Sunday, 29 December 2013

Look at these...

Below you'll see about 40 images all roughly 4x4 inches in size.  They are essentially images from the last year printed out and then recollaged into one another.  So my work reproduces itself once again.  Anyone thinking that these small images are all I'm going to do from now on can be rest assured that I'm about to start working on some much larger images.  I have a plan I promise you.  Don't worry.

These tiny little images do help to provide me with a little bit of pocket money so I'll keep putting them together.  These modest sized pieces are currently 99p each excluding postage. 


There are larger images on there too at higher prices but I reckon they are all lost now in a sea of inexpensiveness.  Never mind.  Have a happy new year everyone.

Sunday, 15 December 2013

irrelevant subjectives

The images in this entry have a little bit less red in them than last time.  I will be doing my usual non analysis of each image and I'll try my absolute best to make my statements as irrelevant as possible to the artwork featured here.



Irrelevance is a completely subjective idea anyway.  Calling something irrelevant is quite a lazy way of avoiding an issue and making out like you're own concerns are more important than others.  Whilst calling someones concerns subjective is a great way to make someones opinions seem pithy and pointless.  So let's be fair to ourselves, perhaps all of our opinions and subjective viewpoints are very much irrelevant to everything that is at stake right now.

''But what's at stake Garth?  Go on tell us.  We are very fascinated by your irrelevant subjective viewpoint on whatever issue it is you're actually writing about.''




The problem at stake here is something much vaster than our comprehension.  A bleeding, bleating, eating mass of constant forever.  So forget the biological.  Forget the political.  Forget the horrible real world issues that are going on.  The murder of innocents, the abuse of animals.  Forget all of that and let's all have a little think about existential angst.

''But all those real world issues that we are supposed to be forgetting shouldn't really be forgotten about.  I'm not sure why you feel that ignoring those things is such a good idea.  What exactly do you think will be solved by delving into your school play equivalent to the theatre of the absurd.''




I'm not entirely sure what sort of point I was trying to make.  I think I was trying to satirise myself and make myself seem ridiculous.  That's why I started writing responses to myself in quotation marks as if my audience were talking to me.

''And how much of an audience do you think you really have?  Honestly you're pretty dense sometimes.  I think you spend too much time on your own.  Typing at yourself like that.  What are you?  Crazy?  Bet you wish you were crazy as at least then you might be interesting.  It's very sad that's what it is.  And then you have the nerve to joke about forgetting about real life issues just so you can satirise yourself and try to bring down the great existential figures that you'll never amount to.''




But I just wanted some writing to put between all these pictures that I've posted on here.  That's what I do everytime, I write stuff between the pictures.

''Well at least you've achieved that.  With a little bit of help from me of course.  What of these other people? The ones visiting your so called Blog.  How many of them do you think trawl through you're writing and how many do you think just look at the pretty pictures?''

I'm not sure if any of them look at the pretty pictures very much either.  Not for long anyway.

''Why are you still typing?  You've managed to write something below every picture now.  Thank God you only put four images on here this time otherwise we'd be here all day. Go on then.  Do something else. Yes that's right.  Get hoovering you freak.''

Now there's no need for name calling is there?

Wednesday, 4 December 2013

Red, red, red, red, red and more red - reddy now? Yes. I am reddy.

According to Wikipedia red is ''is the color of blood, rubies and strawberries.[3][4] It is the color of the wavelength of light from approximately 620–740 nm on theelectromagnetic spectrum.[2] Next to orange at the end of the visible spectrum, red is commonly associated with danger, sacrifice, passion, fire, beauty, blood, anger, Christmas, socialism, communism, and in China and many other cultures, with happiness''


Red is also a colour I have a lot of.  Not just in terms of red clothing but I also have stacks of red paper and card, along with quite a lot of other colours too.  But red appears to be the colour that was on top of the pile whilst I was producing this latest batch of pictures.  Hence why there is a lot of red used in them.



Also used in these images are a lot of notebook drawings from work.  Cut apart and stuck together in different orders because that makes them look like more than just bored scribblings.  As a collagist with lots of self generated materials this is a common trick that I've employed very shamelessly over the years.



In these images red certainly stands out.  It gives them a troubled, abrasive and violent quality - one that's quite intentional and possibly conveys some tortured element within my soul - though more likely it conveys that lots of red was on the top of my pile of collage materials this week.  The soul explanation is much more exciting but the collage materials explanation is much more honest... though both explanations could be completely true anyway, how can we truly know what our own souls are all about?



In collage there is something much more natural about using the materials closest to hand.  Though in all honesty my form of collage is different from the traditional type, which is generated through the use of external source material.  My source material is usually my own artwork and also as evidenced through these pictures the use of coloured card and paper.  There is probably some of my troubled soul thrown in there for good measure but as mentioned in previous entries a lot of it is just put together in a kind fugue state.  Which is quite relaxing most of the time.  Hardly troubled at all.  So perhaps these images are representative of a relaxed soul.... perhaps with troubled undercurrents.  Perhaps not.  I'm not sure.  I'm not as deep as you might imagine.  So whatever troubled undercurrents I have are likely much closer to the surface than I'd like them to be.  I think I can see them.  Hello undercurrents.



