Lonely Bee

Friday 28, October 2011

inate terrors curdle and crystallize

like a flimsy organ wincing through wind

wheezing on lumpy air, spewing out chunks

torturous missile engraving on my stomach

acid curls outwards like a ribbon and congealed in bows

Saturday 9, July

As though they are doused in fluorescent light from hope, affection and contentment. The colours in everything are bright in front of good lighting.

Is red a literary colour? I think it is. Primary in it's boldness, like a fervent equivalent of black, printer ink. Maybe I should get fake red hair again.

Wednesday, 29 June- The Blanket Weave

I have come to the realization that loneliness is nothing but an illusion. When asked "Who are you?", a typical response is that the "I" we think of, is a kind of secluded operator that controls our bodies from our mind which is completely separate. Our descriptions fall immensely short of who we are though. They contain nothing about our internal organs, the way we breathe, they say nothing about how life is impossible without our place in time and space or interacting with other people/things. We wouldn't think of a flower without a stalk connecting it to soil and without water to soak into the soil to make the flower grow. So why do we think of ourselves entirely removed from our surrounds? Philosopher Alan Watts, suggests that we are each like individual threads in the blanket of reality. If we pull, tighten, damage one thread then other threads clump around them or break away.  Reality is woven together in pattern.

That is perhaps the most well-phrased reasoning behind my current work with patterns. Interaction with the author of this blog http://www.thinkpast.com/ , and my interest in, the similarly candid poetry of Allen Ginsberg, makes me re-examine my usage of pattern. Rather than using them to criticize dogma I would now like to turn these works into a dark reflection of modern reality. So in doing this I have adopted the circle concept of a Tibetan, Buddhist mandala (which represents that inter-connectedness of reality. http://www.religionfacts.com/buddhism/things/mandalas.htm)

So I begun by drawing lots of patterns on grid paper, like in the last post. Now I have increased the complexity of design.

 

Finally, I would like to find a manner of printing or copying them in a way that I can retain the complex design and make tiles of them that are about 20x20cm. Then I can collage them all together, to make a poster-sized print of them all interlinking. I will then merge the patterns with photos or images representing other aspects of reality.

Monday, 27 June

So in regards to images I have been playing with at this point.

And now I need to start finding images to combine. So I can create representations of this time, where people and places dance, writhing in these patterns of human entanglement. (Though do ignore the colours. This is pure design and I just fill these things to make editing.)

Fleeting patterns. Residual joy.

I just recalled my password to this sight, hence not updating for a while. In the mean time, I have found some incredible moments of joy. I feel as though the last three or four days are a continuation of a dream. Like a prolonged moment of consciousness. Nothing feels particularly important but everything is so beautiful with a kind of ethereal glow. I feel like everything, including myself, is just woven through a kind of universe pattern that we can't see but we all know is there. Like perpetually changing threads of something that comprises reality, all we can see is the pattern of change. I think this is what happens when you fall into moments of joy with someone that are fleeting moments but reside in memories that dance like a ballerina on repeat video. https://picasaweb.google.com/102633729999897508670/PatternProjectionsShopped?feat=directlink#5506953507057394834 (I've been thinking)

I was going to work at lifeline today before I see Anneliese (to work on the book about Brisbane) but I think I need to draw something of these woven patterns on grid paper. I need to re-interpret life into patterns because they've changed :)  I'll post my drawings and our plans and any work we do on the book this afternoon. (particularly now that I know my password)

Portrait of Friend Arthur as Kraken. Interlaced with pattern

Friday 17, June

Thoughts about a project (a book I'm working with with a photographer friend) are churning around in my head like a jumbled soup of recycled brain waves. Perhaps that just means I need to document them in my more stable diary-blog format. Initially I wanted to work on a children's book illustrated to show characteristics of my local area. I think it is now connected with a more morbid, sincere vein of thought.

At my friend's suggestion, I've been looking at the work of Joel-Peter Witkin....- A talented photographer who shows rather grim, almost carnival or freak-show pictures of confronting subjects. These images are somewhat grotesque but it resonates with the idea of a local environment morphing with individual perception. Eastern philosophies even suggest this, in the sense that you are the world you see around you because you and your environment can never be seen from anything but a very personal interpretation.

I would like to think that I didn't perceive the world around me in such a morbid way, and I don't, but quite often I find myself in unsettling nightmares of this type at night. I tend to re-interpret them into my visual art, just like the symbolist Odilon Redon did. I work in polar opposites to not lose sight of the entire spectrum of interpretation in it's whole. Which is why I do things like painting pure abstracts and photo manipulation or life-drawing in the same intervals of work. Also I need to balance morbidity in art (like these images) with opposites like joy and humor.

