Art on Fashion Interview

An interview for Art on Fashion has been published - also for the rest of this week the blouse with one of my patterns on it is on sale at 15% off.  A lot of them have already sold which is nice news as hopefully I should have some nice commission money at the end of June.  Me and Claude Cat both need more money.  There are more products coming out through this company featuring my work so I'll likely share them as they occur.  They have, in all honesty, been very pleasant to work with.

The image I chose for the interview was the one I thought was least complimentary.  I think I did this to challenge my ego (which needs to be challenged as much as possible) and also because I didn't want to look too posed and cool (because I am not).  Also my living space has done all the posing for me, to do more would just look silly.

I actually prefer this one:

VIDA now launched

I've been fairly active on my Facebook group promoting these but have somehow my blog fell by the wayside so I'm just updating you (whoever you may be) on all progress since my last past.

VIDA was launched last a few weeks ago and seems to be going pretty well with plenty of press attention etc.  Though to be fair they are selling some very lovely products not just my own.  It's all very exciting and strange for me to be entering the glossy fashion business but it's also very enjoyable and enriching.  

I got an exciting email today alerting me that the first design pictured has been listed as one of the top 30 products to gifts this season in Fashion Times - scroll down to the third image, just below the torn up jeans and the gold watch.  There it is.  The same image you can see just below. 

For simplicity if you are wanting to buy any of the currently released products I've tied a link in to each image so just click on the image your interested in and it will take you straight to the product. Alternatively feel free to view the full collection here http://shopvida.com/collections/garth-simmons

VIDA prelaunch

VIDA are launching this month and there website is currently in it's prelaunch phase.  So you can sign up to the website and if you share the website with your friends you'll get free credits with which to buy lots of cool products (like the t shirt in the image).  It's all looking very snazzy and polished so far and it's been a very interesting few months watching it develop without having to take much action myself. 

VIDA are already creating quite a buzz in the fashion industry and have been featured in Fashion Times, Apparel News, Fashionista, Wall Street Journal, Tech Crunch, amongst others.... also VIDA has been funded $1.3 million from the likes of Universal Music and Google Ventures.... so it's all suddenly starting sound very pretty impressive. 

I've not much more to add at this point but there will be more news coming up soon when VIDA launch properly later this month.  You should certainly sign up to their website in the meantime and share with your friends.  With each friend you recommend more money goes towards teaching literacy to residents of third world countries.  So I'm not just promoting this for selfish reasons.

Until next time here are a few zoomed in segments of some of my upcoming products.

VIDA scarf design launch

January this year I started to make a concerted effort to turn my art into pattern design.  It was during a week when I was bedridden with bladder stones and a very long and particularly debilitating migraine.  At the time I didn't really imagine much would come of the patterns, I was probably too delirious and in pain to actually think at all.  Anyway in my feverish Yeats like death-delirium (''can I please see Isabella one more time before I die?'') I managed to produce vast amounts of patterns, all derived from the various collages and drawings I've been producing over the last ten years.  I've been really surprised and pleased with the amount of opportunities my week long migraine has produced. 

The large amount of interest and the amount of productivity has now been verified in physical form by the complimentary scarves I received in the post a few weeks ago.  They are sample scarves that I designed for a new company called Vida who are based in San Francisco. Vida are a very nice company who's objective is to sell printed fabric designs using artists from a wide variety of countries, giving them a worldwide cultural aesthetic.  Also they are very generous and caring and ethical in regards to their workers in Karachi and Pakistan where they are teaching them literacy courses and skills leading towards better career opportunities.  Anyway it all sounds very nice and you can read more and look at all the other scarves here: http://www.shopvida.com/ - at the moment the website is in preview stage but you can request a code very easily and still make a purchase.  Also you should like them on their Facebook page. I'll be posting more on Vida as it occurs.  

Onto the actual designs themselves:  this first one is derived from a notebook drawing I made whilst working at the Manchester City Council's contact centre (quite a loathsome place). The drawings are very architectural but also very, biological, medical and tooth-like.  I like that it has been drawn on graph paper and you see the subtle outlines of squares within the pattern.  So it's like the mess of our lives is all organised into some painful hell like geometry.....  Hmmm....  perhaps a normal person would have a nicer way of analyzing it.  

This next scarf is derived from a section of a collage produced from my own notebooks interspersed with colored card and highlighter penned sections.  It's a very sharp and fractured image.  All the text is completely cut up which allows for new meanings to emerge in a very counter cultural collage fashion.  Despite this the pattern itself somehow intuitively takes the shape of a junkyard or perhaps the ruin of a building, you can see the skeleton of a support structure poking out through the wreckage.  Or perhaps it's a broken bridge leading nowhere.  This one does look outstanding on the actual scarf and what is very striking on the physical product is the way it inverts halfway up the image.  It's a very startling and eye catching contrast when seen in print and I wasn't expecting it to be so bold but the wonderful thing with collaboration is that it opens up all new pathways of surprise.



