Been contemplating the children's art classes i'm running. One starts this Thursday at the same school i went to (Queen Vic, Sedgley), the other starts in a few weeks on a Tuesday at Cotwall End, both primary schools, kids around 8 years old. The first is 12 weeks of mask making. The other is just general art. There isn't a definition of art, not agreed by everyone, which causes problems, but it's probably more healthy that way. That there is doubt, that no-one can be cock-sure (and retain respect anyway). But i think the classes will be good for me as well, when i get comfortable and confident teaching it'll open up a whole area of work to me. Plus i'm having to research into sections of art which i've overlooked in the past, masks for instance. There are so many different masks, for so many different reasons, they were used in religious rituals, in festivals, theatre, superheroes, for protection, they can be used to both hide and express. The Inuits made masks that transformed from one animal to another, beaks opened and another face would be underneath. They also made these finger masks, which were like rings, but with faces popping out. And then there's Venetian Masks, which are surprisingly talked about very little in the art books i have, but they're beautiful. I think they expressed wealth, but they certainly do it very well; gold masks, eye masks, looking like operatic in some ways, used in a couple of Klimt paintings i think. I even saw a gold unicorn mask online for a horse to wear... like something from Flash Gordon.

So, it will be beneficial for me to do these classes, however anxious i feel at first. Given that it's my first run as a teacher, i suppose it's expected that i'd be scared. I'll get over it.

Monday came, yesterday in fact, and i had my usual block in making things. I just can't figure out what i'm doing on a monday, i can't commit to an idea or a style, nor even know whether i want to paint at all. Same routine every week, i think i should be doing something else. Usually by Friday i'm up on my feet again, painting strongly, wondering what all the fuss was about. This week that feeling has spread to Tuesday (today). But i did read half of Alain De Botton's The Consolations Of Philosophy, which is kind of popular, but that's good. I suppose it's clearer than most philosophy books because it expects and asserts itself upon an audience who wouldn't necessarily know anything about philosophy. Which is what i need and like. But De Botton's a good writer, read Status Anxiety and On Love before now, they're good too. But this includes more of a history of philosophy, and applies different philosophers ideas to how we can live happier, more fulfilling lives. He goes through Socrates, Montaigne, Epicurus, Seneca... I'm halfway through Montaigne's ('Consolation for Inadequacy') chapter, have Neitzsche and Schopenhauer to go yet. It's really good reading.

Also been hung up on the idea that there are so many ways to say things, so many ways to express myself, but i can't think of anything i want to say. That's depressing. Though maybe i just have the wrong medium at the moment... that's depressing too.

Isolate and exaggerate.

Making things look like other things.

Animation and Painting are my two main activities in art, animation i havent done in a while, but i'll get back to it soon enough, things are brewing.

I guess most art is, although often very subtly (like cinema or dance), about making things look or seem like other things. But, maybe it's a coincidence, but the two main things i do are by their nature possibly the most open about that process of making things look like other things. Paint and plasticine, both have very specific characteristics of their own, both rely a lot on colours. Paint is about mimicking what something looks like, or in the case of Magritte, exposing that illusion. Claymation is about making things move and act like other things, making a ball of clay portray some kind of character.

Its on my mind because i saw these paintings by Watteau and Chardin, who i really love, and they were satirical showing an ape painting, sculpting, and antiquarian..ing. As if to say artists who only look and copy are monkeys, monkey see monkey do. But it just struck me that everything starts with reality, wherever it digresses to. Or starts with our view of it, although maybe its a cliche that we all view the world in our own way. I mean, yes everything that happens to us is viewed at through our past experiences and memories. But a leaf or a tree, thats the same for me as for you, maybe i notice more or less or different things about it to you though. But its a mistake, i believe, to assume that Munch or Bonnard or Van Gogh or Picasso or Kirchner actually saw the world how they painted it. To borrow from a Chardin quote, they painted not with colours, but with feeling. They were, expressionists, as all good painters are. Maybe that's what Chardin and Watteau were getting at, that you don't just depict the world, you depict it in your own specific way, filtered through your head. In which case the ape paintings are only half the argument.

Well now i've sort of cleared that up for myself this whole post seems a bit pointless now..

