scrunched fake windows in segments - told again - frozen numb structure

As usual at this time of week more art for sale on EBay.

blurry cartwheel life form stuck frozen the world making it a structure

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Bear in mind that EBay is not going to be my future forever.  I have other things planned and other hobbies.  It's become an enjoyable routine now - like a second and better but less well paid job.

Rooting through all my masses of collage materials and mass producing small images to put into little plastic sleeves.  Little windows into the vagueness of my dwindling soul.  Zoomed closer to the minute quivering and seeing the sparks that exist underneath it's anxious surface.

I still exist and I'm not dead and I'm still working towards a larger game plan.  This is another step towards the end point.  It's not forever.

some geographical but also seascape but also nothing - again

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Some days all the randomised computations make sense - they converge into one definitive mission statement when I know why I'm doing this and all the vagueness and fog that surrounded me before disperses and I see the point very clearly.....  That's when I should be putting my thoughts into words - when I should pull out a notepad and grasp exactly what it is that I'm aiming for and write it out as a cohesive and simple To Do List.

an off cut of many tied told unheld moments - a tangle unfinished

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Problem is truth is flexible and mutable and the self isn't fixed.  Dreams and hopes can create a false path which becomes so obviously wrong later in the planning stages.  The truth and self have mutated beyond any recognisable form.  An image is cut from the masses of materials and isolated into a box and treated as if it's something true and valid but then it collapses into something lazy. Losing it's essence and magic.  Some art becomes lazy.  It's no longer right and it's no longer me.

notepad cut and activated in segments

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So at the moment I'm a mass production machine - ramming things together or cutting pieces away. Prefabricated imagery.  Showing vagaries of myself depicting nothing new or unusual.  Like a statue full of living organs.  A mind stuck inside a hollow shell of cement.  There is no shame in this and it doesn't make me feel inferior and it doesn't make my artwork feel any less.  Each attempt is an experience and the output I'm making isn't anyone else's.  Someone could buy a hundred images from me and cut them up and paste them together in a different configuration and make something that looks aesthetically better.  I could program a machine that uses my artwork and permutates all the images I make at a rapid rate producing a image every minute.  

Would that be a hollow version of myself?  Like I was turned inside out and the stone surface was suddenly on the inside?  That there would be no heart, disparity, self doubt or humanity in the images?  

Or would I transgress biological boundaries and is my heart so strong within my work that my spirit or soul would survive mechanization?

reflection on my eye sockets in windows seeing onto street lights or sunshine - hollow transparent empty

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The work that I'm most pleased with since starting my EBaying are images like the above - these images don't seem to sell as well as the images that I think as being more average and typical.  

I'd love to reproduce the image above or something like it on a larger scale.  For me everything about it works and it keeps working despite. 

dead islands floating flames - words scrunched fake and numb

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So best not to take my self criticism or self appraisal too seriously.  I change my position often on a day to day basis - mistakes are all part of the process and it's better to make your own judgement on what's good and what's bad.  Don't allow what I say to have too much impact on what you like and what you don't like because in all honesty I'm not really that clever.  Despite my big words a lot of the time I'm not applying those big words properly.  The text on my blog can be completely ignored and you are welcome to deduce my feelings and motives for yourself.

clockwork archway multiple solidified.... squares repeating dirt

More images on Ebay.  As usual click on the images or the links below to bid. 

the raining structure with words of repeating elsewhere

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Been thinking that my artwork is less detached from reality than I thought - that perhaps the intention is to depict life the way it is and the way it will always be.  There's a variety and also a sameness which coexist and blur into a solid unpredictable predictability.

Having objects on a table is different from having the same objects in a bag but the actual act of gripping an object and moving it from one place to another is a bodily function.  My house keys have become an appendage - apparatus for an everyday physical task.

Our object, hands, faces and brains link us to the world like chains - creating a peculiar prison of repeatable experiences.  Life is a collage of objects, bodies and souls.  None them seem to go together well... they all contrast against one another... confused and alone but coexisting in the best way possible.

It looks like a real mess when you look at it all at the same time.  So it's probably best not too.

squares onto organic

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Limit perception and into smaller compartments.  The grass is over there and the sky is up there and my house is over there.  This doesn't take into account the surprises and you need to always be on the look out for.... intruding elements from compartments your trying to avoid - like muggers.  Therefore it is folly to isolate all the nice elements and eliminate all the intrusive elements.

