Blame

People blame politicians for their misfortunes, or the past, or the stupid, or the rich, or their enemies, or politicians of the past, or witches, or immigrants, or technocrats, revolutionaries, bankers, religious zealots, be they alive, dead, or written about in holy books, which are also blamed, for the misfortunes of the world and of our lives. People also blame themselves.

People have an innate desire to blame someone or something else for misfortune. It's part of being self-aware to believe that the actions of selves matter. If actions of selves matter then praise and blame are logical, but if we are not self-aware then our actions are not ours, and we can't be responsible for them. To blame or praise things that are not self-aware makes no sense. We can't blame the Earth for quaking, even when it causes great destruction. We can blame a warmonger for an act with similar results.

Can an unconscious being, a dog (if dogs have no self-awareness) be blamed for an action that starts a war or kills someone? Dogs do kill and are blamed, but this is largely anthropomorphism by the justice system. We find it easy to blame a savage dog, treating the animal like a brutal person, yet don't treat chickens in a battery farm as more than automatons.

Can the stupid be blamed for acting stupidly? No, for their actions were always destined, given their knowledge and experience up that point. Similarly, the actions of the intelligent were always destined in the same way. Can they be blamed for the outcome of their actions either?

Once the illusion of self-control is released, feelings of blame are irrational. What has been has been, and was always to be, and to attach blame, or praise to the actions of others is a futile waste of mental energy, as futile as blaming the sun for rising and burning us, or the Earth for quaking.

Art as Emotional Communication

People's answer to the question of "What is art?" varies, but for me art is emotional communication. Intellectual communication is not art, merely information. Du Champ's urinal was art originally because it was shocking, but it is not art now because it is no longer shocking, so what art is varies in time with the emotional flow of the observer, and of society.

This also means that art and its meaning is deeply tied to humanity and society, as all emotions step from social interactions, and also of it time, having different meanings and power at different times, and in different societies. The scribbled characters on a receipt may be simple commerce at one time, but in thousands of years, as the last mark of a dead civilisation, may gain new emotional significance and become an artwork. By the same token, a meaningful portrait of a saint or revolutionary leader may, in distant years, fade in feeling to become a mere factual image.

Tiger Moving Nowhere At All

Here's a newly framed print of my Tiger Moving Nowhere At All painting. The size is unusual so each of these prints has a unique hand made frame with a different design. This one is number 3 of 50 and is for sale for £295, you can email me if you want to buy it and are able to collect it from Cheshire.

The painting is about the impending extinction of the tiger, an animal on the brink of oblivion. I wanted the shape of the picture itself to mimic the shape of a tiger's head.

Love and Death

We experience death as loss. We can't feel loss individually, only socially as a recognition of something missing. When we die, we will feel nothing ourselves. So feeling loss is an integral part of our life, it can't exist without it and decay itself is a fundamental part of existence.

Love is attachment and death is disattachment, which is only noticed relative to the prior attachment, so experience is a constant flow of change from states of attachment and states of disattachment, and it is these changes of state that define existence. This can even occur at atomic levels, the bubbles of the universe, a flow of attachment and disattachment.

To be totally disattached, to be invisible and unconsidered by anyone, is the same as being dead, and to re-attach is to spontaneously live, but only in the minds of others, as our death can only be measured by others. Thus, our relationships and how others think of us defines our existence.

As existence is defined by the flow of attachment and disattachment, then change and disruption is at its heart. To fit in, to rest, to stand still, these things are decadent, and passion, disruption, energetic change, creativity, define the brightness of life.

Gone

I still love you completely.
I still miss you each day.
My heart is still broken and fallen away.

I still see your face
in my dreams as I strive
to forget every memory,
and crush every hope.

In my soul you're alive,
in my life you live on,
while I'm dead inside,
as I cope,
with you gone.

