9.1.12 - 6.1.12

9.1.12 - Picking up winnings from gambling on football games - one of the few things that could get me interested in football is making some money out of it.  I've been making very small accumulative bets that don't actually give you much back in return but that I am next to certain to always win... though one can never be certain enough to make this into a career... you're basically dealing with complex blocks of unpredictable predictables.

8.1.12 - Fixed Jacket

7.1.12 - Went to Jodrell Bank and saw the Lovell Radio Telescope - which looked a lot smaller than it did on the television back when it was called the Pharos Project.

Saw a Lady Gaga Tribute Act - a nearly middle aged woman does a reasonably good impression of Lady Gaga, though it's difficult for me to judge as I don't actually listen to her very much.  The above image looks quite unintentionally rude... Woman inverts into confused Lady Gaga parody sliding across the floor of Northwich pub with a slimy trail of wet skin and multiple placement of scattering limbs.

5.1.12 - 4.1.12

5.1.12 - Gambling tendrils collect £1.87 (small steps)

4.1.12 - usual patterns - dead biro, usual writing - envelope remains glued onto scribbled over tasks, complete and bleeding over.  (I think I'm starting to feel more and more repetitious)

3.1.12 - 2.1.12

3.1.12 - Hell Mouth

2.1.12

1.1.12

1.1.12 

Slow and imperceptible experimentation

As you'll see my blog logo and background is now in full colour - it's as if I'm one of those magazines that relaunches itself on it's anniversary with ten extra glossy pages... except all I've done is spend a few hours over the Christmas weekend colouring in my logo and background and thinking that if I change it on New Years Day I could give off the impression that I am entering into some brave new era of blogging. 

However in contrast to this brave new era I'm also posting these black and white collages I made over the last few weeks...

These images exhibit the usual preoccupations and also the same methods as I've been using for quite a while - creatively I move in a sort of sidewards fashion adjusting and developing ideas through slow and imperceptible experimentation.  Sometimes I don't feel as if I've made any headway at all and then all of a sudden I'll make something that changes everything... that's the problem with having a rather muggy, foggy and convoluted mind... there is a lack of organisation so inspiration and ideas are developing all over the place sometimes not quite gelling at all until a year or two later.

Good news is I have a new 2012 page a day diary which I'm going to use every day - like I did with diary I had last year, before I lost it that is.  This new diary is a lovely posh diary from Paperchase which I'm unlikely to lose because it's so big - last years was a little pound shop diary that was starting to fall apart by February anyway, but it was a great help - by the end of January I had so much of my life sorted out - my socks were arranged in my drawers lined up like tiny multicoloured pigs... so hopefully this new Diary will fast track my life and art work into something really organized and brilliant... I hope to scan the developing pages of my diary into this blog because last year the scribbled out activities and layers of highlighter and tippex took on a rather organic and visual life of their own.... which made it all the more annoying when I lost it as I saw it as a developing art project.... so wish me the best of luck... just going off now to sort out my pencil case because my Diary is telling me too.

Clicking Clacking Self Justification

A few little pictures I put together over the last two weeks - partly as an exercise of passing time but also as a means for developing the use of text within my artwork and to see if I can develop ideas in that direction a little more - I have so much writing but none of it makes much sense - it tends to just collide into itself in a contradictory fashion and negates everything it's attempting to convey... it does lend itself better to a visual image as the subject of my artwork is invariably very much all about falling into meaningful meaninglessness only for concrete normality to get in the way and allow for some kind of collection of repetitive tangible objects and people.

Capacity Avenues Unlock

My existence does feel like a story being told very slowly... what happens when the end credits get called?... does my perception simply drop and unfold as if I'm being screwed up into a ball and thrown into some blank dead space bin?  A place of no stimulation as the audience of one walks away from my blank screen of nobody.

Worryingly I think it's probably safe to say that existence is exactly as we perceive it and that I'm not the only one going through this - and you are all a lot more than subsidiary mannequins and plot cyphers to my own story line.  The above picture is like what I'd imagine living as everyone and everything would be like - though it is depicted on quite a small scale.

