Artist Statement 2024

 Artists Statement 2024

Throwing away the paintings I did when I had low self esteem, feelings of worthlessness, depression, living in the city. Throwing them away is the final stage of release of that trauma. Letting go of that part of my life. 

Along with it comes the throwing away of all the boxes of card-stock and cardboard stockpiled for painting and crafting projects. At the time it felt I did not have time to do everything I wanted to do. However, I did not know that in the pressure-stress of thinking I had run out of time already. 

The huge problem was other people interrupting me. Other people getting in the way with unhelpful comments about how my creative process is a psychological disorder. It’s not a psychological disorder; they are. They are impacting me negatively and disrupting my productivity. When they supersede it damages my self-esteem and prevents me finishing my art. When I ignore them I win because I have confidence from being productive. My purpose of being alive is as an artist, not as a punchbag for negative peoples superiority disorders and power games. I would have been more productive had they simply left me alone to get on with it my way instead of criticising me for doing it my way. 

Throwing away the art which did get finished, because it had attachments to a negative time of my life when I had less self belief, is cathartic. While it does mean a potential loss of income - the one picture stored here which I did show someone else won me a £2K bursary; to put estimated value on the other pictures, most of which nobody else has ever seen. They’re all taking up a room full of space in my house which is considered to be a mental disorder of hoarding by most people who are aware of the situation. People who don’t care enough to actually ask to see the paintings it must be added. 

The process of making art is recognised as a form of therapy and as skills study, which is more valid to the artist than are the finished objects. I studied the Fine Arts at honours degree level. While the paintings do have commercial value and would boost the local economy if they were to be advertised and sold, too many people have been derogatory to me for me to have any incentive to empower those peoples nation and culture. As far as empowering myself is concerned, I need to segregate myself from any attachments from the previous art and craft materials so that other people will accept me instead of describing me as mentally unwell for hoarding. The art has multi-level attachments to my negative self-esteem. I am told the filling of my space with clutter is a psychiatric disorder by people who I do not show my paintings to because I do not trust them to see the paintings after they grind me down instead of accepting how lifestyle is fundamental to productivity and that an artists studio requires materials and resources stored there along with finished works, to create art with. 

So it is no loss to me to throw my art out, or the resources required to make more of it. Other living local artists only want the unused paints for themselves and their kids instead of respecting my art and my need for making it. Nobody cares about the finished art anyway. I used to but I’ve got the hint from social pressure. It’s abnormal. This has liberated me to see all artists for what they are, and what I used to be myself. Art is a product of mental abnormality. All works of art are distractions and delusions no matter what the financial value placed on them by delusional people. 

This decision is liberating for me. To detox from the person I was, someone who struggled to make art and struggled for it to be accepted. By destroying it all, I am more likely to be accepted as a person. I can understand that now. It’s why the mental health people describe my collected sheets of cardboard stored to paint on when I get time, as an attachment disorder to junk, rather than as the tools of a working artist. They have got through to me. 

I would be better with an empty room and no desire to paint. No paintings stored and taking up space. The rare state worker who visits my house would feel comfortable there for all of ten minutes. Which is what this is all about after all. They are the authorities and are therefore the experts on how society should be, to improve it. The problems they cause me will go away. 

By burning them all, I am liberated from all the toxic energies thrown at me by other people. All my charcoal drawings. All my acrylic paintings. They’re bad. They have been bad for me. They are bad for the community. The imagery will be default be bad for the community. They symbolise struggle, depression, repression, toxic rejection of corporate control. They do not symbolise hope, aspiration, success, acceptance, purity. 

Twenty-five years worth of my creative output. It will require a few days of bonfires. I will release to the great spirit all which I have been to purify my way forwards. 

I will be free, I will be happy. People will accept me and say I have healed. I no longer need to make art. I no longer need to waste any more of my energy and time living in a delusion. 

The lesson I have learned is to recognise artists for what they are now. I know because I have evolved beyond that level of awareness into becoming something else. Artists are broken because they do not conform. I accept that to fit in, I must conform. We all should. 

