I read somewhere that all the cells in our bodies and brains change and renew every seven years - so I am a completely different person to who I was at school, college or university and the only link between me and the past is memory... whether this is down to different circumstances of different periods of my life or that's it's an actual cellular change I'm unsure - but the past to me feels like it was a weird dopey and empty nothing where I was just making things up as I go along... though perhaps that also describes my present.
I tend to collect things, sometimes off the street and sometimes things that people give me... there inevitably comes a sorting period where I have to throw things out or decide to keep them - photos, letters and mementos that no longer feel relevant to my current cellular period tend to be put in a "memory box" so that I can make room for new dopey and empty nothings. I had a moment a few weeks ago where I looked through my boxes and found these three photographs:
This was during my 2nd year of Uni where i used my landlords back garden to paint on a large sheet of canvas... the emulsion paint ran through the canvas and soaked into the concrete below and the effect looked better than anything that was actually on the canvas, though I had to try to clean it up before the landlord saw it - I sort of half managed to clean it up but there was a definite and obvious shade of pink and blue afterwards - it was just slightly blurry.
My landlord at that point was a middle aged benefit cheat with a limp that changed sides when he was angry: Ted. I actually did a lot of damage to Ted's property - but then Ted probably deserved it - he had very shifty eyes and was definitely up to something... the only reason I flooded the kitchen is because he refused to fix my blocked sink, until it was eventually too late and the tap filled the sink until water flooded over down the sides and ended up soaking the entire floor bringing down piles of plaster onto the kitchen below. I suppose I shouldn't have been sick in the sink as I'm sure that didn't help the blockage - and neither did getting really drunk and passing out as the whole bedroom flooded around me - being woken up the morning after by Ted banging on my bedroom door.
University was wasted on me - if I was given a chance to go again I would likely take a proper subject in which I could get a job related to afterwards as I learnt nothing new about art... I suppose it gave me the opportunity to be unemployed and have lots more time to make art - though I feel this was wasted on me too - but I did develop some of my ideas during this period - some of them bad ideas where I got obsessed with circles in my third year and then carried on this obsession for a good year and a half after finishing uni... did this give me some knowledge on geometry, shape and composition?
Long swathes of my time are wasted I feel on repeating the same ideas over and over until I get them right... now I sometimes feel that a lot of my artwork is very similar and getting a little bit stylised and that I should perhaps get into a new medium. Though the collage project that I'm embroiled on hasn't reached it's definitive conclusion - perhaps the potential conclusion is an illusion and my ideas don't conclude into a perfect horizon point - it just splatters into a wall and dribbles downwards drying into reams of paper as it gets sorted into different categories of pointlessness to be recycled into fresh gleamings of hope. Either way I'll find out soon and be sure to post everything I do and think publicly on this blog - I do that quite a lot these days.
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