Process Void Method

In contrast this image is actually entirely about the trap of being myself and also the creative methods in which I employ and find to be ever so important.  There's a prospect or hope within me to one day be able to produce artwork full time without some day job to support me... that's sometimes a frightening prospect as the motivation to produce work sometimes dwindles through the sheer repetitive nature of cutting and sticking and having to think of new ways of doing it - which is funny because the image above is quite badly put together and it depicts a lost primitive head in it's centre in the middle of it's own loss at to what it's trying to produce.  It's an image where nothing gels with itself.  I do think that the intention is lost in the very essence of what it's trying to convey and it does in the end just look like a bit of rubbish picture.

Turning Machine Clogs

This image is about succumbing to life and accepting the reality of everything bad and everything good and also the veering moods of my own mind as it turns over circumstance and self appraisal and analysis... life circles, spirals and then dies to become something else if only just a pile of sludge and grit and decay... but at the heart of it are cycles and repetitions that will outlast everyone - unless it needs something to observe it in order to exist... 

Perhaps I'm not making an awful lot of sense, do I just write on here my thoughts and ideas hoping they are going to lead to some kind of epiphany where all lines converge away from the cycles and to a finite point of knowing?  Or am I just filling in spaces hoping that these words will be enough to justify what I produce, who I am and why I am doing this?  If that requires justification then I may as well continue to try as I've not quite managed it so far... though maybe one day I'll get there and all my life and thoughts will just click and clack into place with a clicking and clacking of spinning puzzle pieces fitting together fluidly.  All of this preferably on a very nice table in a house of my very own.

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.

new/old work

When I was first putting together my photocopy patterns early last year I had in mind an idea of mass production - being able to produce lots of artwork that would all look different but made entirely out of the same photocopied materials... sadly this was possibly a misguided idea as none of the work actually did look that different... I thought I could cut out the work of coming up with compositions and create a new creative method which was entirely based on permutation and that my work would randomly generate itself into new pictures... I ended up making loads of this work which was basically the same and mass produced.

So lots of this work has been lying about my house for the past two years whilst I've been doing much better things - I used the patterns I developed in different and more varied ways and used them to aid composition rather than replace it.  Though I was always intending to jazz up these old framed pieces and make them look better and more individual.  So for my exhibition in London next week - I was asked to submit work that I would be able to sell for under £100 - so it was time to free up some of the space in my already vast, cluttered and messy house... so I finally "jazzed up" the images that had been lying around for so long... and the results are rather good.  As you can see there are examples of what each image looked like before and what they look like now... the image above is called "Splintered Converging"...  which is a bit of a typical title from me:

Here's another one:

Here's another called one "Void Strata" - which is another typical title - one does find oneself being very typical of oneself... when oneself is me all of the time....  The before and after images both look good but by adding more layers each piece becomes more unique than it was when it was part of my factory line.  

A void strata would be like a cutting into nothing and finding lots of different layers of nothing which is contrarily full of globdules of nothing.  This one is like a some weird coagulating non flow of neon organic.... so maybe that would have also been a good title.... though I'll save that for the next time I make an image of any kind of psycho archeological pseudo limbo.

I then put together four smaller images (about A5) all of which can be seen below here:

The details for the exhibition can be found here - so if you are in London on 1st December then feel free to attend and RSVP it to the email address that's on the website.  The other artists look fairly good and it's a nicely varied selection.  Also it says I am "new and emerging" which sounds rather promising - I'm hoping to sell all my work and have a nice amount of money to spend - I sort of have dreams about some massive company building me a house on top of the tallest tower in London and I'll be their collage boy who makes lots of things that get better and better because I won't have to work in a normal job - I'll have all the time in the world to make much better artwork - also the world would leave me alone whenever I wanted it to - my relationship with the world would finally be perfect.