The above image is pleasant green but full of paranoid potential pit falls that can be defined even if they are not there...  See the red squares accumulating transparently.

the non - end

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And in the night it's even murkier - dangerous shadows and bin bags that look like people.  Private detectives parked outside your house with listening devices.  Faces at the window whilst you sleep.

olympian mutant body solidified in voidful entrails

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Then in sleep the brain jellyfies into some shapeless thing and starts throwing together all the compartments of your head into some kind of melting pot where everything ever combines into some mess of imagination.  The awake and nervous idiot is smelted inside a pancake for what will never be an eternity.

central configurations city from multiple views through it's floating broken parts

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And then the whole of everything - all the buildings I've ever passed drop down with me into this vat of illogical fluid.

Watch them float and recombine in better orders.

Heavy lines drawn around their borders all in imitation of their necessary shapes.

the archway's true face green open diseased buildings within - and the world still on fire

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Though all the time deep down there is something central and tangible.  Solid and real.

An object/place to aspire to.  To live in and to live as.  A central pivot of myself - a metaphysical spinal cord that thinks and supports - making me better and bigger than the sum of my parts and the sum of everything.
If it were a tangible object it would be made of some old rusty metal, brass perhaps.  It would defy gravity and all expectations and it would be an ornament, an instrument and an entity.
It would live through death, Armageddon and God.

clockwork of flawless mechanism - intuitive dirt

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Perhaps it would be built from words - words can shape the world.  Words are intuitive and never really ever random - I can make things up as I go along with words and even if they aren't good words or good sentences I've still managed to change how I feel simply by defining it in a way it's not been defined before.  In the paragraph before this one I created an imaginary object that hadn't been there before - an object to aspire towards and to become one day.  I would very much like to evolve into this imagined object - better than evolving into some amorphous undefined ball of light.  

The image above shows words shaping themselves.  Redefining the image they are built around - I think this is one of my better uses of words on an image and hope to make more images in this style.  Funnily enough though my favourite images seem to sell for the less money.  Though this may be an exception as the colour red seems to be very popular.

unavoidable process opens a mouthless queue (shaking hands with the world)

Yet more images on sale on EBay.  Experimenting by putting some larger images on there for £3 and £5 but the first two on this entry are still smaller images at 99p.

mouthless scream as life spreads open entirely without boundaries.  The senseless complete.

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The first image depicting the sensation of the body shutting down but the mind remaining active.  The ability to feel and observe everything around us without organic self distraction.  Entirely suffused in the infinite dribbling of the world's movement.  

The red line along the centre is part of the self pushing through the fog of total awareness.  Dried lips ready to open and gasp for air - flawed survival instinct?

then the opening was incorrect and closing

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Which leads into this image - the ''escape'' from this overbearing everything into a localised brain and body that is part of this opening.... leading to once more being shut in.  Confines of the personality and the degrading of limbs.  Trapped in something limited and searching for some self definition.  

Back to work again on Monday, I need to tidy up and eat and sleep and to become something decent and ordinary.  My parameters are something comfortable if inconvenient.

  

simple organs process themselves

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31 years in total there has been a grating dissatisfaction and incomprehension.  Chemicals pooling and blood pumping through an inefficient and questioning mechanism.  The attempt to fight against this - to state with absolute clarity ''this isn't enough for me''.   

Losing and already lost.  Problem with losing is that life doesn't let you finish the game and go to bed ready for something different in the morning.  The challenges never go away.

the queue to hell on earth - unavoidable life process

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So I equip myself with hope and happiness proceeding onwards with effort and determination through the constant process.  A lot of time left to achieve everything that I feel is necessary.  Everything proceeds less defined and sharp.

It becomes less about winning and losing.  War is an irrelevance to the real mission.  Reasons nullified. Purposes, wants and ambitions are now simply characteristics made two dimensional and stuck in a self made queue.  This is simple and essentially better.  The world and me are shaking hands.

caved distances sharpen into markings for a non geography of empty depth

More images on EBay starting at the initial price of 99p.

sky realtor slurping nothing again

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A sky Realtor is the notion of someone/something up in the air - horrible and intangible.  Kind of amorphously just hanging around in the ether prodding it's long wire thin tendrils all over the world spreading it's spores and making our lives like mouldy bread.  Making all the targets we could ever hope to achieve diminish through our own decay and dust.  I remember when I decided I was at war with such intangible evil - though I think this was just a delusion of grandeur (though surely that's what my brain parasites sent from the intangible overlord would want me to think).

