The Deadly Allure of Facebook Frame: Part 1

I'm working on the frame for a painting called 'The Deadly Allure of Facebook'. I wanted to paint it blue, matching the colour scheme of that website, but I also wanted to add a sort of bony decay dripping into one corner, matching the painting. I thought I'd try an experiment with acrylic casting resin, a sort of plaster really.

I mixed some up, just about 50 grams, and poured it over the frame, then put cling film over the top. This is a great way to texture and control plaster without making a gooey mess. Then I tipped it up and some wonderful drips bled down just what I wanted! There are lots of air bubbles in there too, which also look good because they mimic bones. I hole this sets by tomorrow because I'd like to paint it then...

Thoughts: This works with plaster but it has trouble adhering. Ideally, the wood would be painted with dilute P.V.A. first (as every wall plasterer knows). I forgot to do this, but this acrylic stuff might well be more sticky naturally, so this will serve as a test. It's a very thin layer, so a top layer of acrylic medium might hold it, and delamination won't harm the mood much, as decay is the theme of that part of the frame anyway. An ideal opportunity to test this new material.

Thought two: I poured the remainder into a pool in cling film. This will cast into a thin sheet which I could break up, like egg-shells, and stick onto the frame if needed. Plaster bits like this are really useful for an artistically secure type of texture decoration.

The Statue

This was my entry for a short story competition that had to be about the supplied image. The closing date has passed, and I've not shared many of my stories in public before so I thought I would share this one. If you have time to read it then I hope you like it. Thank you.

The Statue

The interior of the shop was clean, white, vast, cold. A paragon of minimalist architecture in the city. Each wall was a perfect right angle, and the high ceiling of the room, at least as large as a cathedral, was marked with a perfectly regular pattern of square mirrors.

George was standing in the middle of the space wearing a long black coat, a grey scarf, and a silent, fascinated stare. He was looking at a statue that sat on a white rectangular plinth. The statue was metal, green weathered copper, and depicted two figures facing each other, almost medieval in form and wearing conical cloaks like wizards. They were supporting a ring between them, grasping the rim as though in reverence of the circular hole.

A smartly dressed saleswoman appeared beside George.

“Can I help you?”

George remained staring at the object in fascination. “I'm sure I've seen it before somewhere, but I can't quite place it...”

“I know what you mean. It's a one-off though. An original.”

“I'll take it,” he said, then looked for first time at the woman. She had short black hair, pale skin and neat, black-rimmed spectacles that covered dark, kind eyes. He was struck by how beautiful she was. She smiled and gestured to a distant colleague.

The city street outside was busy, teeming with Christmas shoppers that snaked and bubbled along the grey slushy streets like mating salmon. George meandered through the happy crowds, hugging the black heavy package of his new purchase. His flat was nearby, just a short walk. He pushed along the wide pavements, lowering his head against a new flurry of winter sleet, and swept left into a twisting side-street. This road was much quieter, grey and lifeless, set with cars parked at unusual angles, and flanked by tall buildings of concrete and black windows.

At all times George's mind was on the statue. He was certain that he'd seen it before, somewhere, but where!? The memory was tangible, so real, but so elusive, something from a few years ago perhaps, while on holiday? No, that wasn't it! It was something else. Something deeper. In the shop it attracted him as soon as he saw it, calling to him with an unheard love song. Reeling him in on an unseen thread.

At the end of the road was a block of flats in the art-deco style. George bumped through the glass doors to enter the building, and was soon inside his dim apartment. He cleared a small coffee table and put the package on top, then unwrapped the crisping black coverings with care.

Perhaps the ring was a clue? He looked at the gold ring on his left hand, pausing as if caught by a memory. It was a wedding band, a smooth circle of gold. He rotated the ring with the fingers of his other hand to reveal some tiny letters, beautifully inscribed into the metal: “LUCY I LOVE”

Lucy was gone now. She was still alive, somewhere. Yes, probably still alive. Perhaps in another country somewhere sunny, or perhaps somewhere mundane. Perhaps very close to this small dreary flat, in this cold concrete maze of a wintery English city. George had lost touch with her many years ago.

