This is me reaching out.

Making more contact with the wide world, via the medium of blog.

For the next seven days I will upload a page or two from one of my sketchbooks with a little commentary. Some times the most interesting things are the back stage goings on; the alchemical inner workings of personal practise. Sketchbooks are all these things made manifest.

Todays offerings are pictures from a sketchbook that I took around India.

Above is is a collage of random bits and pieces that I found day to day on my travels. Bright chaotic and idiosyncratic, the sketchbook brings back memories and inspiration long after returning home and reflects the nature of the places I visited and my reactions to them. The crazy colourfull mess of India stays with me, the visual notes infroming later work or being a direct template for paintings.

 

 

This was painted after climbing a mountain in the Eastern Ghats. All on my lonesome, the inacessability and alien grandeaur of the place had a powerfull efect on me. I don't paint outdoors nearly enough!

The Seeker

The Seeker

Just like a real landscape its mood changed with the changing light.

The seeker physically, is a landscape made from of books. The landscape is a setting for a character (the seeker) and a vehicle for an idea.The Idea for the piece and the idea for the exhibition of the same name, came about at the same time one evolving alongside the other.

The  idea, the theme, for the exhibition, was revelations. It seemed like an interesting topic so I thought of what it meant to have a revelation, of how revelations are a personal experience and how from an outside perspective they may seem very different. Take that thought further, imagine an alien race looking at humanities greatest moments of revelation. Would they relate to our profound experiences or see our insights as trivial or unimportant?

When people think of revelations they often think of the grand and spectacular or of religious connotations, yet a moment of revelation could be as mundane as "oh so that's where I left that cheese sandwich". Our lives are full of these moments, mundane and prophetic, and there is something extremely funny about this.

So the seeker seeks. Is he looking for that grand and prophetic moment of revelation? Or is he just passing the time? Does he gaze into the sky hoping to see the face of God, or powerful beings from another dimension? Does he seek for something other or to find himself? What if we do some seeking of our own? What will we see? Will we see the same thing...

From words to ideas and stories, from books to hills, from the physical to the philosophical

Seek and you shall find

Oh look a pile of books. Is that? Some kinda landscape... What's this here?

Go on take a look. No, the other side. Climb on the plinth and look through the binoculars.

I cant see anything...Oh, ha ha. Ohh...
 

What you lookin at?

Just what is is hes looking for what does he see?

I have to say that I got a kick out of watching people stare through the binoculars and see the little guy staring back. They may not have discovered some hither to unrealised aspect of existence or seen the face of God but they were definitely having a little moment of revelation, all their own.
How I grinned.

Book rage aftermath!

1000000 cuts of books,
100 cuts of self,
1000 profanities uttered,
400 books mutilated in the name of art ( they weren't very good books)
and a lot of time.

This is not good for my health.



 Was it all worth it? What was the point? Whats the point in anything?

A happy boy, a painting monsters

What a fun job! I still vividly remember working hurriedly to finish whatever task the teacher would set way back in primary school when I was around the tender age of five. I worked with such feverish determination. Finishing meant I was allowed to get on with the far more important task of drawing down on paper, the jumbled fantasies in my head. At this time they went under the name of warrior land and crawled and slithered across the page as blurry multi armed, many fanged, sometimes tentacled, monstrosities of chalk on brightly coloured paper.




Er, well that was then and this is now, and somehow Ive ended up doing a job that requires me to draw colourful renditions of fantasy monsters and the like. Five year old me would be very pleased, present day me definitely is.



The pictures on this page are glow in the dark paintings on the walls of a recently opened Laser Quest in the centre of Bristol (Ive still to take some better quality photos that truly show the work, glowing, but for now these give a good impression of what its like).

It was a lucky gob to get; the laser quest was moving into a larger basement area in the old fire station in town, which is thankfully where my studio is and as I have said painting monsters is a long time passion. However it was a really large space and a little daunting, though thankfully my experience painting in autonomous spaces gave me the confidence to work on a large scale.


It seems the hard work I've put into exhibitions and projects in Bristol seems to finally be paying off. So long as I find the time and space to paint another day I'll be a happy boy.

Ahh! More arrrt! Few its hard work this art malarkey.

For instance I started the wheels of motion for this exhibition " One Man Travel Plan" about three years ago when I began planning a travel documentary type thing only with out a film crew or anything, just myself and a camcorder.

After a couple of months planning and deciding on West Africa as the most unusual and unknown place for me to go I set of for five and a half moths of writing, filming, taking photos and sketching. Less a holiday more a creative work trip, a long one.