Structural Forms in Visual Art

For some time I've made paintings that reflect a common theme throughout the work, an image or shape in the painting like a visual motif that appears in different forms throughout it. I called these symphonic paintings, but in the past year or two I've been focusing more consciously on the idea of visual art that uses musical symphonic forms (such as the sonata-rondo form used in classical music). I compose music too, and much of my work in other media (eg. writing, and computer programming) is emotionally and structurally related on a deeper level. The concept of an defined structure in visual art seems to be lacking.

I think this is an essential progression. Most artworks use structured forms, from small scale works like poems, to music symphonies or films. Some classical paintings have degrees of form, such as using the golden section, or a triptych arrangement (these were initially altar pieces, and so partly defined by function, but some modern artists like Francis Bacon developed this form in a secular way) but these are for the most part exceptions, and structural forms are largely absent from visual art.

Structure exists in artforms because it aids communication between artist and viewer. In writing, we use punctuation, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters for this reason. This is structure. Classical music is an essentially abstract form, and the structure helps unify what could be random or nonsensical arrangement of notes into something meaningful, creating comprehensible narrative.

Much of visual art lacks these structures, or relies on third party curation to develop them. A painting exhibition might be arranged so that it is viewed in one particular order, with a theme or grouping. This is structure, but it can be imposed by a curator at whim. For many exhibitions the artist arranges the work, but this can be seen as a separate process. The arrangement isn't always seen as the artwork itself, when this is vital; and of course the paintings on display should reflect the structure and the structure reflect the painting content.

The rules of form

1. An art installation should be structured and feature several movements, to be experienced in order, that grant it a temporal quality. Life exists in time, and visual art needs a temporal quality to represent feelings accurately. Reliance on chance or psychology or opinion for order is not sufficient. This is necessary because a complex narrative requires a complex mix of emotions and ideas, and the artist must be able to guide the viewer in the intended way to communicate accurately.

2. A structure must be unified with a theme. A theme forms common thread that pulls each separate part towards the whole, to create one singular work. An artwork on this scale is not an arbitrary segment on the line of infinite time, but a unified entity with start, middle and end, all of which together form one concept. A theme is needed to hold together the disparate parts of the structure. Variety occurs as variation of a single fundamental idea.

These are the essential rules and can apply to any art from, from poetry and music to visual art, but temporality is usually lacking in visual art. Feelings of structure, order, grace, and beauty are essential components of any artform too, but sometimes for emotional effect these can be broken. Breaking the temporal or global thematic aspects however will only ever destroy an idea and hamper communication between artist and viewer and always dilute an idea, reduce its contrast and intensity.

Dream

Really positive dream last night.

I was wondering around a busy supermarket with prime minister David Cameron, we'd both been given new Nokia mobile phones, but really cheap and rubbish, made from white velcro, with soft, brightly coloured buttons. We decided to ask for replacements and were sent to a distant part of the shop, high up, remote and dark with angular passageways, draped in shadows like the back of a theatre or the inside of a mechanism. The floor sloped down like a funnel, and a hole at the bottom led to a passageway, like the tunnel in Running Man that was the entrance to place we needed to go to. I was now blind, but only blind people could go there, so had to go alone.

I went through the tunnel and emerged from a lake in a dark land and a crowd of dark people. My phone was now a magical white stone, casting bright light in all directions and the people were in awe of it, but warned me that light was banned here. A guard on horseback appeared and I was arrested and tied up, then presented before the king in a courtyard. The king was dressed a bit like a Klingon warrior, with orange/brown colours. I was to be executed by him and his batleth, but then I produced a glowing white sword from a scabbard on my back. The blade was slightly jagged and so bright. I sliced the king in two, freeing the land from darkness.

For me this is about the power of communication, but it was interesting to note the crowds of dark people, the oppressed, who wanted to be freed by the light. The dream was very visual and chromanant, elements, I could paint.

Future Note To Self

I used to be in the perfect crystal prison, a palace of solitude forged by mathematical gods but then I saw a pretty animal and followed it outside into a different world, then another moving thing, then another, then fell ill with radiation sickness in a black valley of sharp flint shards, and the red sky howled with rapist wolves, and through the dead wasteland I found my way back to my palace to find it smashed and dirty, a concrete cube two by two by two metres.