All art is taking something from life, whether it be an image (i won't say surface, cus it's all surface), a sound, a feeling, an idea, an emotion, a dream, a peach, a movement, whatever the fuck it is, and transforming it into something else, via you. It's like following the route of light, from its source, bouncing off different things, and fading out or being kept enclosed, only you never actually see the light itself, just what it bounces off. I think i've lost myself with that analogy. Here's some paintings that are 'for you'-

It's not just about that.

Am also very much in love with that word Pentimento, which was commented on the last post. It seems to sum up so much more than painting.

2 out of 3, bine. Nu foarte bine though...

Like i said, i had three paintings on the go; my nephew, Connor

Which, though reasonably competent, could be better, not just in likeness, but quality of line, colour and composition.

The other one was a painting of a painting, and that painting was old and weathered and flaking and cracked, and in places where the paint had fallen off, another painting could be seen, obscured.

Which, similarly, isn't too bad. I think it's a bit like Magritte, conceptual, comments on art, a bit, i suppose.. I have a fondness for it anyway... so sod you.

and then, the third one, a painting of  a dog in the foreground, and a fight in the background...

Only i havent quite finished that yet.... ah well. But it's a lot bigger, and more recognisably, and creepily, me.

And i wish these retarded spellcheckers would stop trying to correct my English to American English.

comsauandiaufdihudshiuhaoonaon:p

couple of hundred years ago we'd have seen a meteorite streaking across the sky as some sort of mystical event. It would represent something, the light would be a god, there would be a reason, maybe a punishment, maybe a prophecy. No doubt this weighting of meteorites with ideas was because we really didn't know much about them. We didn't know that they were just pieces of rock and ice, floating through space and happening to cross our paths.



The reason i mention it is because it reminds me of art. There are no absolutes in art, not yet anyway, science hasn't been able to explain why some art is better than others, causing many people who suggest, absolutely, that one work is better than another to be met with claims that they are pretentious or 'up-their-own-arses', etc. Science can't help us decide whether Sunrise is better than Transformers, even though the majority of people familiar and in love with film (including myself) will generally agree that the former is great, while the latter is shite.

But i don't want to defend either side, because, to be honest, there are a lot of pretentious, 'up-their-own-arses' type people, who describe certain artworks, say the The Last Judgement, or Ugetsu Monogatari, along the same spiritual lines as people described meteorites hundreds of years ago. And, in my opinion, it trivialises those great works by weighting them with near religious idolatry. The fact is they were made by people, for people, and the general consensus amongst those who are familiar with and in love with art, is that they are great. Nothing more nothing less. If you don't see it it doesn't make you a worse person, and if you do see it it doesn't make you a better person. In fact, i'd like to consider the word 'art' as redundant, there isn't a comfortable definition for it, so why use it? words are supposed to help us explain things, but the word 'art' is so heavy with past ideas that it just causes more confusion than it clears.

The great possibility is that paintings, film, music, dance, theatre, is like the beauty of cars. That not everyone will, or should, 'get it'. I like cars, i like that they get me from one place to another quickly, they make me feel independent too. But i don't know enough about them to be able to say, convincingly, that one is more beautiful than another, i can only say, with my limited knowledge of them, what i like and don't like. I think art should be viewed the same way.

So 3-D cinema is the next big thing.. bollocks, bullucks, boulogs. Crap! It's not a progression not in any way shape or form, unless progression is removing us even more from our own lives, because that's what has happened, the idea of cinema being some sort of 'great escape' has pushed it to where it is now. But cinema can be other things too, it can be entertaining at a distance, like a good friend. Or rather than taking over life, it can comment on the one we already have, it can be art.

People seem to think that 3-d is better than 2-d, panavision better than 3:4 ratio, sound better than silence, colour better than black and white. But this is rollercoaster ideology, in which the 'best' ones are also the tallest and longest and scariest. It's pushed along, mainly, by money. Because no, sound film isn't better than silent, there is still room for silent cinema, as there is for black and white. Sunrise, one of the greatest films ever made, and still is, is b&w and silent.