I was thinking a few months ago - in one of those moments when I sit on a public toilet cubicle staring at the door for a few minutes (in a pub or somewhere else boring) - whether I lost my war against reality long ago and that I'd been captured, neutralised, neutered, made ordinary, broken down and defeated.  That my life now is the equivalent of having a spiritual lobotomy where I've long ago lost any concrete reason for why I do the things I do.

arm pivots passes and fixes position through the sparks and recess of empty slips of void

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A lot of my friends think I'm really clever.  But they are completely wrong because I'm the opposite.  I sort of walk around in an intuitive dream like state not really knowing what I'm doing and feeling all together dislocated from life.  Not to say I'm unhappy (I'm honestly not) it just means that whether I'm happy, sad, unhappy, annoyed... under that surface level of emotion I'm not actively learning anything or really developing.  

I'm making no effort.  

I'm operating on automatic pilot.  My day job, my artwork, my home life, my family life, my friends.  It's all just fudged together.  Dislocated elements thrown together day after day into a repetitive cycle.  Not much changing just very slight and very gradual complications to my cerebral kaleidoscope... and these changes are achieved by turning the kaleidoscope around a bit whilst looking through it.  

Much like a real kaleidoscope.

fingers cut and displace spaces with places - two dimensional non geography

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I think proper clever people can hone what they are doing and make it into something better.  Clever people can research.  I have a go at writing but I'm not clever enough to write anything truly amazing simply because I'm not painstaking enough - my brain can't take in facts that tell me anything much about the real world... it's so lost in it's own inside world that reality has no bearing on it.  So that means I'm just as bad as the intangible evil I was going on about in the first paragraph.  I'm amorphous, undefined and shapeless.

So if I'm so dumb then how can I explain what I'm doing and what the purpose of it is?  Other people who know me are probably the best to ask rather than me because their answers for why I'm doing what I'm doing are better than my own.

the true sky builds road markings for secret cavaties

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This may explain why my thoughts often formulate themselves in conversation - like different parts of my head are babbling to each other.  Almost like a separate stream of thought that is in opposition to my usual stream of thought.  I used to wonder which stream of thought was me.

The 2nd stream of thought became manifest in my head when I was about 11 years old - I actually thought there was something wrong with me... I probably wanted there to be something wrong with me as that would explain why everything at that point in my life felt wrong (High School.  Need I say more?)

slow flashes blur into defined edges

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So for a long while my head had two different characters in possession of it - they were both me of course but at the time I did wonder if the argumentative and uncooperative 2nd stream of thought was a form of possession.  Perhaps an alien.

It all seems a very silly now and obvious when viewed rationally - I never think that I'm half possessed by anything anymore (though that would be exactly what my alien demon brain parasite would want me to think).

non animals of UNdefinition sharpen from fullness

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Anyway I went on this tangent about developed a 2nd consciousness because I was talking about how other people's analysis of me and my work is more valuable than my own.  Since my mind split into two different thought streams at age 11  my mind has since then been split into several thought streams at once - this doesn't go on all the time but when it does it's what I call DVD commentary mode.  

Sometimes, suddenly, I'll imagine a conversation that people I know are having when I'm not there.  This usually happens when I'm walking down the street which might be why you may see me murmuring to myself.  In DVD commentary mode - a group of my friends are sat inside my head watching my life through my eyes and giving an in depth analysis on what I'm like and what I'm doing.  

I actually quite like it when this happens because they usually say quite encouraging things - so it's like a reversed paranoia.  

caved distance pillars highlight depth

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So in conclusion I'm not at all clever and the people in my head are much cleverer and their analysis of myself and my work is really really spot on... I wish they hadn't put me on automatic pilot and that one of them could take control of my brain and steer me in the right direction.  

Autonomy and intuition is all well and good for a little while but one day I'd like to actually construct something that makes 100% sense.  Something dripping with context, subtext and other very relevant text.  

Something that isn't described as being a something but as being more than a thing - something that is really really something.

Apologies to all my very valued friends who I don't talk to very often.  I think you'll find it reassuring that you'll always have a place not only in my heart but in my head.

31.12.12 - 9.12.12



NOTES PAGE AT END OF DIARY.



31.12.12 - and so it's new years eve and midnight is about to go by - the end of the year is usually all fireworks and celebrations.  Not here.  I'm not under the illusion that anything is going to change now unless it's me that changes it.  It gives me a chance to start a new diary, slimmer, more compact and purely for organizing  rather than making a collage a day (as I do that anyway) - if the new diary ends up looking cool I may post pages of it on here as usual.  Everything changes but only due to my own schemes and plans - if I didn't have a system of doing things every year would just be another year of doing nothing and staring at walls wondering if the cream white has started to go yellower.  Someday I hope to be able to choose what colour I want my walls to be. 