Zen. 

All we need to do is breathe 

until we leave this body. 

It is the greatest inspiration of all. 

Brushwork

One thing I learned from wet ink brushwork 

Make the initial mark 

That’s all you have to do, otherwise it is overkill 

The samurai philosophy of right action and integrity 

Brushwork also emphasises this 

When a person has inner tranquility it reflects in their brushwork 

The philosophy of drawing a perfect circle 

When Picasso went to art school, 

in his interview he had no examples of his art. 

They asked; "how can you show us you’re an artist worth joining our course?" 

He drew a perfect circle before their very eyes and was instantly given a place. 

Try to draw a perfect circle. 

With swiftness and confidence. 

On traditional ink paper, 

every wobble representing lack of confidence and inner tranquility 

is amplified by how the ink goes into the paper

It’s a factor in respecting the artist through the art form. 

A literal translation of the zen stillness is captured on the paper through the ink. 

It is sacred for these reasons. 

So when we apply this understanding to the Western tradition of painting with a brush, 

which is a lot more complicated than simplicity of oriental brushwork, 

we can see the same applies here too, 

in the artists techniques. 

The huge thing in modern art is to persuade artists not to overwork their work. 

Giacometti is a famous example with his technique for sculpting. 

The only examples of his thin emaciated clay / bronze sculptures which survived 

are the ones his brother stopped him from working on. 

All the others collapsed. 

His method was to pinch clay away from them to get them as thin as possible. 

This sort of minimalism aesthetic is ancient and global. 

It is very important as an artist to be aware of it. 

Perhaps know this or some of this or a version of this already. 

I am not insulting your intelligence about that. 

I am attempting to teach what I know

and also to focus you

and also to simply discuss with you interesting stuff 

about art culture and techniques. 

Don’t overwork your work.

Legacy Of Cyberpunk

Legacy of The Cyberpunk

I robotically use 3D cgi tools and processes to build generic urban noir sci-fi environments. 

To base a build on one particular book, I would have to choose: which book? 

In many ways, to illustrate written scenes would make life more simple, it would give me a defined focus. I worry about copyright too much to dabble in fan-based visual interpretations. The workload, time and energy, also are prohibitors. Big Bad 'They' do not require to embed behavioural modifier chips in my skull, I have no wish to be sued by intellectual property owners of my dead literary heroes for connecting to their vision and taking it in a new direction for the new generations. Ownership is theft of Art, the corporate repression of inspiration.

A book would have to be worthy of doing it. 

The question remains, what book? 

I hear lines in my mind of Bowies album soundtrack for a TV series which was never made, comprising half of the Diamond Dogs album; the other half being his own take on the concept which itself fed directly into SLA Industries rpg by Nightfall Games, a wonderfully retro time-piece set in a Warhammer 40K inspired future. Beautiful though their product is, Nightfall are renowned for suing their fans and so to make any work of art based on it is sadly futile; a tragedy given that the nature of rpg games as imagination based and SLA particularly, is that the genius of the vision is in the groups own interpretation rather than the doctrine of the rulebook. 

This is why I prefer to be a genre artist rather than an illustrator of a specific vision. 

My background as a Fine Artist with a lifelong love of paint has led me to attempt breaking the division between raw paint and digital media. My paintings are abstract expressionist, inspired by urban textures. This means both environmental and emotional influences, exploring the psychology of dissolvement between grey boxes which are bland urban mindsets a result of bland urban environments and lifestyles. The dissolvement of rigid doctrines as limiting factors for our infinite creative possibility. For the same purpose as a scientist banged rocks together to make fire, smelted ore to make tools so the mythic realms of dreaming could enter more penetratively into the material, to improve life, to evolve.