I think that each scarf has managed to represent some separate and important aspect of my work over the last 10 years.  The first is drawing, the second the integration of written text and image, then this one takes on the qualities of work that I actually sell the most of - ie. work which has a recognizable landscape.  As in a sky and terrain and some kind of correlation between the two, but also a visual defiance and illogic so the images still portray in an intangible, unvisitable null space.  Voids reclusive of actual reality and therefore escaping the trap of being representative but also drawing in the viewer to build their own interpretation through what is prompting the imagination.....  hmmm.... this paragraph has probably been one of my most sustained and lengthiest attempts at ''art speak''. Although perhaps my longest and most sustained period of art speak has actually been the last 10 years of my life.  




Apologies that I've not as of yet taken any photographs of the scarves received.  The friend I was going to ask to wear them has been away on holiday so it's not something I've gotten around to.  The selfies I've taken of myself in them are pretty rocking but the problem with those is that I'm worried that my big, slack jawed head would likely detract from the greatness of the craftsmanship and designs of the scarves themselves.  Anyway as mentioned above I'll be posting more news as it occurs.

Front Row Society Contest

I've entered a scarf design competition for Front Row Society.  These online contests are mostly a popularity contest rather than being judged by the merit of the work itself, therefore I have to ask all my friends to vote for me through links I'll be posting on Facebook and on this blog entry.  I doubt I'll have enough clicks to actually win as I imagine there will be other designers on the website who will have more time to post links all over social media all day and everyday.  Then again, who knows?  There's no point in not trying and my hubris tells me I deserve to win.  

I'm going to do some more blogging but first I'd like you to click on the below images or links, one by one, and vote for each image.  Perhaps an emotional blackmail campaign strategy is the best way to win this contest... Here goes....  

If you don't vote for all my images then you are not my friend. So please vote. 

http://eu.frontrowsociety.com/boutique/m/contest/submission?id=14026&cid=93

http://eu.frontrowsociety.com/boutique/m/contest/submission?id=13653&cid=93

http://eu.frontrowsociety.com/boutique/m/contest/submission?id=13650&cid=93

http://eu.frontrowsociety.com/boutique/m/contest/submission?id=13651&cid=93

http://eu.frontrowsociety.com/boutique/m/contest/submission?id=13652&cid=93

So now that you've done that... or you probably haven't... or you might have done... though you probably didn't.... but you should... though you won't... not that it matters much.... except it does... but it shouldn't. Anyway now that you've done that (or haven't) I thought I'd write a little bit more about the images. I don't know if I best represented them with my writing on the Front Row website.  I said something about 80s sci fi films like Bladerunner being some kind of influence but that was simply a way of fitting in with the Modernist theme of the contest.  80s science fiction is the event horizon of modernism (though Event Horizon was actually a 90s sci fi film) bringing the lofty ideals and logic of early modernist utopias into gritty decaying dystopias.  

All well and good but really I'm not sure that it has anything to do with my work.  We are a product of our culture (or at least that's something we can use an excuse for being the terrible people) so perhaps by having a childhood steeped in science fiction did influence my outlook

and visual aesthetic... but if it did it only did it on a very subconscious level.  So in the description on the website I am effectively lying.  I didn't realize this at the time so when I typed it I convinced myself it was true, I was even lying to myself.  I convinced myself that it sounded good and that it would give people a context with which to understand it.

Does this mean that everything I ever write could be a lie?  Am I telling the truth about what I'm writing right now?  Is that actually possible for me, or for anyone?  Is the truth so mutable that it can only define one moment therefore making all promises into lies?  What was true isn't anymore.  Soon the truth will be something else.  Therefore I need to know what is actually reliable?  I can't even rely upon myself to be able to define exactly what it is I'm thinking or what it is that I actually want.  Sadly it goes much deeper than that... MY truth is something in a different language that only I can speak but I've completely unable to understand.  I'm dislocated into a fiction.  I've gotten to a point where all my dreams are actually just shapes and colours.  People don't factor into anything anymore. 

You'll notice that there are images images interspersed throughout my pitiful ranting.  These are close ups of the scarf designs.  You can actually click on these and vote for me in a contest (as mentioned above).  Perhaps if I win then the truth might become much less mutable for me.  Life will become a little more solid and reliable and I might stop telling lies about Bladerunner.  

At this point you might be reminded of an X Factor contestant talking about his/her dead relatives or the fact they have to work in a dead end job and live in a really rubbish flat.  

