It's Time To Get Sexy, No If's, And's or But's

Okay so it's been a productive day.  Taking an idea and thanks to my new toy actually being able to rattle out a fair few ideas.  I approve.  Biggest operational problem is that it's so hot in here and leaving sweaty smears on the paper.  This can be fixed in Photoshop but it's still something I'm going to have to sort in real life.  For these sketches and playing about, no worries though.  

New toy: lightbox!

More adult, but in a non-explicit way.  Sex and sexuality, sensuality and memory.  Interesting starting point.  

Crazy minimalist.  Don't know how well this is going to play with everything else.  

Anyway. so I do not forget: What the hell am I thinking?

I guess, this all starts with the pandemic.  Being kept on my own since March has given me a lot of time to think and, well, remember.  The things I miss the most are the people I miss the most.  I miss the feeling of being around people.  Online communication is no substitute, for the most part it's a lot harder for me. 

Thoughts contract.

I miss people.  Persons.  I miss the feel of being with people.  I miss the feeling of people.  I miss feeling people. 

People touch you, in different ways.  Emotionally, intellectually, sadistically, abusively.  but the one I miss most, the one I focused on: physically. 

This is where it gets a bit more personal. I am an 'always switched on' person.  I cannot relax, or stop thinking about things.  I worry, I stress, and nothing can stop this.  Nearly nothing.

I'm also a very sexual person.  And not just in a hurr hurr horny way. The act of sex, the ways people express themselves, the various ways sex has developed as a cultural force.  The why's and what's of sex.  I am an intellectually sexual person. (note to self, this still sounds off, rewrite later) I am fascinated by sex and sexuality, sensuality and why people do what they do, why I do what I do.  I am curious about everything to do with sex.

So sexuality is one of my driving urges.  I am closest to those I am intimate with.  It makes life complicated, and I am still hurting from that going wrong.  But here's the thing:

Fingertips trace memories on my skin.

These works are memories.  If you close your eyes and remember how a person touches you, then these are a pictorial representation of that.  Tenderness, caressing, forcefulness, intimacy.  Yes, that dreaded, terrifying, wonderful intimacy that I avoid at all costs now.

As before when my clay work was more creating my memories into shape, so this is in a similar vein.  

There is an ambiguity to these pieces, they are just hands.  What are they doing?  To my eyes, it is obvious, but to those unfamiliar?  It's hard to find images that fit my memories that are still clear enough to isolate the handiwork. 

Where does it go from here?  Well, I need some more varied source images to play with.  These are good, but will get to be too hetronormative for my tastes soon.  Then it might turn into a case of upscaling them?  Selling prints?  Oh, so Capitalist of me.  

For now, I'll just build up a stockpile of images.  These might even be able to be used in the screenprint workshop in some way.  Just keep pushing forwards and see where the steps take me.

Self hate for fun and profit

Okay, personal post.  I haven't slept,and I'm waiting for some meds to kick in so I can eat.  Bit of time with nothing to do but think and write.

I am struggling right now.  Overwhelmed and angry.  Lonely and sad. The days stretch away filled with emptiness, and that doesn't even make sense.  I feel so very lost, and uncertain of my place in it all.  I hate myself and everything about me, and the fact that nothing ever changes me. I can't go out.  I have no outside to go to.  My neighbour checked in on me and told me I look like a caveman and that's the only real human contact I've had in months.  I'm not good at talking to people, and online interaction doesn't feel real.  I miss having another soul around me.  A specific soul?  I talk to people in my head, a memory made manifest, except it's not a memory because it never happened.  A longing made memory, fantasies of a life that even before this pandemic I had been forced to lose.  And maybe would have remained that way but for a chance encounter.

I'm losing myself in all this.  I don't even drink to stave off the loneliness and boredom anymore.  I'm too poor, or at least, I'm afraid of being too poor.  The threat of being cut off from the government safety net looms large and I am rationing out what is an 'acceptable' spend, yet I find myself comfort eating and spending more than I should, or what I feel I should.  And so, I hate myself some more.

I hate my neediness, my constant need for validation, to be told that not just I matter, but that what I do is good.  And even then, top tier good.  I have to be the best.  And told it.  Such a fragile ego.  

Honestly, I don't even feel like I'm a very good person with all this. How can I?

I don't know myself very well.  I feel like... you know when you meet someone for the first time and they just give that vaguely unsettling feeling?  You don't like them, don't trust them, but you don't know why?  That's how I feel about myself all the time.  Constantly second guessing myself and trying to be all things for all people because I don't have a sense of self to anchor to.

I don't know how long I'll post this for, or even if I will.

Update 07.06.2020

So, who wants to know what I think of whats going on right now?

#BlackLivesMatter (2020, Procreate, digital)

And if you disagree, get the fuck away from me and my art.

Moving onto personal stuff, I've found it increasingly hard to create these last few weeks or so.  The heat and lonliness that online only contact cannot compensate for have thrown me for a bit of six.  I have ideas that I want to work on, but I just cannot.  It's a pain.

The best I can do is make dumb little digital art pieces like this:

Abstract #1 (2020, F12019, Playstation4)

Which have been created on a Playstation in the photo mode of a racing game.  At some point I think I should get it into photohop and try and remove the game stamp, but is that honest? Which again makes me wonder: What the fuck is art anyway?  Crippled by doubt and my own lack of self esteem, I need validation and that is the one thing I do not seem to get.  Or at least keep.  My narcissistic ego is going to be the death of me.

The last thing I created.  A TF comic round robin affair.  A group of different comic creatives all take turns in continuing a story.  No-one knows where the story will go after they have finished their page.  My pencils, layouts, inks and script, and two friends letters and colours

.https://twitter.com/tfroundrobin

for the rest of it.  It's ongoing over the summer and for as long as we can maintain interest.