This book I will be working on will show all ends of this scale in relation to people's interpretations of the city we live in. Like how morbid events taint an otherwise normal place, positive happenings can cause places to connote something beautiful. I guess that's also the basis of how advertising functions.

With abstract photography, painting, drawing and imagery we will document the connotations in their diversity. I'm still thinking this through but hopefully there will be grants and exhibitions available for this project.

The apples are fresh if you're looking right....

If you copy yourself enough times you become very large.

After waking up this morning I read Keith Haring's journals for about an hour. At some point during this, I just got "it". I mean in the sense that even though I understood everything he wrote the whole way through, something just clicked and I just "got" it. At which point his artwork's became awesome to me, rather than just interesting art done by an eloquent man. Is that the whole game of art? Just making people feel like they've not just bought a gift token from your mind but they really "got it". So then I tried something I've never had an ability at.... simple, comical drawings :)

Sunday, May 29

Fluorescent cascades of lights... visceral in glow,

Protruding, orange lips connect wiry, sheers of flesh... taught and glistening,

Party plastics whine outward... running dribble of brine and lard,

The walls ache, like a congested artery... the bacon leaks misogyny,

Wednesday, 25th May

I've been working in a primary school today. Once a week I come into a school in Brisbane to help kids (working as a teacher's aide) do a collage art project. After the release of the Jeannie Baker book entitled Mirror, http://www.jeanniebaker.com/mirror.htm the children are examining at the juxtaposition of any two cultures that look far apart at first glance and are creating a collage of two similar activities done differently. These are meant to form a kind of "cultural mirror" to each other with slight (or drastic) differences. We are considering the intersections of cultures and the points where we all meet in spite of our inherent differences.

This is a first major art project for a long time in these classes but even so, after walking around talking to these kids, (most of whom, come from distant cultures and countries) I found some of the most delightful examples of creativity coming from their diverse backgrounds and home lives. In their own naivety of age, they already show a much wider cultural understanding than the average white, middle class people of my own age.

We haven't started our collage processes with them yet but I feel almost enlightened being around an audience that attaches none of the derogatory connotations to social stereotypes that almost everyone (in different ways) gets engrained in them with an exposure to social dogma.

I can only hope that the little stint in this job will eventuate into an opportunity to do similar work (even elsewhere)

I have also done some more staining on my own piece of plywood today.

(an appallingly grainy photo I admit but my technology is failing me at the moment)
I would like to stain into the dribbles below the two eye like circles a little more and start drawing into the grain with an ink pen. In the top (lighter area) I don't want any hard lines but I would like to make more subtle washes of that amber varnish to bring more complexity into the grain.

I've been cutting into the wood this time and letting the varnish slip into the grooves. In this light I might not actually use the ink pen again and simply repeat this process a little bit.... I will definitely have to have a think about this though. I am tempted not to think overly at all in regards to this though and just let my pure intuition guide me. So now I'm not just thinking about what to do, I'm thinking about thinking about what to do........... maybe I should be sleeping now I think... :?

Friday 20 May, (10.00 am)

After my last entry I spent some time playing with an old image I had drawn a long time ago. Sordid as this picture is I want to do something similar. But I want the purple waves that are around them to be formed of wood-grain instead.  There should be a comical character like these but based on the fat-scary dude in the Health clip. But he will be emerging in a similar kind of rage from the grain of wood.


Also in addition to this gruesome character I will need to be drawing and staining into some wood again for him to appear in. So this morning I have gotten up with a very clear set of things I need to do. And I have already been hopping across to the mitre 10 to get more wood. I found these two peices of ply and now the adventure begins. Though I might go see a series of really interesting indigenous works they have at GOMA today beforehand.

Journal 1 Thursday 19th

I'm definitely starting to get worried that I have a limited ability to focus for extended periods of time. Lately I have been making and thinking about art but It seems slightly unproductive for some reason. Maybe it's because I'm not producing anything with a clear set of goals and timeframes and that kind of nonsense. SO... to remedy this dillemma I figure I will do what I set out to do with this blog and make it a very frequent (daily if possible diary that anyone can read or not be bothered at all).

I figured that this is what I feel should be happening with the internet anyway. A way for communal creativity Where people can work on other people's creative ideas and combine them with their own at their own will. So here I go...!

Today I got up and spent the first 2 hours of the day watching you-tube videos of noise-rock bands. This one really appealed to me. http://vimeo.com/10818338  ... and my day felt somehow better since I watched it. Then I spent some time reading the journals of Keith Haring and I keep getting really amazed that they almost document the same crap I've thought over in my practise but with an intangible diffference.

