My last blog post detailed the amount of pattern designs that were being rejected and accepted. As of the moment pretty much all pattern designs I submit to Patternbank do get accepted so I must have got the knack of it. Acquiring this knack didn't require much conscious thought on my part, like most things in my life I just went into autopilot and grabbed whatever I could using my subconscious processing. This isn't to say that my day to day life doesn't include all kinds of conscious decisions, but that most of those don't conscious decisions don't have much to do with ''art.''
Speaking of ''art'' one of the things I've been consciously considering throughout my pattern designing is that all the ''art'' that I've produced over the last 10 years and more has been integrated into my pattern designing. All the paintings, collages, installations, animations have collapsed towards this end. It's been very useful to have such an accumulation of jpegs on my hard drive that can be spliced, duplicated, mirrored, cut up, pasted, vectored, recoloured, decoloured, narrowed, widened, squashed, darkened, brightened and generally modulated in whatever way I like.... whatever way my subconscious decides. I suppose it's the same thing.
So what makes my pattern designing different to my ''art''? I suppose it leads back to our favourite 20th century art history question that every art student has to attempt to answer at some point. What is art? In all honesty I'm not really interested in the answer, I'm not sure there is one, I can only write from a personal perspective as to what is my ''art''. You must have noticed by now that every time I mention my ''art'' it tends to be in quotation marks. That isn't without reason. I've always hesitated to use the A word, it's quite an establishment orientated word and seems slightly poncy. What makes it worse than that is that it doesn't even particularly roll off the tongue or sound natural like any other word. Hence the word Artist also being something I dislike.
One interpretation of what art is is that it has to hold some kind of meaning or message. It has to have a point. I'm not sure what the point of my art has ever been. At first it conveyed a slightly sickly, lost, dysphoria and a sense of dislocation from the world. At times it has been imbued with a kind of repulsive energy to inflict something in me onto other people. Which admittedly isn't very nice and neither does it hold much meaning outside of the self. Eventually it became something else. Through collage it has become a separate, organic entity that only required from me my time and for me to buy pritt stick from the pound shops.
The point I was going to illustrate with this blog post is that all my art before pattern designing hasn't been art at all.... but the early stages of my potential career in pattern design. Now through writing this I don't really feel that it's time to strip all my past work of its artistic definitions. I've also just noticed that I've stopped putting quotation marks on art whenever I link the word to my work. So now in my ever pendulous and freely swinging mind I'm now switching the point of this blog post from being ''pattern design is art'' into ''my art has been pattern design all along.'' Confused yet? I know I am.
I've had this blog for the past few years and it's quite grandly titled ''Obsessive Static Polarities and Recursions.'' That title is an all encompassing truth of what I've always been aiming to accomplish in my artwork. The obsessive is easy enough to achieve. Static also is easy to achieve, it's definition being ''lacking in movement or change.'' By polarities I'm referring to reaching both ends of whatever it is I'm doing in a simultaneous fashion. Finally you have recursions, which until I started pattern designing hasn't actually been achieved. I've never created any artwork that is truly recursive, all my pictures, animations and installations have had edges and ends. So in patterns I've finally achieved true recursion. Patterns are naturally recursive, they can be repeated over and over side by side forever and ever and ever. So pattern design is perhaps the event horizon of all my visually creative pursuits and the point where my artwork finally begins to make sense. The point where it actually grasps it's meaning and becomes what it was always aiming to become in the first place.
I do apologize that this blog post is a lot longer than I anticipated and I'd also like to apologise for not interspersing each paragraph with pretty pictures like I normally do. So to make up for that here's some images I drew in biro at work.
Conclusion; I haven't actually reached a conclusion at all and I'm not entirely sure what my point is. Perhaps by not reaching a conclusion I've managed to achieve a sort of recursion once again. Hurrah
DISCLAIMER: The Author of the above rejects all seriousness implied in the above.
