I made this positive decision to enter the Jerwood Drawing Prize. When I think about my raw abilities, I think: I could win one of those bastards, and it's worth a shot. But then when I began to try and calculate the best approach to take to register on its radar, things got quite confusing and I found it hard to settle on any idea with confidence.

I might use some of my notes as headings and try to explain some of the decisions I haven't made.

I'm not trying to be cynical in these makeshift calculations... I just can't help noticing that the Jerwood Drawings Prize is a Contemporary Art prize, so I'm heading back into a world where certain language and certain clichés rule, and it's language that feels like it says almost nothing to me about my my life, but the reason for doing the thinking and doing the thing at all is that there has to be some way to play to my strengths at the same time as avoiding signifiers that the art people are likely to find off-putting, and even steering towards the formulations that they tend to like. Perhaps this game can be fun. Perhaps I can find...

SOME KIND OF LOOPHOLE FOR MY ACTUAL PASSIONS.

(...whatever they are. But I think this whole perverse process may have helped me get a different angle on what I really want to be drawing, prizes or no prizes... like scribbling doodles in the margin during a suffocating lecture.)

At first glance, the previous winning entries seem quite arbitrary and difficult to characterise as homogenous. (It's actually easier to pin down what they aren't.) In a lot of contemporary art, it's not so much that there is one dominating style or idiom, but there are several identifiable traits and memes and trends that recur. Because language that says we must 'push the boundaries' doesn't result in perfect diversity and flawless, perpetual originality, it results in things which learn how to look 'the part', in the absence of criteria with actual meaning.

(That's by Tom Hammick and it won third prize in 2004. Here is the blurb: 'Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, while living at Baddeck in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, invented all sorts of Flying machines and kites, as well as a fantastically fast hydrofoil. Here he is watching his bi-plane, The Silver Dart as it flew for half a mile on its maiden voyage, in February 1909.' )

So... I'm just making stabs in the dark here, but when I think about the things that they aren't probably after... they probably aren't after a very traditional landscape drawing that is moderate in size and unassuming, even if it's perfectly beautiful and delicate. I mean, I may be wrong, but I'm going on pattern recognition here. They don't seem to object too much to a certain measure of traditionalness, realism, but there ought to probably be some 'edge' to it. Obsessiveness is a thing that seems to be a good bet. Some kind of really obsessive technique, that demonstrates a pigheaded commitment, even if it's a pigheaded commitment to something a bit pointless. An impersonal obsessiveness.

(There's the second prize winner from 2004. They do seem to like stuff with maps, stuff that makes reference to locality. Like, stuff about your 'identity', but not really about the inside of you. And this also fits with the 'obsessive' theory. Here's its blurb. This is more... traditional wall text art blurb. They'll have liked the alliteration at the end. 'Throw Away After Use, (A London Town) shows an urban area suffocated by the demand for space. Beginning with a layer of random street networks inscribed with an H9 pencil, I built up further layers of real London places that hold meaning to my life. Up close, the map reveals layers of its own history visible under the new road layouts finding itself uncomfortably in between delicacy and dilapidation.')

In fact one of the concerns I have about my work in this context is that it's too personal. Typically the contemporary art folks aren't interested in the interiors of individuals, unless they're already famous. Typically they're not much interested in interiors at all. It's supposed to be more about 'an ongoing discourse', external signifiers of contemporaryness, and the lie that all novelty, however desperate and superficial and ugly, equates to a noble piece of progress. I'm worried that I'm supposed to demonstrate 'engagement with the discourse', but that's a bit problematic because I've also sort of decided that doesn't mean anything.

The kind of realism they like is often quite mechanical looking, if not photographic.

It may be secretly a lot about wanting to be cool, still, in this day and age. If we ought to be post anything, we ought to be post-cool. But it's kind of an ongoing folly. I guess all I'm talking about is the kind of cool that mean you get membership. Sort of woefully obvious.

When I draw a picture of Ric Flair, what I'm ultimately aiming for is some expression of the very very very specifics about my experience of the exterior and by extension the interior of one very specific subject, but one that fires my imagination, not one that locates my identity in modern multicultural Britain. I'm not sure they're so much down with the whole... imagination-firings. So perhaps they want more distance... a deconstruction of a process, art about art instead of art about interior life. See, I'm not interested in 'the boundaries' of drawing, let alone attempting to 'push' them. I'm interested in... drawing. And its ability to bring me in touch with truth. I don't think that's boring. I also don't think it needs to be progressed beyond, urgently or ever. Maybe no one really thinks that, they only pay lip service to the idea that that's what progress means. It's vague enough that there are no deadlines for the removal of the alleged boundaries. We can keep on just pretending to push the pretend boundaries.

(And that is the winner from 2004. 'Wyoming' by Sarah Woodfine. The interesting thing is... I met her. I had a tutorial with her at KIAD. She was a very nice person. I think I got on with her. I also remember her little lecture she gave about her work. She has that obsessive thing down. I was quite interested, because she was doing images of sort of slightly sinister toys in densely layered graphite. It wasn't a million miles from what I was doing at the time, in my stunted way, and of course I was desperate for points of comparison and 'permission' to do what I felt I wanted to do. It seemed like she made the obsession and the obsessive process the main point and also the thing that distanced her from a 'simple' attachment to the images, and imbued them with the all important 'darkness'. At least, this is what I remember of it, it is a few years ago now, I may be doing her an injustice. But heck, it's my memory. I shall tell it like it's stored. And from what I can remember of the tutorial, she really liked my work and said it was 'beautiful' but I think she encouraged me towards taking one thread... or one approach... and really running with it, perhaps in a more committedly obsessive way, which made general sense as I was dithering at the time. But this instruction would not be sufficient to resolve the rather deeper roots of my discontent.

