Organic mass (mess) converges onto multi coloured light (life) form

Been producing a few large images to exhibit at the Leeds Gallery for an exhibition starting on the 3rd September (details here - it's on for a whole month so if your in the area come along). 

The above image is called "Shambling organic mass (mess) converges onto multi coloured light (life) form."  You may have already gathered the name of the image from the title of this blog post but I like it so much I thought it worth pointing out twice.

The organic mass (mess) in the image should be apparent in the red lines converging on the also apparent globular multi coloured light (life) form.  Does the red of the mass (mess) make it seem too gory.  Also the lines of convergence look rather organised for a "(mess)" but the nature of convergence is to meet at one point.  The organic mass is a gloopy dribbling horror of many different parts and faces - just like people - the organic mass could be people, to be honest, this was my original assumption and objective on starting the picture. 

The multi coloured light (life) form is open to interpretation because it more than likely doesn't exist in any corporeal form.  At a very young age in nursery I decided to amuse myself by staring at the sun for ages and I think at some point and for a finitely infinite time the whole world blanked out and went quiet and empty - although some time later a scary old womans face started shouting at me - back to reality unfortunately.  Anyway there is some part of the mind or the world that can be entered, activated or imagined.  Where you stare at a crack in the wall or the corrugated lines on the radiator and your mind goes totally blank and empty just for a bit and you can feel like you're part of the inside surface of a empty sphere rotating around something much more unfathomable and much more pure which makes every one of us all the more irrelevant.

The opening dilates with inefficient sparks

This is one of three images I've been working on since moving house - I've posted it here because it's the first to be completed, though in actual fact it's an extension or even a destruction of a previous piece of work - which was actually really really good but sadly the canvas was very warped so it had to be destroyed.  I've put the best part on a smaller canvas and put the remainder in on a shelf.  The warped, cracked and useless canvas frame is discarded into the basement, I was meaning to take it to a skip but haven't gotten around to it.  Someone was interested in buying the original image but it's so warped that if it were to be put on the wall it would just stick out at a funny angle - like putting a walker's crisp on the wall and attempting to make it flat.

I'm becoming less and less precious about my artwork.  Pictures and materials tend to take up so much space and the more you produce the less space you have - so it's very logical that I start to cannibalise my pictures into new pictures... this has always been the way I've done things -before through photocopying and permutation and now through reworking old work into new and better work.

"Better" is subjective and debatable though there isn't really a vast amount of people debating my work except for myself and myself.... and both of me have to deal with the practical side of these things.  Why spend money I'm not earning on producing more images when I can mix images together and try to progress my work in a new direction (or in the same direction but slightly "better")?  Would it be preferable to hold onto stuff that is years behind what I'm doing in the bleak hope of some retrospective exhibition when I'm dead?  It would be a pretty dull retrospective if all my work was warped and broken with bits of card flaking away.

31.7.12 - 8.7.12

31.7.12 - phospherescent swamp burns through it's own dirt.  The wheels of my bicycle should require some DW40 or something to make them stop jarring on lift off.  The unreliability of essential objects.

30.7.12 - still haven't gotten around to moving my books into the bedroom and contemplating moving my jumpers into there instead.  Bad construction slows down hopeful progress.

29.7.12 - teeth close in on some spiky node of perfectly aligned sharp edges - allowing for an impossible suspension but not on the field of 2D.

28.7.12 - some kind of moomin slug snail thing.  Blind and sad result of the hierarchy of false leaders of soul migration who decide the rules of reincarnation - will the victims and oppressed rise against their morally superior snobby overlords. 

27.7.12 - hitting yourself on the head makes you stupider so it is possible to bang yourself into a dull oblivion though it would be better to actually change the shape of the world into something better and more suited to oneself.  How to make everything cooperate when you barely even manage to collaborate with yourself.

26.7.12 - amazing how under certain pressures and after certain flashes the eyes or the connection between the eyes and the brain can create pools of perfect light under closed eyelids.  Sort of frightening that I don't use substances.

25.7.12 - Laputa meets Lego.  Lego Laputa.  Should Lego start a line of Gulliver's Travels or would it have to become a film franchise first.  How about Lego 1984.