Well guess what?  I have dead relatives.  Very dead relatives.  I also work in a dead end job and live in a very rubbish flat.  I have a cat to feed as well.  He is called Claude and by caring him I demonstrate that I have the ability to love and I that I am not a scary psychopath.  

I think if you have not already done so then you should vote for me.  All five of my images. I irrefutably deserve it what with me being so hard done by.  I can tell you another reason why I'm hard done by, and this one will put you on a real guilt trip and have you desperate to vote for me.  The main reasons that my existence is so wretched is YOU. It's actually all you're fault.  Every last one of you.

Though don't stay in your guilt trip for too long because guess what?!  I forgive you all.  My weakness is my strength.  My compassion is me and I will heal you all with my love and empathy.  But only if I win this contest.

So after reading all of this then you should realize that voting for me in this contest is possibly the most important thing you could ever do in your entire life.  All your mistakes and missteps so far will be just fine if you click on the links and then click like... also I think you have to log in to the website using Facebook.  Anyway what are you waiting for?  Stop reading this and get clicking on those links.

Have you done it yet?  Come on.  It's free to vote.  There's really no reason why you shouldn't and every reason imaginable as to why you really, really should.  God is watching and he thinks that you should vote for me.  I think he's right.  You think he is right too.  Don't you?  Yes.  You do.  Well go on then.  Get voting. For me.

(It's worth noting that this contest is a legitimate contest and not actually just a popularity contest, so that means that even if I don't get to the top by voting I am still in with a chance of winning via selection of the staff at Front Row Society.  Though that's not an excuse for not voting).

Patternbank Launch

Over the past few months all my creativity has been channelled towards pattern making possibly due to the a website called Patternbank which launched on Monday.  They have kindly allowed me to put my patterns on their website for purchase.  Some at Premium prices and some at Stock prices.  Anyway due to being provided this outlet for patterns I've been kept very busy and have certainly enjoyed myself no end.  My work can be found here https://patternbank.com/garthsimmons .... There are at the moment 12 pages worth of patterns, which constitutes about 20 percent of all the patterns on their website.  Now that really is some extremely obsessively static recursioning on my part.  Perhaps I should get out more.

Surface Pattern Design #5

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.

Surface Pattern Design #4

I've been asked to contribute surface pattern designs to an online catalogue that manufacturers use.  So I've submitted quite a few patterns to them over the last week, some of which have been dormant on my hard drive for months.  Just thought it might be instructive (for me, at least) to post what's been rejected and what's been accepted.  We'll start with the rejects.  I like rejects.

I only know why two of these were rejected and that is due to very bad pixel quality.  In terms of the others I have no idea.  What's strange is that all of these took a lot of effort, so much messing about on Photoshop with layers and special effects, perhaps that's the problem, I might have been approaching them with too much of an artistic sensibility rather than thinking about what would actually work on products like shirts and pens.  I have quite a crazy pattern orientated dress sense but I don't think even I would most of these... perhaps they are a bit too 70s.  

Which brings us onto the triumphant accepted patterns... and all the criticisms I made in the previous paragraph are still applicable.  These are all still quite 70s.  In all honesty I'm completely clueless as to why some are accepted and some aren't, but what I have learnt is that the patterns that take me 20 minutes to make usually get accepted but the ones I spend ages on always get rejected.... so there's a lesson in there somewhere.  If you are designing patterns for mass production then surely it's much better to make them quickly.  I'm very fortunate to have so much source material for creative patterns, by cutting out a small square of a picture and then duplicating that square it into a repeat pattern I can make hundreds of surface pattern designs.  Even though it's very uninteresting there a very real a sense of achievement in how easy I find it as I know that a lot of people would find it difficult.  I still I don't feel I've reached the apex of my pattern designing skills, but I suppose that will come with time and practice and hours of switching off my brain.

.  

Here are the patterns I've submitted today.  I've no idea which ones will be rejected or accepted but some of them are actually derived from the rejected patterns, so even if a pattern gets rejected it can be reworked into a new pattern.

I think I've written enough about patterns for one day... in all honesty I'm not sure how much I can talk about surface pattern design.  It's just not very interesting.  Maybe I'll start finding it more interesting to talk about if I start making money out of it.  

That would be nice.

surface pattern design #3

So for the third week running I'm posting some images of constructions of surface pattern design.

Started with this - thought I could work in the piece of public art I made a while ago to give it an architectural feel rather than just being pure pattern.

And then I built something similar that would work as a branching off point - something to connect to. Everything even architecture needs to connect to something.  Even it is only connecting to itself upside down. You can probably do a lot worse.

And here they are connecting.   Shaped like a tadpole with huge biceps.

But what's this?  It's gone from strong studly tadpole into muscleman poseur amoeba.