Lucy was blind, fair skinned, with a shock of strawberry-blonde hair. Everyone thought her very beautiful. Everyone except Lucy herself. Her disability made her seem more special to George, and made her more reliant on him, but it was George's first proper relationship and they weren't an ideal match. Over time, her needs made George feel more like a carer than a partner, a man used, unloved. Lucy became insecure and guilty, trying to rely less on George but this only had the effect of making her more isolated, more introspective, and her soft, warm core became surrounded by a shell, like clay, that grew harder, and thicker.

Out of loneliness George began to get close to another woman, a kind woman with short black hair, who was a great comfort, but as those soft tentacles of love reached out towards her, Lucy found out, and she left instantly. She cut George off, and out, for good. It was as though both were thrown, far apart and far away from each other into two dark pools of a radioactive gas, two distant pits in space across which no light or thought or sound could cross.

The other woman had vanished, and over time Lucy and George became colder, darker people, more silent and still. The red coal of love inside them, once as warm and fresh as a spring morning, began to change to yellow, then green, then black. Icy and dead. The only thing between them was the ring, this hard band of brittle metal they forged together when they were happy, so long ago.

Control

We have control of nothing except our minds at the present moment, but even then every thought is a direct response only to a prior thought or combination of inputs, just as every future thought is a combination only of the thoughts an inputs of the present. Thus I do not think and am not.

The Love Reliquary II

And now, a change of direction and some bits of The Love Reliquary II, an arched shaped wooden cabinet I'm making. Thought I'd share the process.

I've decided to make the hinges out of wood because I thought it would look more interesting. Here's my design...

See the two parts? They would pivot on that hole, thus opening the doors. I came up with a few variants, but put the pivot behind a bit, not exactly between, because it sort of added a "thrust" feeling, as though the doors were pushing open like a proud chest. Even in the design of the hinges the art matters, this is a cabinet about love after all.

Now, to cut them. How do you cut tiny pieces from 12mm M.D.F. by hand?! Answer. Not easily. After drawing them I crudely used a jigsaw to cut the bits out, here...

I plan on sanding them to shape, but then what about the pivot? It needs to be exactly in the right place. I mean exactly. One millimetre out will, by force of leverage, make a big difference and actually stop the edges lining up, jam the doors and possibly even crack them! So, how to drill a perfect hole?

Well, can't be done. First I drew a circle around the pivot. That will help me see the centre. I drilled all of the parts, then chose the key pieces that were most accurate. My plan is to insert a dowel through a stack of these, then sand off all at once, thus the exact shape should be cut AND each bit will have the hole in exactly the right place too.

That's the next step. Before I end, here's a look at the old Love Reliquary to give you an idea of the object, it's an arch-shaped cabinet. This one is largely plaster and very delicate. That took me several months in 2012. How much my skills have improved since that first one!

Let's see how it goes...

Analysis of the Meaning of Life

If life is meaningless and pointless, then why were we born at all? That tremendously complex and expensive enterprise? The only conclusion is that life is not meaningless and pointless.

If all life starts, exists, ends. Whether short, long, simplex, complex; whether it lasts one minute long or as long the universe; even the universe itself, dies eventually. Does that make a short life inside it pointless? We die eventually; does that make the life of one of our cells pointless?

The refutation of nihilism rests upon the definition of meaning. What does it mean for life to have meaning and purpose?

Take two lives, one with meaning and purpose, and one with none. How are they different? Perhaps that are identical. Perhaps the life without meaning feels more sad because it feels its life is meaningless! - a circular argument!

Let's take a counter argument, that life lasts forever, that history will be preserved, that entropy does not always increase with time and that humanity and the universe was eternal. Would that be more a comforting universe than the opposite? Is immortality itself more comforting and meaningful than a mortal life, or less? Or the same?

We exist because we observe that we exist, and by extension the meaning of life is defined by our belief in it. This is not a trick or self-delusion; we create meaning by belief in it exactly because meaning is a very personal expression and conclusion. It can't be given, and is never certain or completely provable.

This is true for all life-forms and information systems. Meaning and belief are conclusions that result from every sense input, it is an identification of pattern, and because every information system and being has different inputs and information storage and processing systems, the pattern is unique for each of us, is inherently so.

The purpose of life then will fundamentally always be different to each of us. The best we can do is recognise and tolerate that fact.

This has implications for truth of any sort which has the same limitations. Whatever a fact is, at best we can only glimpse part of it via our imperfect senses and make a personal conclusion based on that image. It's awlays possible that some parts of the truth are invisible, and we can never know which parts or how vast or tiny or significant those parts are.

