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.

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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.

Facebook Page - like, like, like and so on.

I've finally gotten around to making myself a Facebook page.  Its one of those things I'm told I should have done but I've never considered essential.  I'm still unsure whether it is essential yet, though what I have discovered is that every single like I receive provide tiny boost to my ego.  My ego used to be a worthy thing but as I've gotten older I feel much more sedate, so my ego needs an awful lot of boosting.

I've done everything I can within my own sphere of reality to boost my ego.  I've been making sure I get my daily quota of Zinc which has been great for my complexion and the bags under my eyes.  I've also just bought a lovely new jacket, but I have a feeling.  A feeling that if I get everyone in the world to like my art page then everything in our lives will be good.  There would be an end to all wars, all poverty, all extinct species would come back to life and we would take our rightful place amongst the stars.  So just click here and click ''like'' for universal happiness and perfection throughout the universe.



I should probably note that part of the reason why I'm not a massively successful artist is because I'm a very unconvincing salesperson.

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. 

So feel free to have a look and CLICK HERE. 

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.

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.

accumulated slow segments

CLICK 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.''

bad variance

CLICK HERE

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.''

efficience

CLICK HERE

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.''

angles fit unfittedly in jigsaws melted

CLICK HERE

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?