A slow day, preparing for the ArtSwarm performance night. I generally dread, fear and dislike organising a live performance. It's so much work, packing and lugging equipment, setting up, plugging and unplugging cables, liaising with performers, publicity and posters, sound checks, setting up tables with food and drinks, organising the set-list, keeping an eye on the clock, and endless more. The actual performance part is easy and happens in a flash, there's usually no time to rehearse and no time to put a good amount of through of effort into the artistic content because it makes up only about 2% of the work. Setting up a live art show is to do the job of a theatre manager, director, publicist and ticket seller, technician, road manager, tea-boy, dresser and make-up artist, and every other job, and generally paying money to do it all. Yet, at the end of the show I usually feel elated and immediately start planning the next event with gusto.
The last few years have been much more performance based, partly because it a least affords a way to get out, commune with other artists, and share one's work. I'm quite geographically and physically isolated and rarely communicate with people on a social basis. I barely spoke at all until my mid-thirties and had no social contact at all for at least 15 years, my principle friend, apart from my computer, was Andrew my pen-pal. At times, I think the terror of speaking or moving that my father inspired in me as a child made me completely afraid to communicate at all, and in this, my communications emit after first fermenting, and so everything is enriched to make art. This is perhaps the root of all surrealistic art. My tendency to avoid contacting others, and having no social desires, will always be a handicap to my art career, or any normal career, whatever normal means.
This theme introduces my latest painting, Home Life, which has elements of mist and distance like my old Coma painting. This organic style is something relatively new and appears to me in clear images, perhaps a feeling of being the landscape itself rather than an object in it. Most paintings have one protagonist but perhaps more clearly in the Taking of Excalibur painting, there were two, the cliffs and the lanced figure. In dreams, we are all of the characters. So it is in a surrealistic painting.
I'll be framing this soon. These sorts of paintings don't seem to get accepted into exhibitions, but I will try it in a few important shows. There is so much luck in what a jury might select.