Music

Right! Right!

I can't work on painting at the moment because the house is in turmoil and my main goal this month is to write a Death Symphony that I've been waiting to do since last October. I don't feel like it, so will take steps to make myself feel like it. Steps...

1. The logical realisation that this is the perfect time. I can't paint and it's winter, the ideal time for music. My schedule is relatively free.
2. Listening to lots of music, and reading about musical theory. Watching the "Symphony" documentary.
3. Reminding myself of fleeting life, the work must be done while the mind and abilities are fresh. Time is limited. We might die tomorrow and must ensure that everything we can do is done.
4. Logical planning of the main structure. An element of challenge to stimulate my mind.

Thus, as a challenge I thought, for the first time, of music as a painting with time and pitch as the dimensions. I've also been recalling comments about Sibelius, an abstract composer I don't like much (although his 5th symphony is good, although spoiled by the ending). He was an excellent structuralist, a painter akin to Kandinsky, but not Beethoven or Leonardo. I fundamentally begin with the idea and feeling and let the music appear, not backwards like the abstractists Sibelius or Brahms.

My challenge is to broadly plan the structure of the whole thing from the outset, for the first time, as I do with my paintings, and so my art is combining by ideal analogue...

On Worry

One day you will be dead. One day everyone you know and all memory of you will not exist. At some point in the future the last of your descendants will die, the last human will die. Some centuries after that the last living microbe on Earth will be wiped out, and the black Earth will be destroyed by the exploding sun. One day there will be no intelligent life left in the universe at all, no mind or soul to contemplate the cold, drifting atoms, and after more aeons, the universe itself will be no more. That's how unimportant your worries are.

Videos...

I've been doing quite a lot of video work recently, firstly a short promotional video for an exhibition I'm part in May/June. A photographer friend said that more people seem to want videos these days, and I can see that film making is exploding. I thought I'd do a quick run through on how I made this video (maybe I should make a "making of" video - no, that's too far!)

First I wanted an animated logo for the group, Northern Artists. I started with the Marvel comics cinema logo, a series of page flicks that gradually reveal the MARVEL lettering. To make something similar I needed three components.

The first was a list of Northern Artist paintings that can be flicked through. I compiled the paintings and made a quick animation of each one appearing. These appeared one at a time, each lasting less frames than the previous one. This animation lasted 5 or 6 seconds.

Next I made a 3D zooming version of the logo using 3D render software. The logo is quite a simple geometric shape, so I made a 3D model of each shape and placed them in the final position, then simply moved all of the objects to it.

Finally I mocked up a few final versions of the logo, just four stills with different bright areas that would work as a sparkle.

The animation of the paintings simply fades out as the animation fades in, and at the end the logo appears. To add drama I did a couple of things; firstly added a black screen just before the final reveal, and then added a flicker to everything. I did that by making an animation of the same length in grey screens, each a random shade of grey. That's easily done in AviSynth. Here is the code for one solid screen, shade $222222 (very dark grey), 4 frames long (zero to three), and of the same size and format as a video clip called "painting01"...

alpha00=blankclip(painting01, length=3, color=$222222)

A whole chain of those, with different shades, makes a flickering grey and I mixed that with the paintings.

The logo was done. Adding the narrative was much easier technically. It was a short film of myself as a hapless artist trying to paint a boxer in a boxing ring. The idea was to make a series of comedic shorts of the artist trying to paint in exciting situations, the moral being that art should be experienced in "real life". My friend Mark Edmonds instantly came up with the whole idea, directed and did the filming, and boxed at me! The captions were a simple matter of still screens.

Sound was added last using my Noise Station II sequencer. I set the timing to 30 ticks a beat and one beat per second, that meant each note slot was one exact frame. It's a perfect way to exactly synchronise audio to the right frame.

My next video task is to make a video about my Eden Iris artwork. That painting and cabinet took months to do and at first I wanted to make a video to promote it, sort of like a music video, but for a painting (which seems like a logical step in the evolution of art!) On starting though, I wanted to explain more about the artwork rather than just show it. I found myself itching to say how I made different bits, the things that went wrong and explaining all of the stages I went through over the five or six months it's taken to make it (the process is still ongoing!) so my next plan is to make a sort of art documentary about it. That's next...