 

30.12.12 -  difficult to determine how harmless this path is.  The future does look completely ambigiously threatening.  So not ambigious at all.  More knowingly and menacingly vague perhaps.  The future is unavoidable.  What if our intuition is our heads remembering when we've lived before - our minds screaming warnings from repeated lives - ''stop smoking before it's too late I died last time''. 

 

29.12.12 - marriage sounds like a great idea and really would quite like it to happen but like with everything I can't help but ask questions like How much would it cost? Isn't it all a bit me me me? (or us us us).  Getting married is cool and you get to wear an outrageous suit and it can be a celebration of love but is it all just for the sake of it and do people do it because they are supposed to? 
More questions in constant rotation grinding through the answerless.  I think I'll just keep doing my work and allow things to happen when they happen rather than critiqueing myself over how normal I am and where I'm going with my life.  I'm going somewhere.
I hope.



28.12.12 - The above looks like a moomin being sick and having horrible visions that make it go crazy... which is perhaps why it's being sick.



27.12.12 - and then shooting out of Doncaster back into Manchester first thing in the morning - all vestiges of Christmas gone almost as if it never happened so this bleak frightening image should have no reference to it.  Except for maybe that bit of red tinsel in the corner - does that symbolize hope?

26.12.12 - Boxing day.  Similiar to Christmas so this is virtually the same collage.  I didn't get the train back to Manchester as trains weren't running to Manchester at all.  In fact no trains were working.  I'm sure I've got the train home loads of times before on Boxing day.  Difficult to remember though.

25.12.12 - MERRY CHRISTMAS.

24.12.12 - Christmas Eve in the office and then catch an immediate train back home to Doncaster.  Generic work collage soon to be followed by generic wrapping paper collages.

23.12.12 - cleaned up the left over xmas and then spent a very productive evening getting everything done ever.  The flat ended up being tidier than anywhere I've ever seen apart from my mum's house and as well as getting loads of art done I've also managed to watch quite a lot of television.  Was wanting to stay up all night drinking strong coffee and going mental until I have to go to work first thing in the morning but don't think my constitution or endurance is up to that these days.  I'm such a 31 year old.  It's such an effort to stay up after one in the morning these days and I used to love staying up late on my own so much.

22.12.12 - my first xmas in my flat with Rachel Jarvis before I go away for the other ordinary xmas with my family.  The best present I've had for ages is this.  Though admittedly the shirt covered in woodland animals was very good.

21.12.12 - wrapping up Christmas presents for my first Christmas before the main Christmas.  Two christmases this year.

20.12.12 - wrapping up Christmas presents for my first Christmas before the main Christmas.

19.12.12 - explosions null and dull in contained spheres of activity biased away from helping anyone much unless they are nice people.  In a position to judge.  Not a good thing.

18.12.12 - the sheet full of school admissions information that i've been drawing on since I first got transferred into the contact centre - been wanting to cut it up and stick it in my diary for months but then i wouldn't have the information anymore.  So I took the trouble to photocopy it finally.

17.12.12 - Christmas shopping afterwork.  Suprisingly quiet and fairly inexpensive to say I bought quite expensive things.  Maybe a paycut for a slightly nicer job wouldn't be worth it.

16.12.12 - headache meets claw hammer.  "Fight pain with hammer but too much hammer would make me dead."
These two labels have no relationship to one another - but putting them side by side does look unusual.

15.12.12 - the first signs of Christmas canter through the fog in the form of a postage stamps.

14.12.12 - A really bad headache enables me to have a day off work but also disables me from being able to do much of anything else.

13.12.12 - the many unhappy and happy face icons that appear on screen when dealing with traffic and parking penalty charges - the ones with eyepatches are for bus lane penalties.  I really like the pixelisation. 

12.12.12 - an hour or afternoon scribbling in different colours (limited to blue, black and red) sometimes wonder what my artistic output actually is - i do seem to produce an awful lot of work - it's getting to the stage where I'm not actually remembering each image - think this is the folly of producing mostly small work but in vast quantities - perhaps the work is less memorable due to it's volume but also perhaps that gives my body of work a vaster sense of scale and also does my constant critique and questioning of my self and the actual relevance and worthiness of the work actually make it more honest?  More questions unanswered and to be followed by more questions until I forget every question asked in the first place.  Leading to the same questions being asked over and over again.  Which explains (does it really?) why my life and artwork feels like one big recursive loop.