I live in Wales where the weather is the the same spectrum as the architecture; bland, gray, rain, cloud, fog, elements which blend with concrete, tarmac, faces, moods, aspirations. It is important to me that my cgi environments retain that painterly quality, their gradients and textures are at once both fluid and wet while gritty and coarse; soft as aether yet solid and hard as a head crunched into the wall. Sci-fantastic and yet real. The disposability of - modern life, culture, lovers, money, emotions, humanity; as a part of the continual renewal which leaves no thing finished and no thing as yet un-begun. 

Our lives a flatscreen show-reel of temporal nature, fleeting feelings overpowering our vision to consume us as a worldview which affects everything we do. Yet which is relevant to nobody but the individual, broken and lonely from experience nobody else has shared: and at once from experience we all feel as a constant drudgery and deny it because we use most of our time trying to escape from it; distractions as we find ways around one concrete box and into another which has a mildly different tone.  It is not the difference which makes he difference but the change which makes the change.

Many sci-fi noir novels fit the bill of this desperately depressing distopia; I grew up in the latter half of the 20th century era of post-modern industrialism, I grew up through the eighties when cyber was a fiction and then the nineties when the internet became a reality. The next generations are filled with optimism so that the discord of gritty gray cities is not something they wish to connect with, therefore my art becomes for me a healing, a healing I would love to share with others but others retreat from in self-preservation. I do not expect those born into a world where cd's are an outmoded relic rather than a thing we saw on a terrestrial tv called 'Tomorrows World', to understand exactly this feeling which I have no word for yet permeates an entire diverse and constantly reinvented multi-media genre. Perhaps that is why it is so compelling to so many people who identify with it even while avoiding it. 

Gray boxes oozing into each other becomes a personal interface between myself and the machine age where concrete emotions means hardness; the only stability. A deadbeat urban environment and social poverty which shaped me into what I am, a maker of visual imagery attempting to express how cold the world of concrete and digital is, cold and yet shocking. I am of that breed, consequence of that generation.

As 3D printers on Mars make Martian concrete from the red worlds rusty dust, calling their high-tech eco-dwells 'Marships' after the Earthships of sustainable, ecological, self-sufficient dwellings retro-pioneered on Earth to get away from the desolate post-industrial city spirit; these steely urban roots from Terra’s grim past will remain, legacy of the cyberpunk. 

3d digital displacement map from photo of painting

example from Gray Boxes series, water-based poster paint on cardboard

jungle journey

< preface

The following is re-blogged from my webjam account which was removed by hackers dec2013. It was originally posted several years previously.

Fortunately I had a copy as a SecondLife notecard accompanying each painting sold from my cyber gallery 'bunker' (the concrete pastiche mayan temple with tree-pod in the picture).

Unfortunately the land rental closed when the landlord sold the patch, so I will have to rebuild the gallery manyana.

http://www.rainforestconcern.org/                                             http://thefreeenergygenerator.com/

JUNGLE ART

a series of 33 images and accompanying text

the alchemical elements are symbolic and the concept is 

SHAMANIC JOURNEY

"Anarchy disguised as bureacracy, disguised as police state, disguised as democracy."

~Snakeappletree commenting on Life in britain.

I was taught in school the common understanding that oil comes from what once used to be prehistoric jungles; forests that have rotted down over aeons into a high energy liquid. I find this strange to believe simply because oil floats on water, so logically the oil should be floating on top of the ocean or in time have filtered down into the seabeds. Instead, somehow all that primal rainforest ended up underground in subterranean cavities, only to be extracted millenia later when Mother Nature set her children the task of refining it and filtering in our movable petrol filters into heavy metallic gas.

Thinking about the processes that have to occur to result in that situation is mind boggling. Billions of years in the making and then... a flash of combustion and a thimble of petrol ignites, is catalysed into carbon monoxide fumes and eventually filters into the soil to stunt the growth of existing species.

I have faith that Gaia, the holistic Life force of this plan't, knows what it is doing and the reason behind the chemicals ending up being filtered into the soil is to add a new sort of nutrient for the new sorts of creatures of the future, which will evolve after this current phase of global die-back. Microbes and mutated plant types, most likely. It has happened before, this we know from the fossil record. And it happens rapidly. Meanwhile this thimble of oil is instead used by me in the form of paint, varnish and pva glue to make some lush fresh pictures inspired by the jungle. I made these a few years ago, 2005 or 2006.

