time deep down there is something central and tangible.  Solid and real.

An object/place to aspire to.  To live in and to live as.  A central pivot of myself - a metaphysical spinal cord that thinks and supports - making me better and bigger than the sum of my parts and the sum of everything.
If it were a tangible object it would be made of some old rusty metal, brass perhaps.  It would defy gravity and all expectations and it would be an ornament, an instrument and an entity.
It would live through death, Armageddon and God.



Perhaps it would be built from words - words can shape the world.  Words are intuitive and never really ever random - I can make things up as I go along with words and even if they aren't good words or good sentences I've still managed to change how I feel simply by defining it in a way it's not been defined before.  In the paragraph before this one I created an imaginary object that hadn't been there before - an object to aspire towards and to become one day.  I would very much like to evolve into this imagined object - better than evolving into some amorphous undefined ball of light.  

The image above shows words shaping themselves.  Redefining the image they are built around - I think this is one of my better uses of words on an image and hope to make more images in this style.  Funnily enough though my favourite images seem to sell for the less money.  Though this may be an exception as the colour red seems to be very popular.

Saturday 12 January 2013

unavoidable process opens a mouthless queue (shaking hands with the world)

Yet more images on sale on EBay.  Experimenting by putting some larger images on there for £3 and £5 but the first two on this entry are still smaller images at 99p.



The first image depicting the sensation of the body shutting down but the mind remaining active.  The ability to feel and observe everything around us without organic self distraction.  Entirely suffused in the infinite dribbling of the world's movement.  

The red line along the centre is part of the self pushing through the fog of total awareness.  Dried lips ready to open and gasp for air - flawed survival instinct?




Which leads into this image - the ''escape'' from this overbearing everything into a localised brain and body that is part of this opening.... leading to once more being shut in.  Confines of the personality and the degrading of limbs.  Trapped in something limited and searching for some self definition.  

Back to work again on Monday, I need to tidy up and eat and sleep and to become something decent and ordinary.  My parameters are something comfortable if inconvenient.
  



31 years in total there has been a grating dissatisfaction and incomprehension.  Chemicals pooling and blood pumping through an inefficient and questioning mechanism.  The attempt to fight against this - to state with absolute clarity ''this isn't enough for me''.   

Losing and already lost.  Problem with losing is that life doesn't let you finish the game and go to bed ready for something different in the morning.  The challenges never go away.




So I equip myself with hope and happiness proceeding onwards with effort and determination through the constant process.  A lot of time left to achieve everything that I feel is necessary.  Everything proceeds less defined and sharp.

It becomes less about winning and losing.  War is an irrelevance to the real mission.  Reasons nullified. Purposes, wants and ambitions are now simply characteristics made two dimensional and stuck in a self made queue.  This is simple and essentially better.  The world and me are shaking hands.

Friday 4 January 2013

caved distances sharpen into markings for a non geography of empty depth

More images on EBay starting at the initial price of 99p.



A sky Realtor is the notion of someone/something up in the air - horrible and intangible.  Kind of amorphously just hanging around in the ether prodding it's long wire thin tendrils all over the world spreading it's spores and making our lives like mouldy bread.  Making all the targets we could ever hope to achieve diminish through our own decay and dust.  I remember when I decided I was at war with such intangible evil - though I think this was just a delusion of grandeur (though surely that's what my brain parasites sent from the intangible overlord would want me to think).

I was thinking a few months ago - in one of those moments when I sit on a public toilet cubicle staring at the door for a few minutes (in a pub or somewhere else boring) - whether I lost my war against reality long ago and that I'd been captured, neutralised, neutered, made ordinary, broken down and defeated.  That my life now is the equivalent of having a spiritual lobotomy where I've long ago lost any concrete reason for why I do the things I do.




A lot of my friends think I'm really clever.  But they are completely wrong because I'm the opposite.  I sort of walk around in an intuitive dream like state not really knowing what I'm doing and feeling all together dislocated from life.  Not to say I'm unhappy (I'm honestly not) it just means that whether I'm happy, sad, unhappy, annoyed... under that surface level of emotion I'm not actively learning anything or really developing.  

I'm making no effort.  

I'm operating on automatic pilot.  My day job, my artwork, my home life, my family life, my friends.  It's all just fudged together.  Dislocated elements thrown together day after day into a repetitive cycle.  Not much changing just very slight and very gradual complications to my cerebral kaleidoscope... and these changes are achieved by turning the kaleidoscope around a bit whilst looking through it.  
Much like a real kaleidoscope.



I think proper clever people can hone what they are doing and make it into something better.  Clever people can research.  I have a go at writing but I'm not clever enough to write anything truly amazing simply because I'm not painstaking enough - my brain can't take in facts that tell me anything much about the real world... it's so lost in it's own inside world that reality has no bearing on it.  So that means I'm just as bad as the intangible evil I was going on about in the first paragraph.  I'm amorphous, undefined and shapeless.

So if I'm so dumb then how can I explain what I'm doing and what the purpose of it is?  Other people who know me are probably the best to ask rather than me because their answers for why I'm doing what I'm doing are better than my own.




This may explain why my thoughts often formulate themselves in conversation - like different parts of my head are babbling to each other.  Almost like a separate stream of thought that is in opposition to my usual stream of thought.  I used to wonder which stream of thought was me.

The 2nd stream of thought became manifest in my head when I was about 11 years old - I actually thought there was something wrong with me... I probably wanted there to be something wrong with me as that would explain why everything at that point in my life felt wrong (High School.  Need I say more?)



So for a long while my head had two different characters in possession of it - they were both me of course but at the time I did wonder if the argumentative and uncooperative 2nd stream of thought was a form of possession.  Perhaps an alien.

It all seems a very silly now and obvious when viewed rationally - I never think that I'm half possessed by anything anymore (though that would be exactly what my alien demon brain parasite would want me to think).



Anyway I went on this tangent about developed a 2nd consciousness because I was talking about how other people's analysis of me and my work is more valuable than my own.  Since my mind split into two different thought streams at age 11  my mind has since then been split into several thought streams at once - this doesn't go on all the time but when it does it's what I call DVD commentary mode.  

Sometimes, suddenly, I'll imagine a conversation that people I know are having when I'm not there.  This usually happens when I'm walking down the street which might be why you may see me murmuring to myself.  In DVD commentary mode - a group of my friends are sat inside my head watching my life through my eyes and giving an in depth analysis on what I'm like and what I'm doing.  

I actually quite like it when this happens because they usually say quite encouraging things - so it's like a reversed paranoia.  



So in conclusion I'm not at all clever and the people in my head are much cleverer and their analysis of myself and my work is really really spot on... I wish they hadn't put me on automatic pilot and that one of them could take control of my brain and steer me in the right direction.  

Autonomy and intuition is all well and good for a little while but one day I'd like to actually construct something that makes 100% sense.  Something dripping with context, subtext and other very relevant text.  
Something that isn't described as being a something but as being more than a thing - something that is really really something.

Apologies to all my very valued friends who I don't talk to very often.  I think you'll find it reassuring that you'll always have a place not only in my heart but in my head.