The show had been a long time in coming, from planing the trip, undertaking it and many hours pouring over photos and sketches since Ive been back. It represents three years of work and I still have to finish writing up my experiences, putting on a bigger more in depth show, there's, there's so much more I could do...


Anyway, the work has been put together ( finally) in some semblance of order for public consumption.Which is good.

I just have to figure out where to go from here?



Here is a map of my trip showing the route and places I visited. I made it out of tissue paper and got really carried away with it (it took ages).


The exhibit starts with the map for orientation and follows the places I visited chronologically.
The pictures follow a wavy course, in part this allowed me to fit in 30 photos, paintings and sketches with out the appearance of clutter and retaining some aesthetic grace. It also symbolises the route of my trip staring as it does near the beginning and finishing, well near the end. It spiralled around the gallery in a really nice way which I cant convey here but it was good trust me.This was a table for comments and to sell prints and cards.The plan is to make the art pay for more trips and projects. This is the dream. I hope it works.

Apocalypse Right Now!

This was an instillation I did recently at The Smiling motorbike (a squatted social centre in Stokes croft) as a response to the stop Hinkley campaign (the proposed nuclear sight not far from Bristol) along with a benefit gig.

I worked solidly through the day and into the evening in the front window. This became something of a live painting spectacle as the window display area was large and very visible on the main strip in Stokes Croft. So all through the day and into the night when the party started I had an audience, which if I'm honest I quite liked.

The two radio active suits sit around drinking radio active wine, trying to ignore the destruction around them and the nuclear blast going off in the distance.

There seems to be a lot of films about at the moment concerning future worlds and a general sense of doom and gloom as to this planet or more specifically our species fate. These are distressing times, though the future is not necessarily decided. Id like to think we will get our act together and do something about it but have a sinking feeling we Will just sit around with our fingers in our ears and let it all fall down around us...

Loonar City

Loonar City, this was what I came up with after a short while spent pondering an email that requested artists to come and make an instillation for a festival of lunacy (a film festival, put on by compass film, held in an old coroners court and one time mortuary for suspicious deaths).

The idea revolves around the idea of lunacy as a relative thing depending on your perspective. So one person's idea of madness is another's genius plan, one woman is clearly insane another is wonderfully eccentric. So what if such characters that push to redefine the boundaries of madness were all to live in a city that allowed them to live out there crazy lives to the full?

My plan was to make a 3d version of this city of the mind where within the cities buildings would be little dioramas that revealed the secret worlds of the cities inhabitants. I'd never done anything quite like this and wasn't quite prepared for the work load that ensued.

Making the instillation was lots of fun. Just to work on a big scale made a change. Ive always liked making things since I was a kid and made castles and monsters out of cereal packets, but this time I got to make things on a room filling scale.

It was great to work instinctively with materials available ( I scouted round town with a trolley and picked up anything that looked interesting). Not having enough time to fuss over things but just doing, flat out hour after hou, was refreshing. Saying that, an artist is never satisfied with what they've done; I would have loved more time to explore more ideas and to make Small and fine details.

The slap dash sprawling cardboard monster that came forth from this hectic activity surprisingly came together at the last possible moment as something approaching a finished piece.

Seeing as the creation was called loonar city and made for a festival of Lunacy it was appropriately mad and received enthusiastically by a few (probably also mad) people.

Im as busy as I want to be

Loonar city, an instillation I did for the
lunacy film festival.


The last three weeks have been a shit storm of busyness for me.
So when my dad recently said " I'm as busy as I want to be" when asked about his day to day activities, this sounded to me like the way things should be and made me think of my life of late, which has been exceedingly full and stressful. Did I choose it to be so?

Well not exactly, Ive had a whole host of personal problems piled on top of which I've been helping with a squatted social centre, helping with the organising of a Christmas market, trying to put a news letter together, planing for an exhibition and making an instillation for a film festival.

To illustrate the point it took me four an a half hours to find a spare few minutes to brush my teeth a few days ago. Even when I finally managed to slip away an attend to said teeth, someone managed to track me down and ask me about things while I was brushing, I was a stressed and agitated teeth brusher I can tell you.

Now I could go on whining about my stressful life, but that would be pathetic and bedsides, yes I did choose to be this busy. Not quite in such a mind bendingly, head fuck way, but I do want to live a full life and things will calm down. So overall, on average, I'm only a bit busy. If not I would be very much dead by now.

In fact given the choice between excessive thumb twiddling and hectic chaos Id go for the chaos every time.

I think its good to be busy, just make sure your busy doing what you wanna do an not what someone else wants you to do. And once in a while ask yourself "am I as busy as I want to be?"

There will be more about just what it is that's been keepin me busy when I'm not so damn busy!