I suppose my concern was always that diving into an obsession doesn't necessarily make the project or the subject any deeper or any better, it may just reassure one that one is doing Serious Work. But my more obsessive obsessions have rather visited themselves upon me in a style that I couldn't have designed.

And here's the blurb for those Wyoming pictures, I'll give it its own block of quote as she was so nice... see what you think:

'Wyoming is based on imaginary journeys to the USA. The notion of the frontier and pioneer spirit has been source to several works. Wyoming is influenced by stereoscopic photography, which has a particular resonance with the previous works involving ‘flat-packs’. In a similar vein they are at once both flat but have the possibility of taking on three-dimensions. Wyoming intends to have the sense of a dwelling being circumnavigated, enticing the viewer to tease their imagination around the sides of the building. Ultimately the impossibility of reaching the other side allows the mystery to remain unsolved.'

Sarah seemed like a person quite happy to indulge her arty whims in a sort of immersive way, then explain them afterwards with an open face and in a way that wouldn't cause controversy. I was a little bit self-conscious about embarking on the process of seemingly indulging an obsession and then repeatedly explaining it in a cute way afterwards... Oh.... whoops... hang on I did kind of do that. Just with wrestlers and not at art school. But I guess my hope is always that the depths of my little journeys reach something beyond mere immersive indulgence. I can't speak for Sarah Woodfine. But she was nice.

NOTE TO SELF: GET SMOOTH CARTRIDGE PAPER IN BIGGER SHEETS

Perhaps visually, to just take some of my more 'striking' drawings further beyond... to give them a kind of pretence and pomp in the intensity of my labour, that might give some appearance of process-obsession to those who like that kind of thing. Maybe I am process-obsessed to a degree... from a different angle.

You can see how I've got myself in a pickle.

One of the basics from art school, the basic sort of not quite spoken rule is that it's all about SEEMING LIKE ART by repeating clichés of artyness, verbal and visual. And eliminating all that other childish unsophisticated stuff that threatens to knock the edifice down.

Ideally I wanted to draw a cat in a tree that was a tribute to Stephen. I had a sorta vision about it.

I wouldn't be thinking about doing it at all if I didn't have some faith that this 'typical' stuff can be overcome. I don't know much about the judges. I'm not saying there's not good stuff in the Jerwood prize. At worst it seems like entering a jolly lottery. I'm not saying that it's not kind of fascinating thinking all this through.

I think I must in part thrive on the tensions produced by clarifying that my values are (probably, usually) different from the values of these distant art beasts. It's happened a lot. It gives fuel for writing. It gives motivation for being.

It's just that I feel it would be naive of me to just present my 'stuff' with no consideration of their values at all and expect to be judged favourably based on my sheer sincerity and my special enchanting Chloeness. Or in my potential to be good. That's not good enough. It needs to take the correct form.

I've noticed that you're sort of allowed whimsy these days if it's really casual sorta abject amateur faux naive whimsy.

Still, I secretly hope that my sincerity could be appreciated if presented in a way that demonstrated superfluous sophistication... played on my superfluous neuroses, the parts of me that aren't important at all... and my despair and isolation... the worst parts... the supposed darkness... the benighted parts of me... the parts that in real life I want to overcome... those might be the things that make me edgy and keep me interesting to them.

Because all this leads me to wonder whether I still make too many concessions to the requirements of the demon Discourse even without meaning to. I do tend to think about making things striking more than making them true in a sense that Ruskin would appreciate... to express as unique a uniqueness as I can muster.... am I a baddie? Perhaps one of the motivations behind my isolating the dominant clichés is to ask myself whether I am 'guilty' of them... but is it a case of being guilty, or a case of playing innocently with some language that may help me to be understood? And more simply... to be seen?

On the Jerwood site was a 'catalogue essay' which ought to reassure me. It's called 'who would be a selector?' . Here are some of the questions the man Paul Thomas asked himself in 2006:

'Is the drawing predictable or inventive? Does it confirm what we already know or does it challenge us?' (Hmmm.... dangerously vague) 'Who is there and what do you want? People emerged from their worlds and took shape in front of me. The room filled with their thoughts. I began to choose drawings that revealed both something of the nature of drawing that interested me, and also introduced me to the obsessive nature of an individual concerned enough to share their thoughts with me.'

His words sound sort of.. vague and touchy feely enough that I should be reassured, if I just do my thing with honesty and... feeling... one of these sensitive chaps will notice, I gotta have faith in it. But the sort of... emotive language and the vagueness and apparent utter level playing field inclusivity... if they were all true, they'd negate all need for me to think at all... I'd be unconditionally embraced and understood. I've learned these kinds of apparent neutral niceness can have unintended consequences, and not be what they think they are. And it is interesting the way the word obsessive is thrown about like it's the mark of a sensitive soul. Real obsession is no fun at all. Why do you have to be obsessive or deranged to be taken seriously? Perhaps real artists are prone to obsession, but is the obsession the important part? Is it the thing to focus on? Or even to fake? I'm more interested in the truth that may or may not have been touched through the thrashings out of my obsessions. And I still almost think using the word obsession may be an abuse of the term. Enthusiasm might not sound quite dark and deep enough.

I wanted to write this today to actually help me decide. But I've no idea if what I've written has helped me decide, or if it's just distracted me enough to make me consider the task afresh. But I think I might be a cat and I might not be shy about being grabbed into a state of repose by my dream lover. I might enlist Ruskin to help me explain.

Next I'll either write that account of my Mick Foley experiences from last November that I've been meaning to write for ages, or I'll write about someone's characterising my work as 'exuding pure psychological terror and isolation'. Cos I'm not sure that was what I was going for. Or I'll think of more Jerwood wranglings.

End Notes.

I can make poetry of men.

The implicit meanings of faces

Cripple ghost.

What are my favourite Picassos?

Sometimes ones that are 'readable' - maybe I'm being critical of Picasso for things that I do wrong with compositional clutter and obfuscating detail. And I do them worse.

