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Wednesday 31 July 2013

"Charging... Clear!" *bzzt* KACHUNK! *Splutter/Cough* "Oh, Thank God, it's ALIVE!"

Ok, so I've decided to rekindle this dying flame of a blog to record some more thoughts on art & some of my own images when I've got some to post.

I guess the main reason I feel compelled to share is that I've just read some inspiring comics (or Graphic Novels for the pompous Guradian* reader) which have spooked me in that they seem to directly deal with questions or issues I've been facing with my own life and relationship with Art.

2 main issues I've faced over the last few years are

Y) A drying up of my imagination circuits - I feel like I've had a severance/separation with the wellspring of creativity - I've put it down to a) the Devil stealing my skills in exchange for sexual favours b) calcification of the pineal gland c) misalignment of the chakras due to a slipped disc d) getting old [eek!] e) all of the above.

So when I read "Flex Mentallo - Man of Muscle Mystery" by the Invisibles' Grant Morrison I felt a ray of hope - it tells the tale of a washed up artist who tries to commit suicide, thus destroying the universes he's holding inside himself, and only when his characters break out of his mind and rescue him is the world saved.  I feel that somewhere within it lies some answers to that question of "where do our ideas come from" and links it to Shamanic thinking and practice - something I think I should look into more... Hmm - I also found a local Shaman's leaflet today! I also constantly feel like the line between fiction and reality is rubbing thin...

 

Charles Burns' X'ed Out also has a hallucinatory tone, and his imagery feels like my own; I feel, when looking through it, that I'm seeing creations from my own mind, albeit much better drawn! His foeti, maggots, eggs, half buried statues and cities seem to come from my own inner landscape - the final image of the book is of a dusty shanty town on the outskirts of a giant termite mound, a landscape I have only recently being trying to model in 3DS as it is one of the places I keep revisiting; I also just found a set of sketches of it from my early 20s!  This City inside an abandonned giant termite mound is where my PC Game idea The Box is set - elements of which again turned up inside another comic called Cairo. Specifically, in my game... well, perhaps I'll put a post about this up on my other blog The Techno Hippy

So whereas if I was feeling more negative about life I'd be moaning about how I've been robbed of ideas, now I feel, Hell, These guys can get published, why not me?  My creativity clearly matches theirs, pound for pound, so all I need is to stop being so afraid of criticism or that I'm not good enough and just publish something, or exhibit my work.  Positivism!

the other thing bugging me is

X) a deterioration in my penpersonship/ line drawing capability - looking back at drawings from my time in Egypt  in 2006 or certainly much earlier stuff, I've clearly lost control of my hands to some extent: the lines are thinner, perhaps more fuzzy, but I sort of 'knew' where the line was going, what it was going to do next, whereas now often I tell my hand to do something and it goes the wrong way - this in turn feeds a subconscious fear that I am developing Parkinson's symptoms like my old man.

Now, I'm just back from Buddhafields festival, and I want to congratulate myself and Life Drawing coach Michael Harket for helping me sketch one of the best figure drawings I've ever done; and also to Robert Mills and Jane Ruell for their Mask Making workshops - I was definitely taken over by the "Dust Devil" character which inhabited my red mask (with Martine's maori marks) - the tickling with Raga Woods' feather dusters seem'd to go down well too - except for one festy kid who bawled his eyes out when I didn't let him steal one of the dusters!

I'll get a snap of the picture so you can judge for yourself ...

Just had a look at some of my old sketchbooks, I've got some really amazing stuff in there, just have to get it up online somehow. WATCH THIS SPACE... :)

NB: for why Defibrillator's are not used to resuscitate recently dead people cf. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicalDefibrillator

*deliberate typo recognisable to readers of Private Eye as "the Guardian" once famous for poor spellchecking