I worked until late on the Salome videos then stopped, my head spinning in exhaustion. I awoke at 4am, thoughts racing so much I could barely pause. It's been like this every day for as long as I can remember, since childhood. What has this got me? What I have produced, nothing more, nothing less. Such is art. I work constantly for nothing but this.
Outlines of the videos are complete, but I am unhappy with the video for Empathy With Daisies, which is lots of arrows flying into the distance. It looks too computer generated.
In the morning I worked on the filing of the Fall in Green projections. I made lots, over 20, for the Wonderland show in Knutsford, which remains our only show to date which used projections. These were oddly filed ready for the show, rather than individually as videos, so I re-ordered everything. All videos are 2000kbps for projection, with silent audio (of minimum quality - a video needs audio to play in the projector, so I need to create a silent track). After this it was time to prepare lunch.
Today was the opening for the Stockport Open Art Exhibition, so Deb and I went there by train, a quick journey. The staff are always friendly and welcoming, and everything organised well. The art was disappointing. Very few, if any, works were inspiring, very few good. Many were amateurish, unskilled or poor. As a selector, I'd have rejected many of them. There were a few that I and/or Deb liked though.
I enter so many opens. I wondered about whether to enter The Discerning Eye. I like this exhibition, but the last one was online-only selection, a choice which favours digital art, acrylic art or other degenerate media. It penalises oil and tempera painting which looks better in real life, and of course, one gets a totally different impression of an artwork via a 'digital photo' than in real life, so very different. All aspects of size are missing and most aspects of skill. Online judgement of a painting competition is an insult, like judging a music competition with ears full of cotton wool, yet, it looks like the world is committed to such insults.
When I got back I started work on the opening video of Salome which I'd forgotten, I decided on a slow tunnel of orange smoke, matching the poster graphic. I decided on black between videos rather than ending each video with black, so needed to recompile all of them. I've also finalised the details for the sound effect job.
Recording the Salome music is vital, this, and a video of the performance, will be the primary legacy of this project which is destined to be hardly seen. Apart from the three performers on the list for the open mic, I don't think anyone we know is coming to see it, which is usual, but less important than the quality of the work. Some of the events I've done, like The Spiral Staircase in Congleton, have been really good, even if the audience is usually less than ten.