(Bit of a mess?)

(Lots of fun.)

There is this Picasso Project site with almost all of his drawings and paintings on it, and I've been printing some out to study (mainly mid nineteen thirties) from, because it seemed like a good time to do that.

(I quite like the ones where Minotaurs ravish ladies.)

Other thoughts about what are my favourites:

ones that are 'moderate' and have more dimensions than two

ones that aren't slight

Sometimes he was just mucking about.

Though I find that reassuring.

Sometimes his noodlings come across a little empty. Sometimes less empty.

Also looking through the drawings in sequence, I think... mucking about, mucking about, mucking about with funny horses and sad ladies, then suddenly it's Guernica. Which made me think, maybe if I were to give my muckings about a bit more respect I could make something quite powerful out of them. I think confidence is a thing that he had and that I lack. That and testicles.

Ones that are funny

Nowadays it seems to me that a lot of the appeal of Picasso comes from humour, and the sheer joy of his playing. That's like his big secret. He's not a huge gravitational figure, he's just lots of fun.

You can learn a lot about visual vocabulary from Picasso.

And organicness. The vocabulary is developed organically. Since I last had a good look at Picasso I think I've become more attuned to my own ability to work 'organically',or you could say undirectedly.

Yet it's not like... you have to shatter things to make them interesting.

I don't want to assume that.

There is this constant tension, when I am drawing, between getting the the core of what things look like and getting to the core of what I'm see-saying on a more inner level. And the two things are connected. But first there's a lot of looking. Like I need to penetrate to some kind of 'core' of a face or a form before I can know what I want to do with it or assume any control. It's like a cheeky dialogue with God.

'Shattering' things, forms, can maybe help you get to good stuff if you shatter things nicely. Along the right axis.

Perhaps it becomes territory a bit like free jazz where some of it may have some meaning within its own language but most people aren't equipped to get anything from it and it's prone to disintegrating anyway. Or at least ripe for fakers and pretenders and delusions.

Sometimes loosening up is how you do things, and a combination of the intended and the unintended delicately balanced.

I'm mean I'm guilty of going from an almost constipated way of drawing to an almost derangedly loose kind.

And what's the point of being loose... it's freedom. Or that's what it's trying to be. Whatever that means. That's what it is.

The Highest Version of the Common Sense of a Loin

or

IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS

What DO I want to talk about?

....

Things which may not be connected but which I wanted to write down.

I want to find ways of articulating in a conversation some of the things that ARE the point.

I originally decided to put this quote in because 'generativity' seems to connect to my themes of infinite shape attraction in the last entry. But this may lead to other things.

'Human beings are equipped with means to apprehend exterior reality. But we are also curiously equipped to apprehend the interior reality of persons. It is said that a sophisticated scientist, strictly speaking, does not judge the merits of a scientific theory on the basis of whether it is "true" or "false." Rather, he does so (at least partly) on the basis of its generativity, that is, by how much it explains, how well it ties together various other facts and observations, and the extent to which it gives rise to new, "interesting" problems.

Have you ever known a generative person in whose presence you experience the bracing flow of "life" along your keel? Have you ever been in the presence of a stagnant and lifeless person in whose psychic presence you feel your soul being sucked out of your body?' - Robert Godwin

Notes mainly to Self:

On the debasement of the idea of beauty and therefore the other kind of beauty I am after... this word 'generativity'... another way of describing my 'infinitely' exciting shapes from last time... infinitely generative? connecting to the....

....infinite in the finite... I read a definition of beauty which called it the infinite (or a hint of the absolute) contained or captured within a finite thing... which seems fair...

(Beauty needs to be not just a word thrown out cheaply or a platitude...)

But that not just being about perfect classical beauty but... things with inexplicable but deeply felt resonance... something obviously worth exploring. Something not fully exteriorizable (new word) with a statement of what your work is about. Because that was never possible, and if you think it is possible to explain its beauty, your art might be lacking an interior.

Artspeak: let's confront it together

It's not just the annoying cliches in artspeak that bother me, it's the fact that it rarely even adds up to what it tells itself it does.

Contemporary art people seem to have a need to believe that what they are doing is serious. There is nothing wrong with being serious... if it's real. But often all I see is this veneer of serious-seemingness, just a web of tickboxy feelgood phrases surrounding something that's pleased with itself but that touches me in no important places. And the desire to SEEM serious can lead to some messed up value systems.. valuing the pretentious and the obscure over the well-crafted and high-spirited. Yet obscurity, or difficultness can be valid too...just not for its own sake. As long as there is a reward for trying with a complicated thing. As long as the complications are part of a language that says something. I'm not anti-intellectual. But when apparent obscurity is there for its own sake, it's obscuring a bunch of nothing in an effort to make the nothing seem exclusive and desirable.... it's a lie, it's a con.

I have quite a strong urge to not take myself constantly so seriously, because it seems so easy to tie yourself in knots doing that. It's perhaps useful to be aware of the ways in which we are and are not significant in the universe, for real. The potential of my consciousness is significant. My voice in relation to the scale of the multiverse is quite weedy. My chances of making the world better by being angry and frowny about issues of the moment are not significant. My chances of touching other peoples' minds by making pictures that truthfully communicate some of the more interesting parts of the insides of mine, well I think I have a good chance of doing this on a small scale.

(Clampett cartoons: perfect in a way that makes me want to ditch all highbrow things with their myriad lies and traps in favour of pursuing perfection for the masses. Unfortunately I might be a bit too serious and introverted to be a cartoonist, and it's not the forties.)

I'm after something that becomes awakened within me, and higher up than my loins, but with a similar force of certainty.

Sources that generate depth and life... although loins can do that too.

