“William it was really nothing, It was your life …” 8 year old blog
I’ve been keeping this blog for 8 years as of this month. I felt these Smiths lyrics were appropriate. There seems to be a Smiths lyric for every moment.
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
This well and truly is my life, there isn’t much else beyond what I put on here – my eternally-concerned facial expressions are complimented by the eternal meandering through life that constitutes this blog. I may not have developed any reasonable answers and thoughts regarding all that has concerned me over these years, but this is it, and I feel no shame in admitting this. Maybe few have even read and listened to what I’ve been saying, but this hasn’t stopped me, and the billions others who feel the need to make a voice for themselves in a post-industrial world where day after day we feel needed less and less for anything; we don’t make things, don’t build things, and we don’t even build our individual futures – more invest against the chances of falling into the gutter at some point.
But I’ve said all I need to say. I can feel it coming to a closure now, In fact I can feel my art-making coming to a point of closure. This life’s all I know, I don’t know anything else, but the truth is I’ve run out of ideas (not the endless-creative my 20-year old-self thought he was after all), and, as things stand I feel it’s time to call it a day on art-making, writing, etc. Please pull me up if I am promoting myself as ‘artist with upcoming exhibition‘ in 4 months time, but I severely hope I’m not, as I’m tired of calling myself an artist. As things stand, and at this moment, I’ve said everything I can as the person I currently am – I realise I’ve tried to give it all up before, but this time it may be a little more longstanding. Maybe I will grow and change, and start making other things, but if that’s so then it won’t be for a long long time, and I’ve recycled my current artistic-self way too much already.
Surfaces of an (Un)realised World
‘The past is another world’. Indeed it is, full of lost what-might-have-beens. I cannot even begin to estimate how many calories and hours were put into making these works that were heading in a more-painterly/sculptural direction, nor the lost might-have-beens that may have constituted an alternative usage of that time. Dating from the bright-eyed-dawn of the perceived-shirking-of-tangled-up-teenage-trials of my very early 20’s in 2004, to works made in the infancy of the long night that proceeded from the 2008 crash, these works now seem to me like surfaces of an (un)realised planet.
Due to this they just don’t fit anymore, like architecture that has lost its aesthetic function within the light of a new kind of world, the demolishing of them was the last necessary act. Reality has changed, and they are worth more to me now as documentation of an excavation of that past reality that I cannot go back to (all a poetics perhaps [?] devised to acclimatize myself to the truth: that I had no longer have storage space for works that were becoming increasingly smashed to pieces in narrower and narrower confines).
However, perhaps what surprised me the most, and possibly came close to preventing me smashing up any more of the works, was that the paint was still wet on the inside of one of the pieces from 2007. The smell of gloss and oils momentarily taking me back to 2007…even the music I listen to from such times seems lost as if submerged under a mudslide.