Money is the cause of this ignorance of past cinema, we don't do the same for music or painting or more 'serious' art. But that more serious art has a mystique simply because it doesn't make much money, the businessmen aren't lining up to get a piece of the latest Operatic revolution, for example. But they would do if it generated the same kind of money. With the invention of the synthesizer people didn't throw down their instruments and only allow the great classical composers to be heard through an electronic sound, they wouldn't fucking dare! (though they might without realising as mp3 gains ground..) But a similar thing is happening to cinema. There is room for 3-D, there is room for digital and digital projectors, but there is no room for these idiots to play a film such as It's A Wonderful Life through a projector that only projects in panavision, cutting off half the bloody picture, which is what i've seen two years running at my local multiplex.

The only cinema's i've been to that showed good films, and did not equate good with new, that had respect for cinema, were independent cinemas. There was one in Yale when i visited once, i forget the name, but it had an Orson Welles season before i arrived, and i remember seeing a Mizoguchi and an Ozu and Once upon a time in the west while i was there. The Cornerhouse in Manchester is another, the Lighthouse in Wolverhampton used to be quite good, but it slipped. The Electric though, in Birmingham, makes up for it, and the MAC has just reopened. There's also the National Film Theatre in London.

Call me a nostalgic, call me whatever you like, but i don't think i am, cinema has a language, and silent cinema is as valid as any other. More valid as cinema, in my opinion, because it was simply about what was visible, the story was told through shots, edits, camera movement, acting. And it was Brechtian, it wasn't trying to blind you, or lull you to sleep, it didn't try and make you feel you were in that moment on screen to give you some great cathartic release, because that is totally unnecessary, instead it treated you like an actual thinking person, who can make up your own bloody mind without it being rammed down your throat. Who felt, but didn't try and cloud your judgment with these feelings.

I've still never watched a 3-d film, not out of disgust, i would if i could be bothered to get inspired by any of these films coming out... but like when i looked at the faces of the EDL supporters in the Dudley News this week, i can't connect.

I have a very sensitive nose this week, like i can't remember having before, i can smell things all the time, the washing powder on my jumper, the food that's slightly going off in the fridge.. maybe i'll end up killing a redhead and stealing her smell too..

I havent painted in a few days, i have cleared out my room quite a lot though, still a bit to go but it looks and feels better. But, ironically, now i've had other things on and less time to paint, i've had ideas of things to paint, i have three on the go at the moment, went round today to work a bit, 3 hours, and started a painting of my nephew, 1 year old connor. And another one of a painting within a painting, and its of a worn painting of flowers, which is crumbling and flaking, and where the painting has flaked off you can see another, more violent, acidic and colourful painting underneath, i thought that was a nice idea. And the third i only have drawings for at the moment, but its set in this wasteland type place, and has two people fighting, a dog lying down in the foreground, and some other people at the back. But that's on a big canvas, may take a week or so before i've finished it.

The next pretty vacant exhibition starts soon, i've entered a few images, one of which i think i've already sold, it's one of the flower ones below, for £20 to someone i met a while back in America, which is cool. And I'm running a weekly afterschool class in a few weeks, after the easter holiday, i have a few ideas, but it'll be the first class i've taken on my own, so it's pretty daunting, but if i make a good go of it i think teaching might be a good way of making some money while i continue painting.

The smell of this jumper is really overbearing.

Concerning painting, i think i'm only better now than i was in september because my perserverance has improved, and that's really a massive part of making good paintings. Is not giving up halfway through and saying 'That'll do', but carrying on, repainting, scraping back off and doing it again and again, until its right, until its good. Of course, it's best if you can get it right first time, but i think with perseverance anyone can paint.

passive/aggressive.. so fuck you

I'm so aggressive lately, i'm always on the defense, anyone mentions my work i'm up on my hind legs with my gum's ready to spring back and show my teeth. I just feel that if people aren't going to make positive comments on my work anytime, then they have no right to take the piss either. And even if they do, that gives them no right to dictate to me. That i'm painting off my own back, with very little money and grudging support. And people think it's somehow their right to tell me how to paint, as if my work belongs to them, and i'm in some ways there servant. That if they don't like it it must be worthless, cause it's just supposed to be a pretty picture, isn't it? hang on someones wall? with all the things going on in the world i'm supposed to be concerned with flowers? well.. yes i am, but not only. Well, i make work for me, i'm perfectly capable of seeing when a painting isn't very good, and when it is, that's why i reuse so many canvases, sometimes i keep paintings around for a while just to make sure, and there are very very few that i'm happy with, and even then not absolutely.

...pssst.. if you click on them (the images), they will grow...