Perhaps the loins thing is not entirely irrelevant as even though the loins level is the crude level, at least one's loins have common sense about wanting pleasure and to breed with healthy specimens and wanting what's good for them. Minds have a habit of becoming quite unreasonable and craving what's perverse and no fun and made up and I fear these dead dead ends that come to naught.

And this fear is healthy, as Rocky Balboa said . It's what you do with that fear.

What is the highest version of the common sense of a loin? What does that look like?

Maybe it looks like a Rex Hackelberg drawing.

And it's all worth saying 'again', because reading interviews with artists on the Myartspace.com blog, I remember that not all of them are thinking like me, at all, a lot of them are quite exteriorized and secular and all about political issues and campaigning and ideas and what their work is about and tutors and doing research about issues and having all these reassuring signifiers of how serious their endeavour is and how important they might be... this is a different interpretations of having a moral dimension than I try to have...I think 'Try to have values and not ideas', as Collings and Biggs said, is pretty solid advice.

Biggs and Collings: See how many things their work isn't about.

Actually dash it all to hell, it's worth putting in this long quote because it seems to fit with the things I've come to talk about, and says it quite well.

'People have got used to a situation in which art becomes more and more un-visual. In fact it’s the least visual thing around at the moment. In terms of visual sophistication and aesthetic awareness almost anything else -- graphic design, architecture, ads, the patterns on curtains -- is better. The visual is sacrificed on the altar of meaning, but at the same time meaning in contemporary art is pathetic: ‘Look Mum! I’m interested in capitalism and schizophrenia!’ No one involved really believes these meanings. They only pay lip service to them. This seems absolutely awful. It would be much better to have something else. Therefore why not reason yourself, in terms of what’s going on in your mind when you’re reading about art or looking at it, into a relationship with art’s past, the pre-pop past. That means getting used to acknowledging a separation between entertaining trivia (an element of which is necessary to human existence, of course) and art. Art gives pleasure and draws attention to how pleasure is constructed, and is consequently difficult and serious as well as pleasurable. You might be thinking by this point that the problem with this whole thought is that it’s really about pleasure, and surely the bubble that contemporary art seeks to prick is the phallic power of pleasure? But the supposed pricking that contemporary un-pleasure does must be pretty shallow when the results are in every collection of every collector in the world that you can possibly think of. Maybe it would be better to have something which -- even if your message as an artist is political or moralizing -- is delivered in a way that has more visual impact than most contemporary artists seem capable of achieving, supposing that sophisticated visual impact were something they even wanted to achieve.'

I think my main difference with them is that they're quite serious (I nearly said 'puritanical') about their seriousness (carefully defined as it is), and about the high cultureness of the high culture that's been carefully separated from the low culture... . Perhaps I'm more serious about recognizing the richness or generativity of spiritual clout in great things in art or entertainment. My radar is of a slightly different species, and my sorting might consist of differently demarcated categories, but I don't exactly disagree with them, and their arguments have a lot of what I want to call integrity.

And the principle of having the audacity to take it upon one's self to sort cultural output into good and less good is an excellent one, and a healthily radical departure from absolute relativism, which is a big stinking mess of wrong.

Perhaps my mind is as much born out of premodernism as modernism, I have as much respect for the truth in the mathematics of ... I don't know, Euclid, and proportions of Leonardo ladies, as I do for the idea of Picasso. In fact I accept the positive value of Modernism with a kind of... a more perverse or mischievous pleasure. It seems to give a license to do naughty things. But they only have validity if they're founded on some kind of moderation. I have a sense of a moderateness that in itself is quite magical. I'll never learn all the things that Michelangelo learned, which is a shame, but I do have one or two of these little principles ingrained in me that have become quite instinctive when I'm working.

But I am as likely to respond well to a very old thing as to a twentieth century thing. Despite the linear distance of time and culture, those are real responses. My soul is not necessarily in thrall to the twentieth century. We don't have to be restricted in that way.

Bad Ideas:

Ideas... as in... 'This art is an idea... I've worked on my ideas so I can explain this to you... I know the art school language of concepts and I regularly use this claustrophobic clutch of cliches and am slick at it now and rather comfortable... I did research about my issues in the library... this is my list of one word things I am fascinated by... now my idea is finished and I am explaining it to you... now it is a sophisticated enough idea' ... that all seems arbitrary and pretend to me... that's all not my currency.

I guess I'm saying I have a principle of not explaining, but I still ought to be able to explain the origins of the principle. Anything that can make it a conversation. All they want is words to fill a space.

I have a lingering wariness about even aspiring to be visible in the art world, when if 'they' seem to value these clichés and not the things that I value, if I fail to tick their boxes, then they will not even see what I am trying to do. (That's what makes me yearn for an audience 'untainted' by the rigid clichés of that sensibility, write letters to Mick Foley, etc.) But I don't take the logic that far, as far as literally thinking they'll never see anything in my work, this logic is not airtight. It is precisely 'group think' that I have a problem with, and clichés don't arise from individual minds, and there's always hope and always possibilities for surprise and delight as long as a droplet of independent thought is still possible. It's also important to note that though I am being harsh on this language, not all the art of people who have used this language is bad. I think soon I'll do some blogs on artists I actually think are good, and almost good. Even now, even with things being degraded in the ways they're degraded, I don't think the problem is a lack of talent or even a lack of art that is somewhat good. The problem is more the confusion of good with bad, somethings with nothings (and by extension the lack of 'sorting'), the abundance of mediocre flotsam, well-meaning crap, and maybe the lingering myths about ideas and cleverness being more important than actual things with quiet power. All of these problems have the tendency to render us increasingly blind and senseless to where the good and the substance actually is.

I wouldn't bother with writing about art if I didn't have some hope about these things that can seem so difficult to tackle, so difficult.

I'd also like to avoid religion and politics in these sorts of conversations, even though they may be crucial dividers, for good and ill. (Good: being sure of myself, and ill: alienating people. So my current line is: have the thoughts, but leave them out of polite conversation.) Which again leaves me asking... what's left? What is the ideal territory for this conversation?...