This last one was actually the first of these images to be put together.  There appears to be a little less red in it.  I'm no psychologist but I would analyse the reason for I am doing this would be through a serious condition called ''Not reaching the point in which his collage materials that contains a huge amount of red paper and card.''  Despite not being a psychologist I am very confident in my diagnosis and me and myself are now working our way through this issue through lots of cognitive therapy.  Pretty good work to say I'm not a psychologist.  I've read a few books in my time.



In news not relating to the colour red but relating to books over the past month I've been taking part in that Nanowrimo thing.  Where you are meant to write a 50000 word first draft of a novel in one month.  I actually managed to achieve this completing the first draft in 30 days.  It's very messy but looking forward to redrafting it. Whether it's going to be any good or if I'll ever mention it ever again is another matter entirely.
Look at that graph above.  That proves I can hit the buttons on a keyboard every day and achieve a target word count.  




Also unrelated to the colour red.  A friend of mine, Nick Cash, has devised a new portable gallery called the Paste Table Gallery which is taken to all kinds of places in London.  He tends to exhibit collages and other interesting work.  Some by an artist called Garth Simmons, who I have never heard of.  He sounds good though.  I hear he lives somewhere in my flat but I can never find him, maybe because he has to go to work all the time at a normal job.  Maybe you should all give him loads of money then he can be a self employed artist and I might finally get to meet him. 

Anyway the Facebook page for Nick Cash's venture is located here https://www.facebook.com/pastetablegallery?ref=br_tf you should go and like it.  Go on then.

Sunday, 10 November 2013

refresher course

Another blog entry with my most recent artwork for you to observe.  It's good for me if you look at this. Observation = validation of existence = sense of purpose = getting out of bed and actually getting something done.


So when I have the vaguest amount your attention I should really be presenting myself properly - I wouldn't want to give the impression that I'm a fallible human being.  Blog's are all about self advertising (this one is anyway) so I should really be swishing in and saying something mysterious.  Telling an exciting story about myself or perhaps not writing anything at all to go with these pictures, just let them speak for themselves, but perhaps they haven't got anything worth saying.  That would be quite unfortunate as that's what art is supposed to do.  Say stuff.


If you want definitions and justifications of ''what it all means'' I've done that quite a lot in previous blog articles.  I've been writing on here for at least three years now.  So you'd think I'd already have that covered. I also sometimes feel that I'm repeating myself a little bit.  But there are so many ways to say the same thing over and over again, very often I'm having conversations with friends where we are just going over the same opinions we did last time.


An interesting thing going on in my life for the past few days is that there's a problem with the drains in the flat I'm living in.  The drains are so full they are starting to leak from the roof into my flat.  I've called the letting agency but they are very slow about getting it done, not being open at the weekend.  So I've taken the situation as well as I can into my own hands.  There's something nice about this.  I've been given a tangible problem to deal with.  My problems are usually ethereal, wishy washy and unsolvable.  It's usually me that is the problem with me.  So it's nice to have something proper to fix or more than likely break.


It's now that I realise how this really doesn't fit in at all with the colourful images that I'm displaying here. I'm not fulfilling the characteristics of the typical self advertising artist blogger. That's the problem with self reflection, you only reflect yourself, and after 32 years I have a pretty good idea what I look like.  I have a love/hate relationship with mirrors, though we are getting on very well at the moment. We are hoping to get married.


I used to hate seeing my reflection.  I remember catching sight of myself in shop windows and not recognizing who it was but the very shape of him and the ambling stupid walk made me think I was looking at some strange vagrant with bad legs and zombie complexion.  There were times when I really took myself by surprise and what made it worse was wondering what other people really thought of that distended and horrifying shape.


It was really a surprise I ever made it out into public.  I must have had such a low level of self awareness to forget what I actually looked like.  Or maybe I was just in such denial as to how hideous I looked.  Perhaps learning that level of self denial is quite a useful tool and can actually be mistaken for self confidence.  I have no issues with my reflection these days, we've long since comes to terms with our issues.  I just started washing my hair and face more, started buying my own clothing too, and after a few years my reflection has really grown to love me.  I can't help but feel that my fiance is a little bit superficial and that our relationship is based entirely on physical appearance.  I've convinced myself.  I'm breaking off our engagement.  I've had enough of that hipster.


So now I'm on my own again.  Apart from Claude the cat and the very slow dripping from the ceiling.  I suppose I should count myself lucky - some people have much less in their lives.  My problems are incredibly middle class.  I very much hope I haven't made anyone reading this feel sympathetic.  You should take your sympathy and give it to one of those homeless people I hear so much about.  I would only spend it on Mochas.