A long time again.Busy with local community involvement and garden is a challenge in the wet warm summer we are having. The image above is a mod of an earlier work but much more obviously involves still graphic digital methods. The thought processes are essentially the same as when I draw or paint 'analogue' but of course the rapidity with which one can make, test, reject, accept results is astonishing. This work does begin to capture the edginess of 'being here now' for me...I'd be really interested in opinions on this.

On the domestic front I have started on a small mediterranean garden in front of the studio doors...this to be my 'wander and ponder' space when I am thinking and working.

Hibernating...mentally

Just noticed how long since I posted...guess my usual end of winter greyness overtook me for a while. Still preoccupied with an issue about static artwork and its ability to reflect the current era. A recent conversation with someone while gaming on the internet revolved around how the 'unreality of virtual reality contrasted and heightened real experience' That is it makes the importance of tangibility and real world 'transactions' more significant or renews 'novelty' is the way to explain it! So I have a feeling this forces some sort of renewal on me...its not 'painter's block' I'm feeling..its interminably long gestation of ideas...heigh ho a case for working patiently through a lot of dross I expect. Oh....I didn't really do so little for a month or so ..bathroom being decorated and garden furniture painted and studio space being steadily cleared.

Doing it anyway...

Can you understand the dilemma of creating yet not wanting to create a product line ? It's the root of the eternal complaint of the working world...wanting people who can 'do' not just think. When will schools supply us with prepared labour!
Creating is often about internal dialogue which occasionally surfaces as of some general use. Just lately I have made images that seem to be summaries of past thinking, coalescence to a milestone. This image is just such an image using computer graphics yet in many ways a very traditional composition and subject matter. It somehow encapsulates all of my past thinking with current experience and 'lives' at its best with the luminous glow of the display screen. I have always been attracted to the triptych. The oddness of a group of three needing the completion of the fourth...the viewer, is very real to me. It also offers the possibility of story telling. Are the three just part of a bigger 'comic book' of life?

Diversionary events

In common with just about everybody else in UK I have been distracted by our 'real winter'.
Opposite my home there is a dairy farm and the yard is a focus for the local bird life during hard weather as food scraps, insects and shelter in the barns are available - this picture of the 'congregation' in the usual tree sums it up. We also have a local Buzzard I am just itching to get a pic of when he occasionally sits on a nearby post.

Streaming existence

Today the BBC News site carried an item on 'Childhood'
It brought to mind several episodes of thought ...
There are issues I remember from my early years, such as the sense of exclusion and having to wait patiently to become a 'grown up'. Later a realisation that we are a social organism. Without groups of at least 2 in the first place we do not exist!
We have a human skill to understand and manage by subdividing...time into millenia right down to parsecs, lifetime down to babyhood, childhood, teenhood,adulthood.
It is easy to lose the holistic sense of self, an individual in the continuum of our lifetime, even easier to lose the sense of group identity of the species that over arches all of us. I have all my life had a conflicted set of concepts ...individual ambitions as against a sense of stewardship responsibilities, how I envy those who reconcile this early in their lives. The news report (link above) makes a good deal of the problems of overemphasis on individuality and its effect on young humans can this be a route to a new social sanity at last?

Stuff...

I have always been intensely interested in images and what they do for us. We surely realise that by the objects we own and formally display we project what we want others to believe of us. Blogging opens a new zone...It is interesting how people often display pictures of their homes and parts of their homes that would be considered definitely informal...those things that many would rush round to tidy or even hide before visitors arrive for example...For me these pics reveal another 'layer' that we all understand but have not seen as important in 'Art' terms. They give hints about the day to day dynamics of our lives, the threads of continuity, rather than the landmarks of coalesced ideas that formal art and ideas of how we live often are. They further inform our collective humanity in that they often reveal how similar we all may be rather than emphasising differences. The actuality - Blogging - seems most of all to be a collective celebration of our humanity! How we live is what we Ar(e)t!

7. 'You cannot collect all the Data'

One doesn't have to think very deeply to realise the truth of this and then the question arises...
We therefore always operate with partial knowledge, how we handle this is how we live.

6. 'Screensaver thought'

A painting can be a complex, highly personal, customized ideogram, complex in the way a cinematic or televisual image may be but uniquely characterized in permanence and stasis. This is my current 'screensaver' thought. A 'screensaver' thought is that state of affairs that one is left holding while having to do other things...the thing to which you must return before resuming.

5. 'Encryption for Thriving'

Supposing a person is a memeplex - Life is such a lottery - could we manage our own programming...

4. A propos...

One of my indulgences has been a small collection of British studio pottery...here is a piece by Peter Moss - it is just a phone pic and deserves better...I'll do something about that.

I love the sketchy scratched lines ...I think they convey something about the nervous energy of our times and the form has something of a classic column about it as a foil.

3. Why do I think pictures are important to me?

I am highly susceptible to visual stimuli and navigate in life largely on visual cues. The importance of this is...
1. I respond without checking other channels for interrogative feedback...High risk of behavioural error (e.g. wrong purchase!) except where response is mandatory (e.g. road signs).
2. I have lowered response to other channels...Tends to reduce social interaction and response thus limiting variety and increasing risk of 'failure' to communicate and develop sufficient survival techniques.
So...this skill I have to draw and project and to compress data and 'read' compressed data also carries huge risks (that have taken many years to comprehend) and now at last I can feel 'happy in my skin'!

2. What does image making do for me?

Images can cope with speed of thought, complex conceptual mixing and projection of 'virtual' states of a concept. They are minimally consequential in their effects on resource and time when development and experiment are a high proportion of the activity. Images can also be 'aside' from daily experience to the extent that we can take time to assimilate and assign their role in our lives both subliminally and intentionally. Visual imagery is a powerful shorthand but also contains many risks.

1. Diving In

Nearly two years have passed since, weighing the prospect of two more years of work against managing my own time and money, I took my pension early even though all the usual financial caveats were evident.
So now in a new home 2 years on, much as planned and required, I can pursue my own thoughts and dreams at will...

to be continued...