This series is about Process. The process of making abstract expressionist art. The process of thought involved with making a painting, deciding which colour, which brush stroke, how to arrange apparently random splatters, how much to use haphazard spills in creating this image.

Prior to making these images and thinking these thoughts I was wand'ring around in a british woodland, consciously picking up and placing sticks that had fallen from trees. My arrangement of these was such that some of them had obviously been consciously placed; others I arranged so that they looked as if nobody had touched them at all, that they had landed there quite naturally and without interference. In retrospect I can understand that I was exploring and deconstructing the decision making process itself. Questioning the qualifiers we use to judge.

Prior to my attending and during Art school (cheltenham university class of '99) I studied Jungian psychology and the Primitive in art. The Jungle, the forest, is metaphor for the inner wild, the subconscious, the primal self stripped bare of judgement, stripped of labels and the labeling system in our minds which program our observations away from true seeing, the Pure Gaze. A breakdown of the artificial constructed memetic grid, the systematic belief structure that we superimpose into the world and mistake for reality.

Wand'ring around in the forest and then making these images became a cyber-shamanic experience for me. Not only in the sense of their construction process but afterwards, the object we are left with, a bunch of petro-chemicals and wooden board (a cupboard door retrieved from the overgrown ruin of an abandoned house) temporarily bound into a form the surface world of which invokes emotional and psychological reference points, an inner journey partaken in by the observer. The images become signifiers of stages or scenes of that journey. It is a journey of transition.

This series is about processes and it is also about change; transition. Change being the only constant (other than void). There is light-sensitive colour changing paint mixed in with the other pigments here. What I observed during painting was that when the paint and pva dries it loses its sheen, its intensity. Subsequently it became necessary for me to take digital photographs of the work in progress, recording the process.

Still moments frozen in time.

~Snakeappletree, 2009

IMAGERY AVAILABLE HERE

no need to re-upload the pics because i found my other back-up

ceremony gate

< preface

Lived events, footsteps in a new direction which is at once a deja vu of treading ancient path. We have walked this route before, when we were others, wearing others body and mind; so our ritual passage is both a sacred awakening and a continuity. Tarot imagery is drawn from passing such as this, what Yaqui sorcerers calls Mystical Passes.

When we access the Otherworld by this way we are in a groove and the most befitting symbology, if we do it justice and do it right, is primal and basic. Every nuance of personal derailment from that path makes it unique for us and yet more difficult for future selves to follow. Our complexity is streamlined through the gate, it is the eye of a needle. 

I wrote much at the time regarding the passing and wrote it in paint and with pencil. I found as i wrote that the imagery was writing itself, my body a conduit for its manifestation, the flamboyancy of my studied skill mere wallpaper around the principle form.  I borrowed from my studies, symbols easy to recognize and dance with; as is their pagan purpose. The prose, struggling to remain a direct account, becomes poetic; dancing wild with the heart as it has to, for this is the only way to tell it true. To do it justice and to stay within its play, this is necessarily the way.

Imagery to follow.

Ishtar is Itza

< preface

During my mid-twenties, the first decade of the twenty-first millennium, my research revealed the following revelation:

Ishtar is the name of a Babylonian deity, a Goddess whose concerns are Love, War, and the fertility they generate. During my teens I danced with my then-partner through the Processional Walkway of the Goddess which is currently located in Berlin Museum; together we entered the Ishtar Gate.

Itza is the Mayan word for 'city' although a more proper definition is 'the ways of all the people'. Upon reflection I saw that the ways of the people are, essentially, the fertility generated between love and war. In a single word i would use 'urban' since we are indeed and increasingly an urban species, building our own habitat in the same way as is natural to other builder species which we cohabit with.

I X A where X represents ST or TS alternately ZT or TZ; the serpent on the cross motif.

