Deconstruction of Falling Bricks

Some of you may have been following this story on Facebook, I did become quite obsessive about it and took as many photos of this slowly demolished building as possible.  I my eye on it all day due to it occurring outside my office window for the last four months I was working for Manchester City Council.

I'd been working for the City Council for quite a few years and took voluntary redundancy meaning my contract finished March 2014.  That's the uninteresting part of this story.  This is the story of my unlikely non-friendship with a collapsing structure.  Here comes all the personalized, irrational but knowingly just metaphorical stuff.  The collapsing structure could be seen as a physical manifestation of the end of my time working at the City Council.  The gray facade was torn from the face of the building, revealing all the hidden colours.  Almost like how my job had given me a bureaucratic facade and as time went by the mask had to slip away for the real me to reemerge... now that's turning the metaphorical into the pretentious... but I don't mind so much about that.  Pretentious is as Pretentious does.  And Pretensious writes a blog.

It wasn't like any ordinary demolition.  When I was young I remember Edlington's pit being blown up in an amazing explosion.  The whole structure tumbling down in one fast organised collapse leaving behind a blackened undeveloped wasteland.  The explosion was exciting to my 4 year old brain and I wasn't of an age to appreciate the political ramifications.  I had a vague concept of Thatcher as a pantomime villain who stole milk from children.  To be fair on my four year old self he likely had a lot more political knowledge and awareness of current events than I do now as a thirty two year old.

In contrast to the last demolition I watched this building was taken apart in slow motion.  I'm assuming it was taken down in this fashion for health and safety reasons, though a friend told me that they might be selling the bricks so they'll need them all intact.  Either way the deconstruction method could probably be googled and that would give you a more satisfactory answer as to why some buildings suffer this slow unravelling. This entry is more about how interesting I found it on an aesthetic level.  Like a form of archeology. Looking into other people's past lives, their taste in colour and how well sign posted their fire exits were.  How a dull, boring tower block can have under it's surfaces such vibrancy, and that even in council flats there is a taste for bright colours.  Not all council residents look live like Mike Leigh believes them to.

So I would check everyday, see it from different angles dependent on my position.  Discovering that there was not just one of these buildings but two of them.  If you have ever been to this area of West Gorton you would know that there isn't a great deal to do apart from smoke.  So the arrival of this rough, colorful character into my life became something of a fascination and I thought about it on a multitude of levels, some of which I can't actually recall or even put into tangible words.  Or in other words ''I'm not sure I can be bothered trying to put them into words.''  Perhaps this is due to a lack of words in the english language to define my feelings or perhaps it's due to me feeling that to reveal them would be telling too much about myself.  The main reason though is that some of the levels were very silly.  Needless to say though I did have an appreciation and at times an actual affection for this building in it's dying days.

The broken building became something important for me to chronicle.  The more it was taken apart the more the imiment change in my own life approached.  The idea of leaving my job before the building was destroyed seemed like cheating, it needed to be destroyed on the last week of my work.  Progress on the poor thing was very slow for quite a few months, so it got to a point where I feared my visual journal wouldn't be complete and that I wouldn't be there for the broken building when it was finally torn down.

Around this time I started to get into pattern design.  I started to see the world differently and the real world started to feel like art and patterns.  I started looking at everything in different ways, seeing pattern potential in everything.  The fact the building was being destroyed meant that it's pattern would be lost forever, but also it meant that it would leave a new pattern behind.  That being the issue of existing within time and space everything moves and changes.  Patterns and art are a way of fixing life into some form of permanence. There was nothing permanent about the broken building or my job at the City Council and most importantly for me to remember that there was nothing permanent about me.  That I really am adaptable and I am capable of changing.  At the time this was very frightening.  I wasn't sure what I would become and still feel like I'm in a bit of a chrysalis.

A few years ago, possibly around the point I started this blog or not long after, I actually felt I had reached my full psychological apex, that I wouldn't ever rise higher or change into a different sort of person ever again, that I had reached the middle of my life and from this point onwards I was a fixed point.  This doesn't mean that I was incapable of achieving but that my core characteristics were always going to stay the same, whether I was living alone, with people, with a cat or with whoever I would always be the Garth Simmons that I had become.  As the building was taken apart so was I, and within the ghost walls I began to think more about the real me rather than the trappings and definitions I'd inadvertently put on myself.  This is good as those definitions had become very old, tired and predictable for me to live in, sometimes they were actually frustrating.  But it was strange and scary because I had no idea, actually still have no idea, what it is that I will become.

And so it ended.  The last week of March.  The whole thing broken down and turned into piles of dead brick.  I got the bus away from West Gorton for the last time.  Leaving behind the dead shell of a departed friend not to mention some lovely co workers.  In this blog post I've attempted to make the mundane epic or perhaps make the epic personal.  Experiences somehow change their substance when put into words, ''mundane'', ''epic'', ''personal''.  It all was what it was and all these things happened and now the future feels vast and indomitable.

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.