11.12.12 - statistics swallowed and spat out into an insignificance.  Calls per hour, Adherence, Total service requests, Latenesses, Absences.  All of these are irrelevent in a job I'll possibly never be very good at due to lack of wanting to be good at.  Is this disrespectful in the economic climate where supposedly no one can get a job and your meant to keep your head down and carry on being unhappy in a position you weren't born for?

10.12.12 - character design for the book I'm working on at the capacity of 1% a year. 



9.12.12 - another typical Sunday to do list.  Next year's diary is a lot smaller being 4 days per page (with a notes section at the end of each week) so will likely use loads of tippex so I can write more tasks in once they are done.  This will probably make the pages thicker but not as thick as when they are covered in bits of card and paper.

cellular within groundless landmass dark sleeping dominance arrange tangled illogical drops of self

Here are four more images I've uploaded onto EBay.

drops of self bring dark to the arcade

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New Years Eve is coming up soon.  Not to be a killjoy but I'm not particularly interested in going out.  'Drops of self bring dark to the arcade' is a description of what happens when you combine me with a party or nightclub.  Perhaps because my teenage years were quite antisocial somehow I just feel really false and empty when I go out into these sorts of places - simply because I miss all kinds of social cues everyone else is wiser to.  I've tried clubs and parties quite extensively but didn't really get into them because, for me, they were a bit rubbish and made me feel like more of an outsider. 

breathing tangled landmass of illogical organs

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Outside what though?  And how is the outside and the inside defined and which people are where?  Sometimes I have sudden flashes of what is either complete empathy with everyone or complete self projection over everyone everywhere.  All of a sudden it appears like everyone in the world feels exactly like I do and is dealing with the same disorientation, dislocation, discontent as I am.  That all of a sudden every conscious mind is staring at the same focal point of nothing and feeling total despair.  I don't tend to get this feeling much these days think it's stopped due to not going to nightclubs anymore and also not travelling on long bus journeys.  I've pointed out the similarities between the two in a previous entry for an image called ''heads multiply in limited tubes of ruin'' which is a description of this possibly shared sensation of being trapped.  The above title is also a description of confinement but confinement of a different sort.  It's different to a shared experience of being trapped inside a bus or night club and more along the lines of being trapped in life.  Being trapped in life is much nicer than being trapped on a bus though - and much more colourful and exciting - but it can make me feel ever so slightly dumb and hazy - almost as if every movement I/we make is done badly and that I/we should be thinking things through before I/we allow it to keep moving but despite my/our entanglement the world keeps moving along regardless of my/our dumbness.  The only alternative is death.  And death is proper rubbish.  So it's better to carry on living and enjoying the bright illogic and just hoping to see as much different types of it as possible before the inevitable.

9 spokes arrange in the groundless

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I've also covered death on this blog before - here it is - think I've probably covered most things that go through my mind a lot - though I've not covered ''9 spokes arrang in the groundless'' because I'm unsure of exactly what that really means....

I can hazard a guess.  In the image above there are 9 lines emerging from a central pivot.  Although the central pivot can't be seen within the chaotic colours - so the chaotic colours are the groundless and the nine spokes are arranged and organized in this groundlessness.  

That was pretty much a description of what the image looks like and what I think it's depicting but as far as I'm aware it's not really meaning anything at all.  I could extract or conjour further meaning from this title and the image though i would be inventing it after the production of the image meaning that it wasn't part of the work during the creative process but invented afterwards. 

Is that really bad form and should all my art mean something? Does it make me unworthy as an artist?  Answers on the back of a postcard. 

dominance without but within ascendance

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The image above is something about power but a pure sort of power - along the lines of what God has, or would have.  A kind of selfless dominance rather than a silly kinky dominance.  Ascendance is the key word in the title to distinguish this as a purer control.  Though if anything were truly pure it would likely work against the way the world worked.  It would, perhaps sweep the world away on a massive tidying up mission because it likes it's house clean.  The above image is sort of like me when I'm getting ready to hoover. 

sleeping cellar cellular

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This image began as a piece of notepad paper from a few years ago.  I've collaged over the top and coloured over the words I found least interested and allowed the words that stood out to my unconscious to remain.  It's like automatic selection - similar to automatic writing except it's words being selected rather than being written.  A word/image experiment.  The words selected are ''ascension ascending feeling marked out pushing simultaneous whirlpool self audience over ever third every toy''.  Read what you will into that.  Whatever it means I'm sure it's good.