Good Ideas

Of course the way David Lynch talks about Ideas is quite different. He talks about ideas as the initial hypnogogic vision, the 'fish' that comes from 'diving within', that you try to stay true to through the processes of the making, and staying loyal to the feel and the utterly specific truth of that vision. That's a bit different. That's not about explaining. it's the opposite, it's doing something that can only be done through the language of the film. 'Idea' is more about grabbing something from a deep place with him. And he may not even have such a strong sense of it without meditation.

He has quite a cute way of talking about vertical or spiritual things. Cuteness is a good device in conversations. He sometimes borders on being too cute to be of practical use. Maybe I just mean that he doesn't explain enough about his meditation to teach me how to meditate. But I think I know roughly what he's on about apart from that. Again his talking is a sort of delicate, almost awkward intersection between the wordless deep motivation and the mechanics of making films.

And more to the point, it's about something that is real and NOT a spurious justification that is merely spat out, paid lipservice to, and not really 'done', when all's said and done.

I don't know, reading interviews with artists makes me wonder what I would say to those sorts of questions, and whether I could extract the right answers from my shy mind in the heat of the moment. So that's why I seem to be bringing together this motley collection of explainers. I need to have imaginary conversations with them.

I'm looking back at the Collings and Biggs site and seeing what bits of their writing I wish to respond to, though most of it is quite sensible.

'Pop crap, which is powerful and fun, is about immediacy – on the whole the reason to have art at all is that it is against that. It’s against ‘Aha-I-get-it’. It’s against sound bite meanings that don’t really mean anything and that are interchangeable. It’s for contemplation. Non-ego driven formal values – this is worthwhile and lasting. A type of art where there is adjusting and changing somewhere in the process, one where eventually a balance of colour relationships is arrived at, and if one element were lost the whole thing would be different – this is worthwhile.' - Matthew Collings and Emma Biggs

This is... getting towards some common ground with the things I've said... the example they give of 'pop crap' is the Sony Bravia bouncing balls advert. Which clearly was a good advert, but clearly leaves you with a sense of so what, like a lot of expensive things on television.

And if my shape-crushes and sense of fun-packed infinity aren't your bag, serious formal abstract painting adventures would be a pretty solid way of being sincerely serious and doing something that's indisputably not made up, not spun out of thin vacuous air. It's a way of doing something physical, with substance and constituent parts, that's not just something that may as well be an advert concept. It's something closer to a seriousness that's real and not a collective delusion. That sense of cheaply ascribed cultural meanings that are 'interchangeable'... that's very real. They are interchangeable because they are just words floating in the nothing with no accountability, no follow-up. That's what the culture show does, all things are reduced and levelled to politely interesting digestibility, then we move on to the next thing, never deeply moved. Relativism here becomes an ugly, mind numbing, potentially evil thing.

Physicality is important to me too. I need to do my best to make the force be in the substance of the thing itself. Which makes this sound like a Jedi ideology.

The Collings and Biggs arguments are valuable to me at this point, because they know the art world and they don't cop out like I do. I do this thing where I 'just sort of know' it's something spiritual that is the point of art, to such an extent that it seems to make arguing about the materialist crap redundant, and the gulfs between me and those who don't 'see' the point simply too wide to attempt to mend. They are tackling 'it' on terms 'it' recognizes. Getting into the nitty gritty of conflicting belief systems and calling a nothing a nothing.

And it so often seems to come down to that, having the balls to discern the somethings from the nothings.

(balls)

I began with the quandary that if I admit that I am not expert at talking about spirit things, that then leaves me with seemingly little to talk about. My territory on this blog is generally where that ethereal, yet inexhaustible actual motivation intersects with the twin practicalities of arting and persuading.

But I began kinda talking about beauty, which is one of my positive values that I'd like to be able to converse about goodly. Because perhaps it is one area... one crucial area... in which the 'ethereal motivation' meets the force and persuasiveness of physical embodiment.

And this isn't just about persuading about it, it's about living it. Living as if beauty matters.

I will let Ruskin say something.

'I have seen a man of true taste pause for a quarter of an hour to look at the channellings that recent rain had traced in a heap of cinders. And here is evident another reason of that duty which we owe respecting impressions of sight, namely, to discipline ourselves to the enjoyment of those which are eternal in their nature, not because these are the most acute, but because they are the most easily, constantly, and unselfishly attainable. For had it been ordained by the Almighty that the highest pleasures of sight should be those of most difficult attainment, and that to arrive at them it should be necessary to accumulate gilded palaces, tower over tower, and pile artificial mountains over insinuated lakes, there would have been a direct contradiction between the unselfish duties and inherent desires of every individual. But no such contradiction exists in the system of divine Providence, which, leaving it open to us, if we will, as Creatures in probation, to abuse this sense like every other, and pamper it with selfish and thoughtless vanities as we pamper the palate with deadly meats, until the appetite of tasteful cruelty is lost in its sickened satiety, incapable of pleasure, unless, Caligula like, it concentrate the labour of a million of lives into the sensation of an hour, leaves it also open to us, by humble and loving ways, to make ourselves susceptible to deep delight from the meanest objects of creation, and of a deep delight which shall not separate us from our fellows, nor require the sacrifice of any duty or occupation, but which shall bind us closer to men and to God, and be with us always, harmonized with every action, consistent with every claim, unchanging and eternal.'

I noticed that my previous John Cena Special from July the 12th 2006 is still by a long way the most visited entry I've done. I'm not sure if it's because it's interesting or because John Cena has a lot of fans. Or because of some peculiar spamming hijinks. Or because people come to laugh at me because I am a mental.

Vaguely in my memory I thought I was probably mean to John in it. Now I am glimpsing back at it through clenched fingers because I hate reading things I wrote in the past, and maybe it's too weird and off on its own trip to be perceived as merely mean.

