Friday 18 November 2011

London swings

this is where i'm off to for the best part of a week, starting tomorrow. I'm leaving behind a half started painting of Bonnie and Clyde laying dead in the poppy fields of the wizard of oz. No snow will wake them up, no wicked witch had sent them to sleep. Though i'm aware of the ideas present in the combination of those two images, of youth and innocence, of a violent passage into fantasy, of home, it's more the origin of those ideas which i'm interested in, the images themselves. The combined force of two cultural icons - hitler and the eiffel tower, for example. You can't really take those images at face value without being aware of the stories behind them, but you can't have stories without imagery of one kind or another (and i include words, and imagined images). By imagery, i mean something which the story can be hung on, words, for instance - spoken, written or sung.. It's the medium which contains the idea, and the medium which can inform the idea, and which you respond to and argue with, and take with you - the medium, the imagery.

London, a place i'd like to live eventually, although not permanently. There are many places like that. In fact i can't think of a place i can imagine wanting to die in, to stay permanently. From Alaska/Norway (one of the two), to Romania, Dudley, an old wooden shack in the woods, Manchester, Scotland, Berlin.. maybe the daytime in the woods and the nighttime in the city.. who knows, I don't really want to stop anywhere. My indecisiveness will kill me sometime, somewhere, perhaps between the second and third stop on the 7.23 train to Edinburgh. I don't really want to grow old, not old, more the lack of independence is the worry. How can you be independent if you commit yourself to something, somewhere, and without independence where's the life.. A reason for indecisiveness perhaps. Or a denial of the present situation, that without committing to something, you remain in a sort of void, floating between alive and dead, committing only has the appearance of being permanent, but really it's not, you can always go back, claim you made a mistake, change courses.

I didn't get the job i went after, but i'm kinda not really bothered. I'm annoyed that it cost £30 to travel down there and they couldn't even give me a reason why not. But really, i see so many people going through the same thing, and without a job they aren't doing anything, i'm painting, i'm animating, i'm making a comic, i sort of feel like i'll be alright anyway. But every job that passes comes with a sort of mourning, that that was a route things could have gone, but didn't, that was the life that could have been. Mourning is comforting, but i have no interest in pursuing lost lives.