I think the problem with my motivation for making surface patterns is I'm not sure what products they would be put on.  This might look brilliant on a pencil or a really good coat.... but at the moment all I think of when I look at this is an acid blotter.  I don't want to go underground.  I'm doing this in the attempt to be a massive sell out. Maybe I should put some owls on it.

surface pattern design #2

So with some jiggery pokery of old images I've been experimenting more with repeat patterns - but trying to make them less typical than usual.  So I seem to be more creating new distinct textures I can later mix in with other textures.  That way I can eventually overlay and intersplice lots of different patterns building up designs that are more and more dense.  The image above is derived entirely from a sold image of art I made but it's been altered so it works less like an artwork and even less like a surface pattern.  But it's a starting point.

I've then stripped away some layers and completely killed the colours making it entirely black and white and then put a thread of colour on the top of it.  A kind of flailing organism floating in the ether of meaningless sell out pattern.

So then I strip away the flailing organism and play it safe with a nice repeat pattern.  This is less typical of the repeat patterns I've done recently so it's reassuring that by playing it safe I've actually come up with something that does look almost unique.  That the previous steps were leading towards something usable.

So overlay a larger version of the image and trim away the edges then colour it in red.  A hot distinct column standing out all pollinated by the surrounding swarm.

Then zoom out and we have made another marvellously generic repeat pattern.  Just to show how easily it can be done.  Looking at this now it may be interesting to put something across the middle going horizontal. Some odd contrast with the rest of the pattern.  Then build on top of that again and see what happens.

I didn't do that though, at the time it didn't occur to me.  Instead I got a little tired of near perfect symmetry so decided to add an element that doesn't fit with the pattern to throw it slightly off centre.  This was achieved only very slightly with an off centre receding archway effect.  

Then I took the off centre archways and built them into ANOTHER repeat pattern with a background derived from an image of an interpretation of biospheres.  This results in another symmetrical pattern that can be repeated ad infinitum.  But which can also be used to enhance other surface pattern ideas.

It's hard to know whether I'm getting the hang of surface pattern design or if surface pattern design is getting ready to hang me.

Surface Pattern Design

I Realised after much thought that my artwork could be perfect for surface pattern design.  Perhaps this is a way I could actually support myself as an artist.  A long time ago someone told me that I'll probably end up designing the background patterns of biscuit tins and perfume bottles.  Perhaps they were right. 

My first attempt is quite simply the same image repeated over and over.  It's not the most imaginative approach to my first pattern but it will be useful to use as backgrounds to other patterns.   I have to start somewhere and this is where I started.  It's all very trial and error.  

What became evident, but should have been obvious, was that any repeat pattern I made can be changed in terms of size, colour and brightness.  The above is the same design as the first image but altered. It actually makes it an even more generic surface pattern design.  

Which brings me to this next development.  I've built a node with flailing perfectly measured limbs sticking out that can be connected to similar nodes.   When these are connected I can build a massive grid making to overlay on top of any other pattern design I want.  

So overlaying a grid can make the pattern slightly more complex.  Slightly more interesting... hopefully slightly less predictable and generic.  It does remind me of the back pages of very fancy old notebooks.  Though it wouldn't really work as a pattern design for an item of menswear.  Unless.....

Print this onto a shirt and in it's larger form it could look like a shirt for someone bending the fashion rules and attempting to look like a more subdued 1970s.  For the less loud the pattern can be shrunk and it would look like a checkered shirt from a distance - but when you get close up it'd become obvious theirs something a bit more going on with it.

After a while of cobbling these together I did have to start realising that my personal identity as an artist is getting lost in each and every image.  These say nothing - they aren't even meaningless voids they are actually made for companies to print onto whatever they want in whatever size and format they want.  So producing these images should really have some negative impact on my self esteem as an artists.  They give me a strange creative satisfaction that's very plastic and empty.  Like blowing up balloons.

What has always been my ideal in creativity is to try to make things nobody else could make.  None of the above have managed to do that.  I'm not sure if that is completely achievable with surface pattern design because most things have been done with it.  But the idea of doing it well in order to generate money to support my  more idealistic endevours is appealing.  Any business plan is appealing to me at the moment. 

This idea will hopefully be quite lucrative once I get going.  I'll still make artwork and still carry on writing my book.  But if I can make some good surface patterns and make some money from that then perhaps I'll be able to go self employed when I get my voluntary redundancy next year.  I just need to build my website and portfolio.  I think the best philosophy to approach this venture with is to make sure I carry on at least attempting to make the designs unique and personal - that way their will be nothing else on the market like them. 

If anyone has any advice feel free to comment.  Also feel free to express your sheer disgust at my new corporate leanings.