24.7.12 - working in a call centre again after so many years.  I'm a good administrator but working in customer service isn't the best for me - I'm going to try to doodle in this diary everyday I work there as there is so much time for my hands to be idle.  In my admin role I was up and down the stairs carrying postbags and generally swooping through the building on various chores - with plenty of time to have a good sit down.  The above is a bad drawing of a character from the novel I'm also determined to write whilst working in the call centre.  Might as well put the dull times to some good creative use.  Even if the results of good creative use are really really bad.

23.7.12 - first day at the call centre.  Brought a few felt tips and a few biros.  School Admissions is quiet over August and July.  Though not as quiet as I'd like.  Quiet is nice.

22.7.12 - putting new colours and textures to some good use over my week off work.  Hoping to get some new work done to exhibition at the Leeds Gallery in September (details here) nothing quite like the pressure of a exhibition to make me do loads of new work.  Three pictures all half done being made all at the same time - and so many DIY tasks to distract me from them - which is nice as if I rushed them they'd probably turn out rubbish.

21.7.12 - like a flaming phoenix like bird growing out of some burning flaming spinal column.  Sometimes I just write down my first association with the image - perhaps nothing memorable happened that day.

20.7.12 - colour photocopy's of nothing have so much more variety than my usual coloured paper.  

19.7.12 - delicate underwater plant forms conquer through phosphorescent growth - (phosphorescent, a favourite and overused word (shame I have so much trouble spelling it.) 

18.7.12 - A visit to Chester Zoo.  Last week of term lots of young children wandering about.  Felt very sorry for my favourite animal the Red Panda seemed very annoyed if not scared by the children who were playing loud rubbish music under her tree.  Had a strange fantasy of throwing their phone on the floor and stamping on it - though I would probably be the bad guy if I made such a move and not only am I too nice to do such a thing it also wouldn't occur to me except as something funny to hypothesise on an hour later.

17.7.12 - A better drawing of the character drawn on 24.7.12 - though this is a bit of a cheat as it was drawn later than this date and then pasted onto what was a blank and empty page.  Breaking the rules of authentic chronology.

16.7.12 - designed a lamp in a notebook like this whilst I was stupid and at University (a bad but not uncommon combination).  It doesn't make a great deal of sense as the light shade is fully transparent so doesn't work as a lampshade.  Perhaps some kind of more opaque material.

15.7.12 - a silhouette collapses through the emergence of tentacles.

14.7.12 - the start of my big week off work.  Everything moved from Sandy Lane and some new work in progress.  Some distant hope in full integration and organisation.

13.7.12 - the last day in my admin job at School Admissions before I become a victim of the City Council's redesign structure and shunted off to the call (contact) centre.  I'll miss working in the city centre and the ease of travel and talking to real people face to face rather than through a muffled phone line.  I really really like my Admin job and alot of the people in my office and I don't want to go to Gorton everyday but with any luck it'll make me look for something much better and more suited to me.  

12.7.12 - A faulty fax sheet.  All stretched and skewed like when you run a piece of paper around on top of a photocopier the image stretches.  This has stretched over two diary pages - it was so big and impressive.

11.7.12 - yawning through hostile ruins - the weaving of non connected still fallen pillars and windows looking out into the different kind of dark.

10.7.12 - the sleeve of the shirt seen above has faded a lot over the years.  There will come a day when all my clothes will be faded more pastel versions of the clothes I used to have.  Is it like the fading of myself - will I become paler and with less sharp edges and colours - like some kind of diminishing ghost all empty and lost and dead repeating myself and stuck in habits and tics.  Ticks and tocks relentless plunging into a pile of dropping off bits.

9.7.12 - film screening for the Manchester Fringe Festival for Insect Clutched Stick - a short animation I made a few years back.  Can be seen here:   http://www.littlesongfilms.com/video-art/insect.html
Bit embarrassed by my voice to be honest - but I suppose it's a normal thing to be embarrassed about.  Though abnormal for me to have recorded it and cut and pasted it over an animation.  Stephen Fry was unavailable and unaffordable.

8.7.12 - twin dying suns viewed through floating debris of planet.
(Don't know who I'm trying to fool - looks more like some bits of paper stuck on top of one another.)

7.6.12 - 4.6.12

7.6.12 - the new place is beginning to look far more organised.  Shelves are a big task but had a lot of fun with the brackets and the sheer sense of achievement making what looks like a weak ledge for soft toys become a sturdy supporter of books.  Saw Metric in the evening and they didn't play any of my preferred songs just the more rocky stuff and their new album I've never heard. 

