The unquantified non process

I have been working in a new temp job for the past 4 weeks where I was answering calls from schools who were uploading the results for their National Curriculum Assessments.  It was an incredibly quiet job so I got lots of time for incredibly productive daydreaming and drawing.  It's the most I've ever been paid to sit around and doodle and daydream.  I've compiled these drawings and daydreams into a kind of psychological narrative, and also colored them in digitally.  I wouldn't call it a comic or a story but more of a historical scroll.  Anyway see what you think and please don't take it too seriously.

A structure. Of all things

Another quick abstract narrative comic.  This one can be interpreted as being a middle point of a story - a kind of liminal space - so it's like a middle point of a story stretching which I can make previous segments and newer segments.  Which doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to make more of it.  Just that it's another potential work in progress.

Also as usual a side note that still have loads of small but cheap artwork for sale on EBay.

planet photocopier/scanner

Another web narrative that I busied myself with.  It's meant to be deliberately confusing and looping. Allowing you to read through it and read into it.  Searching the image as you go up and down it for words and meanings.  Each of which does correlate to some subtext of the image itself.  

As usual artwork for sale on EBay.  I'm be a bad business man if I didn't provide a link... well... a worse business man than I already am.

Interpretation, assumption, misinformation

Working on a lot of new ideas at the moment - I have an idea of producing a very long and large narrative of about 100 pages - words interlaced with imagery - probably almost a graphic novel though I would rather bring it out as a scroll as it would then flow downwards rather than page by page - though perhaps that's a symptom of blogging... it's made me enjoy creating work which flows downwards like it's being read rather than being seen all at once.

I have the layout and the idea of it in my head and it looks perfect - which is worrying because that means I've already set myself a very idealistic aesthetic which could be unachievable - though perhaps I'd achieve something different.  It will be a lot of hard work and I've set it to 100 pages because there's a lot of disjointed ground to cover and also felt that there is nothing wrong with giving myself a large project which would finally try to set in stone and define exactly what it is I've been trying to do all these years.  

All my work has led on from previous work and grows organically from one to the next incorporating and permutating the past into future making a uncontrolled mass of myself... which has become bad because it's become so dense and involved that everything is in there now so I feel like I'm in some kind of black hole of my own swirling incoherent mess.  So it's time to bring it all together into something cohesive - understandable and personal.  For an outside viewer my work probably doesn't drag you right into me but more rather into a texture and a pattern of a nothing and it's perhaps time to find out where the real me is amongst all of that and be one hundred percent open... for a long while I've been thinking about infinity and trying to find a tangibly finite sanctuary within that and the only thing that I keep arriving back at in all my searching is myself - I am the tangible object.  I should allow myself to express fully everything it is that I feel and not allow my artwork to just be strange imagery with shades of myself peering out never coming to the fore fully due to fears of being ridiculed.  The following images all use text in a minimal way though perhaps unsuccessfully and all display my tendency to always express something private but never actually reveal anything.

Above is an image I made in 2008 - like a lot of my work I've included fragments of my notebooks full of my feelings and automatic writing - of which I was always quite diligent in keeping.  There are no full discernible sentences in this picture.  The words are used in a disjointed way to convey some sense of being lost or stuck in ebbs of geometry and endlessness.  Like our thought processes stream into the barriers or columns to support the world we've built.

As with this one too - though to a different effect, this time the words are falling or rising from the architecture which they conform to but also strive to escape from - this was obviously a time in which I very much desired to escape from the world... 2008... the year I talked endlessly about becoming a hermit or going away and starting a cult just because anything would be better than working for Barclays Bank or whatever terrible job positions were due to me in future.

This last one you'll what could almost be statement  "Then assumption leads your motiv(e)" is describing how we fill in the gaps in our knowledge with misinformation - particularly when evaluating other people.  This is then followed up with three more half sentences which don't give you the entire message but allow you to try to draw more assumptions from the not being able to see the full content... this is what we are doing when we try to read one another.  Even if we are given the time to explain ourselves the way we want to it can get distorted and misinterpreted... which is sad and one of the reasons I hate putting myself out into the open... I think that now that I'm used to it though, and that I'm old enough not to care what people think (sometimes), it is likely time to do this - and it'll hopefully look really really good and not be "pretentious" or annoying at all... though I'm sure there will be plenty who may see it that way - though I'll try not to be scared of you and just get on with it.  I plan to do this at the same time as producing individual pieces of artwork too - though perhaps as usual all my ideas will inform and misinform their surrounding ideas and motivations - probably with a lot of assumption too.

Heads multiply in limited tubes of ruin

Made this last week though took a while to upload it onto my blog - simply because I spent the weekend in lovely Llandudno exploring various brilliantness.  The doom and gloom of Manchester and city life in general may have eroded my spirit into a cynical inward looking feedback loop - where my self analysis and all that looping personal history, notions of identity, and every other piece of personal trash just tumbles around and around getting tangled and intertwined with  everything and everyone else - until in my head we all get mashed together into one self centred conglomerate of conflicting ideas.  A city isn't the best place to have this kind of feeling because you end up projecting these feelings onto other people - being sat on a bus or walking down a busy high street and wandering through observing a huge bunch of big blank heads and face traffic.

This picture is a representation of people, crowds and their containment... whether you want that containment to represent streets, buildings, houses, buses... I actually thought of buses at first but it actually makes me more of nightclubs - maybe it's the fact it's bursting with vain self possessed faces caught in bursts of overly loud colours... or perhaps I just don't like nightclubs very much.  Containment in this case is in relation to everywhere you could possibly be confined to - such as a familiar route to work or a habit like my own of trying not to step on cracks in the pavement.  I ran over loads of pavement cracks a few months back to catch a bus - gleefully feeling let loose and free after so many years.... then lots of bad events happened since which have actually made me think that maybe my superstitious precautions where right to follow after all.