Then after reading this and feeling an almost manic happiness all morning I want to document emotions. In a raw way. I want people to feel something when they see art. I want to feel things when I see art. Because this is what I think the purpose of art is. F*ck putting concepts in art. Art is an excuse for all people, regardless of race, sex, age or wealth, to indulge in something as ephemeral as emotional response.

I've been working on wood. This is my first attempt at staining it, putting some black ink on it and cutting into it. I want to show the grain of plywood, like a Japanese architect trying to reveal the nature of the raw material. I want this kind of rawness combined with the same emotional rawness of the Health video clip like in the moment where he is about to knife her. The rage on his face. And like the prolonged moment where she realises what she just did.

Escape Philosophy? no no... Enter Artistry

I still had ingrained in me a possibly misdirected kind of hatred for the elitism of academia and lots of philosophies that are prevalent in the society we live within. So to circumvent this or perhaps find truth in it, I have started to attend ARTALK cafe's organized for nights by the UQ Philosopher and the curators of Switch gallery Dr. Gilbert Burgh and his partner Leanne Vincent. We speak about philosophy and art in a group kind of communitive inquiry that exclude no-one. I must admit both my preconceived assumptions regarding academics and the Ipswich suburb itself are already fading into a memory of error.

We are looking for a kind of respect and understanding for other people's views and interpretations of our affairs. Hence it has been fueling and playing into my own series of abstracts that embrace an existentialist type of personal touch and interpretation of our environments. From this ideas community and the mindset that underpins the desire to comprehend other people's reasoning, Lucy Somerville (my housemate) and I will create an illustrated book for children that is neither didactic nor trivial but shows concepts like context and the independent human necessity to associate images and experiences with meaning. It will be implicitly set in the West End community.

Furthermore I am hoping to expand on the concept through some kind of series of coinciding abstract art exhibitions and public discussions about the desire to relate images that are intentionally disassociated from reality back to real concepts and images. Are these concepts themselves abstract? Is abstract even a REAL idea?..... I think I've lost myself already. In future projects I hope to find myself and work with others. Will keep this up to date.

Raw Crannies and Canvasses of Nook

After ages of being at home without a stable job, making and researching art I have finally come to a point where things are culminating into a place. The "Night Parade Collective" is a group of artists including the treasures from deep inside Australia's cave of Bat's- Todd and Claudia Manion, Figurative drawing artist- Emma Fitzgerald, photographer of macabre beauty-Anneliese Melaena, conceptual artist Todd Heidke and Wade Tuck with his encyclopedia of semi surreal, invented wild-life. After joining up with the night parade we will be exhibiting at and Ipswich community gallery for the first time next month.

In a perhaps misdirected effort I intended to start investigating the realm of surreal type animals to attempt to mimic the work of my colleague. So I began under the assumption that surrealism comes from a human's unique interpretation of their environment. and I began to paint nooks and crannies from inside our apartment. They have presented themselves as nothing more (or less) than a raw collection of abstract interpretations.

"I Can" art exhibit

I'm currently exhibiting at a gallery in Fortitude Valley. I'm very pleased with my input into the gallery. I have been exploring elements of Hinduism and looking at them from my very "outside" kind of perspective. I don't know of anywhere in this city where Hinduism is practised and I am really unaware of people who follow this belief system. Perhaps the closest I have seen of these cultures are just the collections of associated trinkets sold in Chinatown. My research has been collected on the internet and also certain books of a British philosopher named "Alan Watts" ( The Book On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are). So it would really be falsified if I claimed any true knowledge of Hinduism but I do now have a knowledge of something completely different.

In my search through these western interpretations (for a western audience) of Eastern beliefs I came to understand that the nature of things is the entirety of everything it is and everything it isn't. It's just inseparable. There IS no being without the concept of a complete lack of this. Vedanta Hinduism, from things Watts indicates, believes that the whole universe is in an endless cycle of a kind of an on off game. Which applies to all values. So that's what my artworks showed. Images of superimposed beauty and grotesqueness, architectural type lines filled with very natural (almost wiggling) paint strokes.

Lines moving between on and off, white and black

The architecture of flesh

 All exposure is good. It's also good to have a purpose of actions. I now want to move to a series a paintings once more that don't tell you anything. I have noticed finally that whilst I like dearly so so much contemporary art, I am thinking that a Benjamin esque urge to replace feeling with concepts is creating art that doesn't necessarily make viewers "feel" anything so much as just "criticize" something else. I don't know what I think about that observation, but I just have a burning desire left in me now to create artworks that are only to generate emotions. I am  look at expressionist and minimalism schools of art in particular. I'll keep you updated with my attempts to discover something raw but beautiful........