6.6.12 - the silver is as it's meant to look.  Am I rising to a point where all my efforts will start to make sense.

5.6.12 - reflective stickers don't scan so well - the blue above is actually green but I actually prefer the scanned version.

4.6.12 - and to become a workable factory of sending produce to nowhere permanent.

3.7.12 - loads of things have no place and you can't tell if they are in or out.  Good thing the world has big enough dumping grounds to get rid of the stuff I'd rather not had.  Bear in mind the effort I make to recycle.

2.7.12 - I'm taking my things out of bags and boxes and putting them on ledges and available space and moving some things back into bags and boxes to take to bins.

1.7.12 - a trip to Ikea.  Great food and great furniture.  Built myself this desk - hoping that it will help me in my artwork and be useful as a place to organize myself and not just be a thing to put stuff on.

30.6.12 - a quick change of bank details and a move to paperless billing - I have too much of an accumulation of paper.

29.6.12 - brief trip back to Doncaster to visit older brother visiting from China.

28.6.12 - dark pits dug in the side of unorganised bone residue. 

27.6.12 -  impromptu sketch.  No sense of scale yet.

26.6.12 - disorganised shambling organic mass (mess) aspires to be incandescent multicolored light (life) form.

25.6.12 - the green light of death signals to go forever.

24.6.12 - a great unit of shelves designed to fit around a bathroom sink.

23.6.12 - 31 years old today.  Celebrations are put on the back burner and to be filed under "forgotten."  Got some nice presents though.

22.6.12 - started my house move today.  Got the keys and the contract and set up a direct debit to pay the water bill.

21.6.12 - old notebook plus paint.

20.6.12 - an old notebook from three years ago used during my last house move.

19.6.12 - lizard scientists.

18.6.12 - the organic mind imagining structures of solid unbreakable moveable objects.

17.6.12 - looking through old notebooks - found designs for an animation I was commissioned to make for an exhibition about different letters of the alphabet and each letter could be interpreted however you like.  I was assigned the letter L - ell hell:  the idea of looping over and over through an l shape made of l shapes.   The exhibition was cancelled so this was never projected but it was meant to repeat itself from beginning to end with no discernible beginning or end.

16.6.12 - the cube of order moving objects around me into lovely boxes ready for the big move.  Changing houses as soon as I get a moving date - the lines of movement need to be drawn into the least difficult strategy.   I am very good at linking words together to make the mundane sound more important and calculated than it needs to be.

15.6.12 - mental images which can't be linked to any origin - can some form of narrative be knocked out of a load of tangled pipes and broken objects.  I reckon it could if some powerful creature of vagueness became the point from which it originates. 

14.6.12 - the chain leads from one end of a story to another - though neither end is even vaguely worked out.  So the chain remains the only tangible point in the plot.  Though it could end up being a desert.  Or perhaps a thread or a tube.

13.6.12 - bits of this image torn off before throwing the rest of it in the bin.

12.6.12 - my brain coordinates my hand towards circles and vortexes - it's like if I leave my head unthinking it can only allow two basic compositions - a sphere in the middle of a rectangle or a series of lines pointing into a centre.

11.6.12 - like a stabbing pain but also a inward puking through some internal doorway that multiplies into shards of The Neverknowing.

10.6.12 - bought a nice purple jacket for 99p at the Barnardos in Fallowfield.  Small tear in the back.  Noticed from the label inside (and also the name written in marker on the inside) that the jacket at some point belonged to a school girl.  Beau Brummel is the name used for the jacket.  Beau Brummel knew a thing about sartorial elegance.

9.6.12 - empty drones with big feet and even bigger lungs.

8.6.12 - the insides of envelopes.  Why isn't more effort made to make the outside of envelopes as interesting as the inside.  It's like jackets.  I have seen some amazing lining on the insides of very boring and dull everyday jackets.  And shoes too.

7.6.12 - character sketch. Should look sadder and slower.

6.6.12 - a comparison of spaces and sixes.  Phoning landlords, arranging viewings, preparing the escape capsule.

5.6.12 - the great green orb built from the insides of envelopes - in denial of it's own sentience.

4.6.12 - chaos and the like - malformed limbos of empty everything and all the usual - never congealing just constant just like me constantly going on about it.