This is the first picture I've done in a very long time that represents anything real and tangible - I'm reacting against people describing my work as psychedelic, because I always associate psychedelic art with stoners and images like this - which isn't at all my desired aesthetic.  So for the moment I'd like to veer away from swirling abstract vortexes and head into the representational.  In my recent installation - all throughout the wall covering abstraction there were non deliberate organic shapes - all trying to twist themselves around each other into recognisable form human or anim al form.  This is made me think that maybe I should try to escape from the abstract and bring these forms into lives of their own but still retain some form of gloopy terror.

As with my previous two entries this was put together on sheets of black A3, so I've posted each individual sheet below for closer examination so you can have a closer look.   Oh and by the way it's titled "Heads multiply in limited tubes of ruin".

Thinking fluid fragments

This is the picture I put together this week, I've entitled it "Thinking fluid fragments"

It looks really small.  A problem with trying to put a long horizontal image onto a blog - it's tricky to know how to fit it on screen so it can be viewed.  The above shows how the work should be displayed but doesn't allow you to look at it closely.  Therefore I'm posting the image on it's side, separated into it's three A3 pieces.  So you can tilt your head or monitor to the side scroll down and have a closer look.

For me it's all about thought - how I'll move from one feeling of tangibility to another and feel somewhat entirely in flux adjusting and editing myself as go along.  The words and colours pass through and get destroyed and rebuilt - crossed out as they pass by like busy traffic at light speed.  Some elements drift along dead, silent and unused - like forgotten trivia and empty memory.

There are also the dominant traumas and the excuses I make to myself all of which create sharp stabbings and ring out as clock towers over and over again until the vibration gets duller.  Thoughts move block like - falling bricks sucked sidewards by an impossible tornado - viewed from above it's like the schematic of a far away space station.

This part of me is a cell of rearranging elements.  Some recognisable and comforting stream of identity and self recognition - "here I am and here are you - this is me and that is you" - I get along in a constant static of learned behaviour realising that I'm much more confident and assertive than I thought - stood by the counter talking to the civilians and all the while living in my own internal world whilst reality clicks away against my surface... an efficient if unwilling participant cog in the whole system of everything.

In my next picture I should devise some kind of chart, like a list of what every colour and pattern means in the whole scale of the image.  That way I can start making very bizarre intuitive schematics of inexpressible feelings and ideas.

Living forms tunnels

So I finally got around to making some new artwork - there is some massive boundary between the creative process itself and the actual finalised product in terms of my own evaluation of the work - during the process it's either the most pointless waste of time or the absolute pinnacle of genius... where I break new ground and every element of the artwork is displaying my soul set on fire ready to burn the entire world.... then I go to sleep and observe the finished product again in the morning and it reduces itself into being a repeat of what I've done every single time before - only with different aspects highlighted and other aspects downgraded.  So my mind is layered with visual feedback loops - repetitive behaviours and tics.  Like a composition of rearranging and gradually changing shapes.  Like the theory of eternal return these elements will eventually over time drift back into the same shapes and patterns. 

The image on your right is last nights image which for the moment is entitled "Living forms tunnels".  It was made on 3 pages of A3 and then these were placed next to each other - I've decided I'm going to avoid working purely in normal shaped paper sized rectangles and combine pages into longer strips.  I think that form of composition suits me better - and it allows one to fill it with a narrative, however abstract.  I'm making a series of works - not sure what I should title the whole collection when it's done, but I'm sure it'll be similar to the way I usually title things:  with a thesaurus finding combinations of the same meanings that sound best next to one another... usually a combination of three words (Verb, verb, noun or Noun, Verb, Noun) - this collection will be a fairly varied group of intuitive explanations for various internal and external processes - some of which can only really be said to be hypothetical, such as the death process and the God process - and some of which, like the work produced last night, are based entirely on subjective experience.

This work is detailing living through Forms and being processed through boxes where our emotions are contained and limited in reaction to social pressure (SCHOOL).  How key facts of our lives are indexed, inscribed and imprinted through our memories so the only tangible fact of us is our dates of birth, names, and other details we spend our lifetimes writing down over and over again for the benefit of identification and processing (Date of Birth, Name, Address etc).  Perhaps a very immature and adolescent view perhaps.  So many people are embarrassed by their teenage angst for various reasons - though sometimes I suspect I was onto something before the world held up a dirty mirror which penetrated past the most oily of my blistering skin.


You'll see below the individual pages of the completed work.

Gloop, bones, repeat, death, endless (in colour)

Quickly broken remains

 

 

Tippex & wall staring

This was made by working on a very small piece of paper with tippex and collage over and over again. Building up layers tearing bits off and sticking new and old bits back on.  It forms some sort of shifting and altering story, it's almost like an autonomous autobiography, except with all the nice bits edited out and the primary focus forced onto the unintelligible, mad, dribbly moments where I was just staring at a wall for a bit. 

So in summary the above is like all the moments I've stared at a wall for a bit, edited into one long sequence of me staring at a wall, or floor, or ceiling.  Though let's be fair, 30 years worth of staring at surfaces does cover an awful lot of surface.

(A sequel of sorts I made at a later date - the date I am adding this to the end of this entry (10 March 2011) can be found here:
http://garth-simmons.blogspot.com/2011/03/quickly-broken-remains.html )