I made Bob read it through and he says I didn't say much in it except that I didn't hate John any more. other than that I used some rather elaborate kooktastic language that rendered my thoughts unintelligible.

I don't know why I thought he looked like Ron Howard.

I don't see that so much now.

Maybe John's cragged up a bit since then, sandpapered his jowls and consigned a microgram more boyishness into old man oblivion's bin.

It happens.

And maybe I became moderately more schooled in the specifics of his face shapes, rendering such kneejerk comparisons more difficult, less intuitive.

More people compare him to the visages of the illustrious Wahlberg and Damon, which makes some sense.

I sometimes worry that some wrestlers will one day read something I've written or see something I've drawn about them and Not Take It Well.

'Yo yo yo yo yo'

I had only just stopped hating John when I wrote the supposed John Cena Special. I'd forgotten, now, how visceral my loathing had been. I was quite sincerely surprised by all of a sudden not hating him. It was like giving up a point of pride. And actually I had been less than complimentary about his aesthetics, but I suspect that all stemmed from his rapping gimmick being so deeply foul and loathsome as to taint everything he had. As soon as that was over, the fog of pure rage lifted and one could see with more reasonable eyes.

I know how serious it all is for some of them. I think there's that kind of danger in my ambivalence about things like this. Like wrestling, and wrestlers I stop just short of having a crush on. I'm not devoted or committed to things, I don't risk my pectoralis muscles for them, I just toy and play and dream and self-indulge about them. Another part of me could take it or leave it. But some people are committed to this thing, deadly seriously, inextricably linked. Their identities hang on it. My ambivalence and my duplicity might be Not Taken Well by some. Although it'll probably never come to that, because my thoughts will remain tucked away and obscure on these batty blogs, and the personage I present to the world will be mainly shy and cautious and skirt-wearing.

(Maybe sometimes my writing is like a frustrated set of writer's notes getting half way to some fully formed 'parody' with a narrative, the written equivalent of a satisfying, truthful, inventive drawing... but I never get all the way there because I don't think of myself as a writer of narratives or of comedy. But this sometimes feels like a messy pool of the beginnings of a cartoon or a film or something. I shall just have to make my pictures convey the best of this thought, the best that I can. Perhaps if not a narrative, at least a sort of sequence of evolving moving images... which is closer to something I feel is in my grasp.)

Perhaps I could be seriously committed to one or more of 'these things' if presented with the opportunity. That would put a different complexion on everything. What if I was obliged to be loyal to a corporation who paid me a ton of dosh. I'm committed to the idea of me being an artist, but that's rather a movable feast, which is why this blog is here with its constant musings on what that all means.

One has emerged from the peak of one's giggling hysteria about these matters today.

The Cena matters, that is.

John is admirably serious and hard working in the role that he's been given. But I don't really know who he is.

I was thinking that if I was going to do a follow up to the Cena blog, it wouldn't really be about him, hard working grown up professional real life person that he is. Apparently he's more than just a collection of unusual person shapes put on television for my personal amusement. The plan was that the blog would be more about following up the issues raised in the first one and connecting this to some of my half formed plans for evolving the Projects. And more about using my being off on my own trip for the powers of good rather than presenting my giggling hysteria unfettered.

The point of the Randy comparison is, I used to get annoyed when thirteen year old girls treated Randy and John like a matching pair of blando heart throbs. Randy’s utter superiority in every respect was being outrageously overlooked I felt. He was being reduced to a very low and wormy level with this Cena juxtaposition nonsense. And I really did loathe John and find him aesthetically offensive. The affection differential was vast. - me, in the heady deays of July '06

Things have evolved, clearly, still further now. I don't reserve such special praise for Randy any more. Let's not get into that, but one thing I can get into is Shapes. I used to love Randy's shapes, and say that he was exceptionally beautiful, and be infatuated with the meta-shapes that appeared to back up that claim. the profile, the thighs etc. Deep, pure magic for me. Not just shapes, lines even, single angles. All the small parts of geometry. Randal the oily narcissist happened to be the vehicle for my newly expanded awareness of the seductive magic of singular shapes. And in relation to him, I said it had to do with a notion of archetypal or classical beauty... something permanent and mathematically indisputable. So I could feel less embarrassed about it. And because it was a bit true.

But even if he had that archetypal quality, I was also infatuated with the precise subjective moment of my own enhanced vertical awareness of that thing, as seen through him. Not merely the 'thing' itself, as a supposedly generic thing objectively existing wherever it could be scientifically measured... There was a sort of narrative of expanding awareness happening for me, expanded moments worth more than their weight in time, which in turn expanded my drawings.

But expanded them like a pubescent growth spurt that left them swinging their newly long gangly arms cluelessly, and frenziedly grappling with traumatic hormone soaked urges and conflicting compulsions.

(You could call it the awakening of the sex drive of my geometry-soul. If you wanted to. You don't have to.)

I have countless violently, nay, lustfully scribbled on identity-crisis angst-ridden pieces of A4 paper floating about homeless in my house to back this up.

And I think the thing now is to fill out that growth with some maturity, still drawing on the deeper moments that hang there so luminous in my narrative.

I've written blogs about my shape-consciousness, and blogs about my soul-consciousness, and how the two have been sort of separate, and probably I usually say some platitude about wanting to integrate them at the end, the clever shapes and the soulfulness. But now I feel like I might be closer to actually achieving that. It feels like that's actually what I'm working towards when I'm working, getting rid of that sense of having so many bitty confusing strands in the air. Being a bit more assured in my particular oddballness again, not desperate for cartoonists to approve of me or anything like that. Having integrated lustful urges and radical newnesses of experience into a sensibility that may be under control.

