Casting off moorings.

I had spent a little less than a month working on portraits, drawn or painted from photos, and then, unannounced, this face emerged.

He stares out of the page, an unsettling presence.

There are stories to imagine, none to tell.

Well as far as I am concerned he was a piece of recreation.

I simply played with colours and forms until it said stop.

I stopped to contemplate what he or it might mean for future acts.

I find working purposefully, in a concentrated manner on study , on technique, tiring but valuable.  I realise that this will be a constant source of frustration but also a challenge and a potential source of satisfaction.

I am not really sure how the idea of completing 30 portraits came about, it just did.

It is this path which arouses my curiosity, which begs me to retrace my steps.  

Taking bearings.

Why, I ask myself, does one image attract at a particular moment? 

There are people who have an eye that I treasure.

There are people who have a way with words that inspire.

There are those photos that come back to me that I go to search for years after.

What determines this toing and froing from, repetitive technical exercise to recreation?

Instinctively, intrinscially motivated moments of studied effort, concentration, intermingle with instintively motivated moments of freely formed, instinctive creativity.

The monster can't appear without the work on portraiture, the monster can't appear without the freedom to create.

Mapping not tracing.

Mapping most often involves taking knowledge of the lines of others inorder to trace one's own steps....

I suppose what I find so wrong about much of classical education is that teachers don't wait for students to naturally and instinctively search for answers, for mastery, to their own personal questions, to map out their own personal paths.

Most of the time creativity is not called for, only unthinking tracing.

I find myself taking screen shots of the artwork of others, as reference, as inspiration.

I find myself watching documentaries retracing the artistic paths of others. 

Moments of serenity, moments of despair....

I think again how objects, images, memories become markers on our maps, moorings for our lives.

I think again how motifs model meaning.

I think about the challenges to accepted motifs and the creation of new forms of art.

I think of how loss of attachment, mooring, meaning, leads us to fearful despair, confusion or outrage.

Tides, waves, lunar movements...

I leave people and portraits and find refuge in landscape.

As I draw, I branch off, my eye drawn around the room.

I glance over at my bookcase and see the  mountaineering section, the aikido section, the Stanislavski and Chekov books on acting, the various tomes concerning educational  research from the past ten years.  Each section represents moments, hours, years of attention, enthusiasm, passion, and its waning.

There are seasons, tides, reverberations, which somehow connect in my thoughts, memories, writing, drawing, painting....

Living for many years on the coast, moving backwards and forwards between two countries separated by the sea, looking at photos from series of annual trips across the channel, the sea is a constant motif in my existence.

“There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?” 
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

Casting off moorings.

Strangely, time appears for this work, when time before appeared absent.

How is it that after so many years, I find this time to paint? 

Maybe, I have cast off those moorings that were holding me back.

I find a poem on the Mooring image from Wendy Taleo. It finds its place somehow here.

I don't really know why it is that I am pausing here to write a few notes in this "ship's log". 

I had become fed up with words.

They appear here to punctuate the flow.

One more time with feeling...

I know it when I feel it...

There is a starting point.

It isn't a photographic image.

More than an image there is an urge.

First strokes of a brush pen.

I am taken up, defined in a curve.

First angles, first volumes of the body.

Whose body?

Whose body will it be?

Verticality.

Crosshatching.

Lettering, familiar scribbled lettering.

EXHAUSTED.

Change implement.

Where's that red BIC pen?

I need that red BIC pen.

I need it's cut into the paper.

I need it's disresepect.

I had some time, some peace, some desire.

Going back to school.

I had been working on my drawing technique, academically, like I used to do at school.

I hated it.

There are moments when my soul erupts in revolt at constraints which I have accepted being imposed on myself.

There are moments when I feel the need to return to basics - "What the fuck is perspective?"

Oh that loaded word "ARTIST".

Oh I hate labels: writer, artist, academic, researcher, all that malarkey.

We are all imposters.

I feel reassured learning more about the voices of artists behind their work.

Picasso that archetype who would altenate between "studies" -  careful "drawing" and apparent flourishes of revolt.

The artist was inseparable from the man, the lover, the refugee.

A man who at times fell into despair when thinking of the appearance of photography.

What should an artist do when faced with "photorealism"?

"I might as well kill myself"... he thought.

"Picasso decided to paint what he felt not what he saw."

Flashmobbing...

So I am tagging along with INKTOBER...

Who are the artists, hobbyists, inconnus in INKTOBER inseparable from?

DISMALAND INSTAGRAM? 
DISMALAND TWITTER? 
DISMALAND FACEBOOK?

What the hell am I doing here?
What the hell are we doing here.

I can only speak for myself.

I have enough context of my own without questioning that of others....

Stop asking too many questions.

Do it, fuck it, do it.

Do it if you feel it.

I am accepting the constraint, the weird prompts, the challenge, pushing myself to submit to the crowd.

I want to find out where it will take me, what I will learn along the way. 

Writing here, now, is my way of finding my way, of reflecting on the task in hand.

I can feel that crowd, that mob excitement, hysteria  violence even in INKTOBER.

Doing "INKTOBER" I feel distracted and perturbed by the stream upon stream of cartoon monsters.

I feel alienation from fucking venomous superheroes, fantasy novella charicatures, Disney fairies, princesses, princes.

I look at the profiles, hobbyist, artist, please DM for commissions.

I wonder at times what the fuck INKTOBER means?

What does it mean to me?

What does any flashmob drawn together mean?

What does it matter?

It doesn't matter.

Do it, fuck it, do it.

Is it a community, a souk, a gallery, a supermarket, a trading floor, a show?

Yes, all of that.

Do I feel alone together?

I feel at times that I am in Mangaland, Mangledland, Dismaland perhaps?

Dismaland...

I was reading yesterday about Banksy's Dismaland.

"Banksy's Dismaland: amusements and anarchism in artist's biggest project yet."

Well actually I was reading about his pièce de résistance (really?) the shredded balloon girl.

Banksy artwork self-destructs after selling at auction for £1m – video https://t.co/2jpCZK2aXf

— Simon Ensor (@sensor63) October 7, 2018

Good old Banksy, apparently he's added 50% of value to his shredded and signed screen print.

He's even been tagging on to a Basquiat exhibition.

Basquiat's value is ballooned with rarity as a member of the 27 CLUB.

TWELVE GREAT ARTISTS WHO DIED AT THE AGE OF TWENTY SEVEN

Banksy is already too old, too knowing for that.

Two new Banksy artworks appear on wall of Barbican centre

BRITART.

I have been studying artland these past few days....

There was Damien Hirst laughing all the way to the bank...the richest living "artist".

Sharks in suits, sharks in formaldelhyde, cows and calves cut in two with chain saws.

Jewelled skulls, subcontracted spot paintings.

Then there was Francis Bacon and his abattoir art.

Abused, deranged, skin canvas scarred with life.

He had skin in the game, and blood on his hands.

The lunatics have escaped the asylum....

Art is an asylum, it appears....

I watched a great documentary about "Outsider Artists".

And I think to myself, that art or this stuff here is indeed an asylum, a means of escape, or is it the only real way not to escape?

And I think about the self-promotional reputational economy in academia, in artland, in celebrity land, or in sham-democracyland.

 I feel a desperate need to find escape or at least to protest.

I suppose whatever the motivation behind the lines, between  the lies, behind the dollar signs, behind the hashtags, behind the crosshatching, there is something innately moving about this human need for scratching out an existence thus...

We are caught quaking between light and darkness, finding shading between sense and nonsense.

How shall we flesh out our bare bones?

Who will choose which marks of ours live on?

Who the fuck cares?

We all end up in shreds.