Painting is Good for the Memory

Like a dream, painting is a record of the artist's memory, both conscious and unconscious. How strange to look back on my (unfinished) painting, based simply on a photograph of an anonymous man on the tube, and find that within it there are signs of what has been occupying my mind.

The horizontal strokes of the under layer were, at the time of painting, quite basically representative of a train. In retrospect, they remind me of my habit of standing at the very edge of the platform as on the edge of a cliff, as the train passes. It's sort of the same feeling - the soul-swelling wind and seeing something dark and moving. At those times my eyes are at the front of my mind and various questions of mortality quiver a little, as the wind makes them cold and the vibrations make them shake. Milliseconds of madness. I've been catching the tube much more often, and this has become a frequent occurrence. The tube, at times, is an intense experience.

This intensity bleeds into some other shapes I make in my mind: well-crafted fear, a wise old fear, cunning and smooth at the edges. The fear of the noise of the tube (why the fuck is it so loud in London?) and the fear or just plain being here with a paintbrush in hand and a makeshift palette, deciding what mark to make and worrying all the time what mark I will make. Here and in the future. Whether it matters at all. And all the while telling my brain to go fuck itself.

In my half-painting, there is definitely fear in the lack of colour, but the loudness of this all really isn't there.

For Luc Tuymans I think that is the point. Max told me to look him up. His colours are muted like the ones in my painting. Often his subject matter is relatively dull as well. This is deliberate. He uses the banal to paint the indescribable. Here is his Still Life (2002) painted for an exhibition about social and political engagement, for which he was expected to make works based on the September 11 attacks. "It is a monument to the inadequacy of language" (Saatchi gallery).

Perhaps there is some vague unintentional link between my unfinished painting and his paintings. His paintings are muted but represent the intense.

More 3D Constructs

   

Everyone Should Do Life Drawing

        
To represent the act of being human and alive.

This prolonged concentration always makes me feel like I have come out of a very long sleep in which I dream of muscles and joints and skin. Then I wake up, get out on the street, and everyone is suddenly naked.

Lines are more discernible and colours are clearer.

It is one of the few times that one is conscious of another more than oneself.

This lack of self-consciousness lingers for minutes, sometimes hours, afterwards. It is exhilarating.

3D constructs

Peace of Art

3D Spatial Drawing 

Went and saw some of the 'design trail'/anti-design fair on Redchurch St. At first I wondered through some white rooms looking at shiny tables and low-rising lounges, cushions painted with computer-generated images, minimalist colours.

I thought, dudeman where is the anti?

It wasn't there and I felt too dirty anyway so I left.

Tonight I was walking again down Redchurch, post-rain. I stopped because of some delicious looking blue light emanating from one of the shop windows, bouncing off large pegged-up paper. It was prints! Fine-lookin' screenprints!  There were fresh ones on the walls and hung on a rack like clothes. Ace. John inside informed me that they had transformed the small gallery space into a printmaking studio for anti-design week. I could see the work and the progress and the people (brownie bits and beer on table next to printing mesh and frame). I picked up the zine they made each month (Barebones).

Unlike the furniture designs in the white rooms, it brought the viewer closer to the creator (shaking hands in fact). It was evidence of designers/artists using the festival as a celebration and performance of creation, not a contribution to the crisp cold commercial orgy that is a lot, but not all, of design.

I didn't feel dirty in there.
  

http://hereticprintmakers.blogspot.com/

  

Conclusions on Design and First Day Three Dee

    
My end manifestation of VisCom final project - something involving cereal boxes - confirmed for me that ultimately, despite their impressively clean lines and pressed shirts, designers always have to compromise. Sell out to sell it. Make money to live. Whilst I'm still young I won't bother with this pragmatism. However the two weeks were, above all, enlightening.


I am a little disappointed to learn that essays have been phased out of this course. ACADEMIA IS NOT ARCHAIC.


The first day of 3D spatial was challenging. It was structure over aesthetics, at least in our group. The additional dimension is a bit of a mindfuck, but probably in a good way.

Spontaneity With A Brain (VisCom Rotation)

So far, it has been a much appreciated goad to enrich my work with a conceptual base. To think before and WHILE I create. To master the balance between preconception and immediate action (smart spontaneity). However I still vow never to be a graphic designer.