Post Assessment Musing

Well, it's a pass.  The first half of the first year of my Fine Art degree has been cleared, no problems.  Biggest takeaway is that I need to find a theme.  

Which I have, but it's a fairly nebulous one, an idea of a feeling.  You cannot tell people how you're feeling and expect them to truly understand.  Your experiences are yours alone and no matter how hard or how well you explain them they remain a private experience that others may only guess at.  Similarly, you can never truly know what another is experiencing.  It is the way of things.

So, I need to bring theme to a form, that I can push and explore.  I think that is the angle I'm expected to push.  Which I can do.  That would be easy, but it would be boring.  It's there already, I form I have explored in paint, clay and an abortive attempt at solarprint.  (Thanks Covid, for curtailing that).  I have already made plans to integrate the clay and a separate wire sculpture.  I need to make more of the clay pieces, but they have taken so long to be fired (the first one was fun to make but so badly done that THREE MONTHS drying time wasn't enough for it to be fired safely) that it's make me wary of going back.  That and the sensual experience I had being something I'm very self conscious about...

    

I think that's a theme.

But can I commit to it?  That's the question.  I do tend to feel stifled when restricting to one thing, I kinda need to explode in all directions.  Well, I have a few weeks now to ponder my next step, and then a year to find a theme.

Mid Pandemic Flailings

Artistically, I'm flailing.  Not sure how to create what I want to create or even if I should.

Art, to me, now, should be a reflection of one's self, one's existence.  Hold a mirror to life, reflect it and shine it out anew, distorted and abstracted as though through a prism.  And that is what I strive for.

To me an artist isn't someone who just makes pretty pictures.  An artist is a creative, a thinker, a philosopher.  Driven and pushed by urges and instincts that they cannot explain.  This is my life, this is what I leave behind, this is my statement.

Big words, big ideas.  In an academic sense, something to be crept up on, snuck up and approached over three years with an eye to creating a shown work at the end of the year and a culmination at the end of the third years of Work.  

I haven't created for a few weeks now.  I want to but something stops me.  There is fear.  Fear of going too far, of being told I am wrong.  There are...  valid grounds for feeling this.  It has happened before, before I endured so many lost years and now...?  My mind is bubbling, spilling over with ideas to persue, frustrated at being denied access to studios and materials due to this pandemic.

i am encouraged to not do photography

My work is moving towards a darker impulse.  I feel that to create the work that makes me feel like I am creating validly I must push in a direction that will not be embraced by the safe world of university.

Sex and drugs and rock and roll.  Hedonism and self destruction. Blood and sweat and art that is dangerous to the touch.  

But it's a big psychological push.  Breaking the hymen of social acceptance in my own mind before I even try and do it in other people, when I need, almost pathologically, acceptance.  I don't want to find myself ploughing a lonely furrough any more.  I don't think I can take rejection right now.

needlework

bloodywood

So where to now?  The summer stretches ahead, and I am confined to quarters for at least the next month of it. I hate not working, but I can't shake the paralysis.  Maybe after the results for the first uni year come in this week...  if they're good, maybe that will be validation enough?  Time will tell...

Pandemic Musings 1

So, here we are.  Several weeks into the midst of a global pandemic and labouring under an inept government, the end of my first year of university has gone to shit.

I'll freely confess, I'm struggling to make sense of it.  The plan was to turn around at the end of the year with studio full of work, and say "ta-da, module one complete".  Unfortunately, I;m now quarantined at home (I'm in a severely vulnerable group due to my asthma) and cannot access most of my work.  I have photo's of a lot, but none of my sketchbooks.  Which is where a lot of the development work for this module actually is.

I'm worried.  I'm not the greatest with computers, before this year I'd never made a powerpont presentation.  And now my academic future relies on my making two of them proving that I have satisfactorily completed a module that even the staff haven't thought about since January.  They've moved on. And until this, that wouldn't be a problem.

Agoraphobia

Please end this please end this before it ends us, ends us, ends us

I want to stay inside

I want to stay inside for good

It’s been a struggle to get into a working headspace at home.  I don’t really have a dedicated studio area (city centre flats are not renowned for being spacious) and what little I’ve scrounged is still full of distractions.  Nevertheless, on Tuesday night I attempted a start. My process, to begin with, is almost action painting, I put blobs of colour on the surface, and then attempt to blend and smear them out.  I don’t actually know what this first layer is going to look like until I’ve finished.  This is a new practice for me, as before I started University, I always started with a shape, or a full image to work towards.  This is looser and is a much more seat of the pants approach.  I have no idea what this work is going to look like until it’s finished.  There’s always been an element of that to my work, but never from the get-go.
I wonder if these are too over produced and cluttered, though.  That seems to be a part of it, reflecting the mental state of a person in this position, and maybe as I hopefully achieve a clearer view of where I’m going, the works will too?  I’d like a cleaner, purer approach, but for now, the mess seems better.  Like, I like the clean, flatness of the work now, but I know it must be covered, messed up, made imperfect and damaged.  Psychic self portraits.

Ultimately, I don’t feel I’m happy, with myself, or as an artist.  This isn’t fulfilling, and I don’t know what is.  I feel like I’m just scabbing a wound, and occasionally scratching it a little deeper.  My trips to the British Museum and National Gallery stirred nothing in me, I could see the pretty pictures, appreciate the thought and explain why they were the way they were, but it was just a cold analytical experience, and I feel that about my own work at the moment.

It’s not enough.  And I don’t know what is.  

So feeling a little lost, I return to my sketchbook and work on something, that seems to call a little closer to me.  I don’t know if it will go anywhere, but it is a little more representational, and I feel that is something that I might need to bring back into my work, the illustrative side.  It’s not good, but it’s a start.