And I've written a couple of notes while I was drawing Filmation's He Man that might sort of make sense now:

MAKE SHAPES MOVING

I meant make shape emotionally moving... or FIND the shapes that are specially moving for me... but if physical movement is implied, I think it's implied accidentally on purpose... Sometimes the drive to put LIFE in drawings can mean almost an urgent desire to see them move, or for them to seem like they could achieve motion.

But shapes can be moving, this is the thing I've not acknowledged enough, I've talked about shapes as if they're neutral and discrete and autistically splintered from the wholeness of a thing... shapes have ALWAYS moved me, and to communicate this way of perceiving reality ought to be natural for me. Shapes are as good as music to me.

'So I was a painter. I painted and I went to art school. I had no interest in film. I would go to a film sometimes, but really I just wanted to paint. One day I was sitting in a big studio at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The room was divided into little cubicles. I was in my cubicle; it was about three o'clock in the afternoon. And I had a painting going, which was of a garden at night. It had a lot of black, with green plants emerging out of the darkness. All of a sudden, these plants started to move, and I heard a wind. I wasn't taking drugs! I thought, Oh, how fantastic this is! And I began to wonder if film could be a way to make paintings move.' - David Lynch in Catching the Big Fish

SOME VAGUENESS IS VALID

A more confident word might be 'ambiguity', but maybe 'vagueness' is more honest and confessional... Yes some of the things I draw are vague! But they're like that for a good reason! I think!

I couldn't help arguing when my Ma expressed doubts about the parts that 'look unfinished' in the aforementioned Bob painting, that sometimes things are 'vague' because some details just aren't necessary to the essence of the thing. Sometimes painting all the details just feels like empty labour. But it's tricky subtle territory. I might be all wrong, or I might be right but the painting is bad for other reasons, or I might be right but got the balance wrong in that painting.

Some paintings you can look at too much if you're doing them all day, and lose sight of them.

(That picture is there because one of the moments that made me be a Suede fan when I was fifteen was going to a Suede concert and liking the shape of the back of Brett Anderson's haircut where it met his neckhead. It was the back of him that made an impression. I didn't consciously make a big pretentious deal out of it that the way I have made a big deal out of Randy's profile. But I know that it was a shape-moment that tipped the balance and made my decision. I also remember that during that concert I was thinking about how to get past the bats in Dungeon Master II. The shapes were perhaps more LASTINGLY moving to me than the music, or at least more DECISIVE. Not that the music didn't move me in a teenage way. But I wasn't that familiar with the songs that first time I saw them. I wasn't a fan going in.)

(And my intense Beatles phase in '99 began precisely when I re-watched Hard Day's Night and became suddenly delighted by the particular curve of the McCartney eyebrows.)

Now a logical question given the threads in this blog...

Do John Cena's shapes move me?

Well, they do spur me into action...

The man has a certain shameless gung-ho ness about him which lends itself to jolly well getting stuck in and blast the consequences.

He's like one version of an opposite of me in my cripple persona. Improbably robust and strong. No hint of the slinky or the feminine or the sensitive at all. Zero. Zero of any adjective even vaguely associated with femininity in the thesaurus. Bob remarked that Cena's existence makes the mythical concept of literally endless toil seem possible.

Or as a man on a gay forum put it: 'He has a killer smile and the biggest hands I've ever seen'.

But the way things have evolved in my pictures, it's sort of like the Cena frame has become a basis for some rather grotesque... or one could say... 'baroque' improvisation. Like with that one with the shrunken cranium and the tricep kitty. That's really not about John, but about the frightening things big strong man bodies can evoke. And about mucking about. Whereas at the beginning I was precious with Randy and treated him like a gilded butterfly, I was never precious with indestructible John, whether I was attempting be truthful about his cuteness or his ugliness or shamelessly exploiting my fanciful ideas about the qualities of his form to make things for my own gratification.

I guess it didn't start from a crush. (Although goodness knows crushes often come from shapes and one's meditations upon them.) It started from a startling removal of hatred. I used to get confused by my intense feelings about shapes when I was at school. I used to assume that if I thought about a boy's shapes when he wasn't there I must love him. But it was really that I loved the shapes, and the fact that they existed. My brain can be quite abstractly thrilled by these things regardless of context.

I'm thinking now it's interesting (and stupid) that I have used the word 'shapes' when technically if I am talking about the parts of a human body, I'm talking about forms. Yet shapes seems the right word, because one's field of vision is two dimensional as is a drawing. So subjectively, forms become shapes. I don't care if your eyebrows are made of hairs and attached to your head. To me they are shapes.

And I think it comes down to this: a desire for, or even a discovery of, an INFINITE joy in shapes. And infinite joy derived from these certain chosen fragments of the finite, of the human carcass. Potentially... perfectible in the subjective truth I can access. Infinite possibilities for interpreting them on a two dimensional plane with powers of feeling and recognizing and powers of invention. Sometimes these moments I have are so rich that they do contain almost infinite quantities of motivation to continue. And that sense of the possibility of infinity is itself quite thrilling.

Perhaps sustaining the purity of the original spark of infinite shape devotion is a big ask. But it is a real thing.

OK I've been meaning to do this for too long, but put it off unnaturally because of art tasks with deadlines. Which is really the sort of thing I should be doing.

Sometimes I worry that the way I write is narcissistic, or could be interpreted as such. Well, not exactly worry, I wonder. Because I think I write the best way I know how given the nature of my thoughts, and I'm not going to get too flustered since writing is not a thing I stake too much vulnerability on, or even a thing that I do every day. But still I wonder, and narcissism isn't good. I think it's one of the least nice of the mental distortions I see in the culture we have.

I know I say 'I' a lot. Ten times in the previous paragraph. And I know that Stephen Fry said once that it would be nice if we tried to do that less. But my reasoning has always been that I say 'I' a lot is because I only presume to speak for myself.... I'm not nearly confident enough to make statements that are supposed to apply universally. So I reckon I use a lot of annoying phrases like 'so it feels like' 'it seems like' 'I think' 'maybe perhaps sort of a bit'.