The light Nome break (and others)

Making a submission of work to an exhibition in London where everything costs under £100 - found this which I made last year which is called "the light Nome break" - the title is a reference to the Nome King from The Return to Oz which was the first film I ever saw at the cinema when I was about about 3 or 4 - I liked it so much we had to go in twice in a row - but then, it is a very good film.

This picture reminds me of the Nome King but it isn't a deliberate homage - though the visual similarities of cracked stone and angry shifting drew me towards this title - the Nome King is pretty much the ground we all live on: angry, turbulent and forever restless in it's never ending swimming of dull immortality.  I sort of related to the Nome King myself at the time - and sometimes still do when I'm feeling philosophically short sighted.  This is the only framed art I've made which is 3D, parts of it rising above others.

Found these two other smaller pictures - the one on the left is called "Paramount Beacon", because at the top you can see a mountain that looks like the Paramount logo.  The right image is called "Picket Tendrils" due to it looking like tendrils passing over some pickets - quite simple really and at least one of these pictures doesn't have a title inspired by cinema.

Self diagrammatical blood speech

In the interests of pursuing more representational art I've produced the above self portrait.... though it's not at all a conventional self portrait - which is a good thing, the idea of being creative for me is to be make unconventional creative, and honest.

Why I'm interested in making my work representational is due to my work for many years being conventionally abstract - in pursuit of defining voids, blank spaces, pressed down eyelids of pushed light receptors... staring into the sun for far too long... so the above is an attempt of making a conventional self portrait into an honest and unconventional self portrait - which is still very abstract.  In fact so abstract that I felt it required a speech bubble containing a diagram of what each part of the picture represents.

So here's a small close up of the diagram.  It explains that the central figure is "me" - the left of me is the "outside" world which channels it's way through me "in"wards and builds all sorts of swirling thoughts and patterns - represented with drawings, teeth, organic forms - moving outwards through internal processes where they form an uncontrolled twist of nonsense.  The bottom right corner is a fluttering, pumping, often troubled heart - and finally the red speech bubble containing diagrammatic dialogue is "speech"... As if my speech and expression are of a constant evaluation of all of the "outside", "in", "heart" and "me"...  So it's almost like a simplified circuit board of my unwilling day to day construct and conduct...  A self absorbed though trapped circuit board integrated into the constant motion of life itself.  Possibly not as deep as I may be wanting it to sound.
So in making steps towards being more representational I've produced something mostly self representational - I think that I'm moving more towards telling narratives and showing mental connections of places, people or objects that don't go together melding into some terrifying flux of associations.  I've got a few exciting projects coming up over the next year, some of which I may actually get paid for but for now I don't want to go into too much detail about until everything is finalised - in the meantime I'll be keeping this blog up to date with everything I get done.... I've been thinking an awful lot about the routine of keeping an art blog and how not posting anything on here tends to make me work towards very strict and limiting deadlines... one can get caught up in the whole pursuit of self promotion to the point where that is your primary pursuit... this is being rectified.... though as usual, there's a good chance I could be worrying myself over nothing and I should just keep going on the way I always do.  Anyway I've some exciting developments coming along which I'll be sure to post on here as soon as confirmation is confirmed.

Below is the image that gave me the idea to make a new self portrait - that being my old self portrait from 2006 - drawn in biro and then blown up to a massive size which I then blutacked on my old bedroom wall.

I lik the caved in horror and the broken contortions of malaise and confusion.   This was drawn in a much less settled or successful period of my life, and even though the frustration and the challenges I had then are still present - in a more evolved and charming form - it's nice to contrast and compare different periods of your life with one another and realise that things very gradually do get better and better... until you die of course, although, I've not had many reports on the afterlife it may perhaps be the best time of all.

So I feel quite lucky that things didn't carry on the way they were - if I go even further back I can remember what I felt like at school.  Was it all actually worth going through that just to be doing what I'm doing now.  I'll think positive and potentially deluded.  Perhaps my next self portrait in 5 years will depict some kind of pompously glowing orb of total self satisfaction floating high and free over all the little people I've decided to forgive.  Ha ha.

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.