The Mayans associate Itza with the Fifth Age, which in their galactic calendar renews itself circa 2012. This coincides with the western astrological Age of Aquarius, where 'the christ consciousness' previously associated with feminine Isis energy, becomes mainstream.

Christ, Chi-Ri-ST, associated with the preceding age of Pisces symbolized by the fish (vesca pisces, relating it to the sacred well concept).

The word ISIS symbolizes the pure flow of both ida and pingala streams of the kundalini flowing perfectly in balance; the internal and external worlds perfectly mirror each other, are one and the same. This is the lesson we are to learn as a species during the era of the fifth age. 

The following series of my art is dedicated to this concept and entitled 'Ishtar is Itza'. It is intentionally urban, and intentionally multi-layered both in technique and references. Obviously this takes it into the abstract. The main of the series is two large canvases, one entitled 'Itza' and the other entitled 'Ishtar'.

The rest of the series deals largely with the concepts involved with urban human culture as summarized by love war and fertility, and is multi-format.

The project is expansive involving use of computer game engines to create labyrinthine 3D environments as well as 2D computer art augmented from digital close-up stills from the over-layered painted textures.

ITZA

The painting palette and techniques are minimalist; black, white, the grays between: from the scarred patchwork of tarmac and cracked concrete which our urban habitat is constructed of, to the city lights at night where halogen blends through mist into the crisp inky darkness.

Fat paintbrushes for smudgy splodges, thrown and dribbled marks, haphazard and accidental like spillage in the street; are finely cut and repeated with cardboard edge, spreading the paint in lines using the same technique as for cutting up lines of cocaine, the speed of life of the city.

Layer upon timeless layer; the history and the future of this place are equally the same as this present scene, that being a stage, a momentary gate in a process of continual progress, toward a goal we cannot fathom beyond its own perpetuation and changing nature.

 

IZTA

Her eyes are bisexual dun black, soaking in her domain and nevertheless the most intense blazing light; dark matter, the hidden secrets that 95% our environment remains obscured despite repeat patterns of our lives, generation after generation.

She wears a bourka for high fashion and religious protection, emphasizing her personality through the look she casts. What we say about the city we can say about her. She is virgin, innocent and whore, wise mother ancient spirit and young child needing the support that makes us what we are; by providing it or by taking of her soul.


Thus we become her, she who lives through us, watching endlessly and steering from realms beyond our senses. She teaches us our limitations and offers us freedoms. Without her venom, we suffocate in our own stagnation.

process art

This blog is by way of a Preface
to a series of interconnected blogs showcasing my art.

See links to other related blogs.

It has been a long time since I last painted, other than a brief splash eighteen months ago which produced the start of a series that has not been returned to yet, unless the divergence from the mind of the artists aspiration and vision, from the actualized works, deems the continuity to be taken as a whole for what it is despite the artists intentions and influences. How an artist categorizes internally his or her own work, compared with how historians categorize the same.

Exploring that is a huge part of what my work is about; in a word: PROCESS. It is inseparable from subject.

The deep and intricate background feelings and observations of an artist about the subject matter; all the stuff a casual viewer doesn't get to see; the write-up to justify or explain the are object. The invisible processes at work to create a finished piece or series. 

As a virtual adept of the marvels of computer augmented art (ie: Photoshop 2D, Cheetah 3D) utilizing digital technologies I find the smooth transition from a painted canvas (or in most cases reclaimed board or cardboard) through photography into cyber environment to be a natural continuity of the act of making a painting. 

Most often the canvas is discarded as a biproduct in favour of further development of the piece, through the pipeline, through a blog and into the perception of the viewer. One canvas becomes a whole series of digital stills, becomes an interactive environment within a game engine and an Oculus Rift headset. Electricity is now a crucial raw element of the artists tool set. Oil and Acrylic have become graphic tablet. I do not at this time own half of the products I am talking about, it is illustrative. 

Links:

Jungle Journey series

Ceremony Gate series

Ishtar is Itza series