But it's because I couldn't stand to appear cocky.

Perhaps I'm just cautious about getting peoples' backs up when I need allies...

And if I say something withering about some culture it's softer if framed in 'sort of I think'.

So is it just me being manipulative?

Or honest? About my non-concrete non-master-of-the-universe thoughts?

I'm keen not to encase myself in a crumpled or limiting persona.

Or I would be even more annoying if I stated my thoughts as 'facts'...

And is it because my mission a solitary one?

How odd.

And my low self esteem is boring (narcissistic maybe) and it would bother me if I thought it was just that that was the nub of the issue... but there's something deeper perhaps... Something I could do more book learning about... subjectivity. My thoughts, I think my whole territory, is a subjective territory. So the 'I think' qualifiers make a kind of sense, but there may be new ways, new cliche-avoiding strategies, to communicate the kind of subjectivity I'm about. Perhaps more assertive ways.

A less intimidating way of putting it is... it's about an inner life, and interiority. Even if it fails to put that across, that is there, and ALWAYS has been, virtually since birth. a part of the whole point of the whole darn thing.

Going back to the BP portrait competition, that's something I felt about the entries generally... there wasn't much inner life going on in the paint. Not of the sitters or the painters. There's a kind of culture of materialist secularness about the whole thing. The illusion of 'These are the harsh facts'. I think my painting of Bob has a bit of inner life, or tries to, but I'm still concerned my non literal paint bursts and glows and patches might just come across as amateur, or even corny, to someone who doesn't essentially beleive in the kind of inner life I mean. Or maybe I just haven't communicated it well enough in my painting. Maybe the winning entries are a thing I'm not very interested in, but exemplary versions of that thing, whereas my Bob painting is an oddball mess. It's a possibility.

(Though I suppose, curiously, those 'bursts and glows and patches' are more socially acceptable in fully abstract painting... even more so if it was the fifties now... but I'd never be convinced that a fully abstract painting was really putting across my interior life... not in any way that's of use to the living human race on this gravity-riddled mudball. I would suspect that if I did a fully abstract painting I would be participating in a long running collective elitist semi-delusion. I would suspect that. I wouldn't be sure. But I'd feel the meeting ground for communication had floated off nowhere-wards.)

(Jules Olitski does paintings with hills in them now.)

Here's a richly quotable quote from a recent commenter on the One Cosmos blog, which says a thing that I think, better than I could say it:

>>The mass media give us only a flattened realism devoid of reverence, depth, or dignity<<

'I think that unless there is the superimposition of divine imagination, vision, physical vision is the most "corruptible" of the senses - material vision draws us to the external, certainly more so than does our aural sense.

I'm thinking of William Blake whose material vision was certainly keen - he was a painter and engraver as well as poet - but who literally saw with divine imagination, angels walking across the Thames, for example, or the "soul of a mosquito", which he literally saw and then painted (pretty ugly soul, by the way)

I think video and its ubiquity is particularly without mythic, imaginative depth. Even black and white 16 millimeter conjured up the sense of a certain mythic, reverential distance. And the old black and white movies are still, I think, somehow more "real" than most of today's films. Video, however: there's no "bounce back", no resonance at all. It's sallow and sweaty - like a long day waiting in line under the sickly fluorescent lights of the Department of Motor Vehicles center.'

And this was another 'I think' person, just for good measure...

I remember the Blake image as being 'The Ghost of a Flea' but maybe it's a matter of interpretation. Or maybe there are two pictures and my education on this is lacking.

But I think my issue today is about making sure not to let the emphasis on MY inner vision be mistaken for, or become, a narcissistic 'I am the centre of the universe'. or to turn into a thought that goes 'The world needs to see my work because I am important and the world needs me'.... which could in turn make me less receptive to what other people are offering. That's probably not a serious danger, but there is potential for confusion about this stuff, especially in a world that looks quite empty of interior things and full of celebrities and their gaudy unbouncy textures in high definition.

The narcissism that abounds in our culture is itself probably a perversion of something good... freedom to think one's own thoughts, opportunities for individual achievement, confidence... I don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater... but narcissism is ugly.

Education

I had a notion that a certain course of education could help to rid me of the dangers of narcissistic delusions.

I also had a notion that the education I have received could encourage narcissistic tendencies in a person. Thinking of art lessons at school... you only realise all this in retrospect. You're so accepting of things as generic and normal when you're a child. But... as in English... we weren't taught grammar. Or sentence construction.. or basics in how to paint in watercolour. Or colour theory. Or anything logical and boring and square. it was a big lazy free for all, with vague ideas about modern masters thrown about the place willy nilly. If you were good at art, you were good at it, there was no learning. Just 'expressing yourself'.

Because you're special.

But not so special that we'll teach you any skills or rules that would enable you to express anything meaningful.

Then later at art college being good at it didn't even count. There was no 'good'. There was no truth.

But... OK. Next is a video. Trevor and Simon used to have a segment on Saturday Morning children's television called 'Art Forum' in which they played arty men Domenic Belgeddes and Daniel Cakebread. I couldn't find any clips of that specific sketch by itself, but interestingly, here is a clip where in the montage at the beginning , Trevor and Simon are seen briefly rolling around in the 'express yourself' part of their Art Forum thing, and then are seen doing a drama workshop at a school where they quite literally encourage kids to express themselves as a warmup. However this is allowed, because it was just a warmup, and just a workshop, and just school, and I love Trevor and Simon, and anyway drama is for dastardly lithe extroverts with no interior life and not for sensitive cripples like me, so the rules are different.

And maybe that's enough for today. I have rambled and roamed. This is to be continued... I want to explain my practical thoughts about a narcissism-busting program of intensive education, which would leave one very little time for these silly blogs.