Not content with getting on with the novel, I've started musing on a story. I can't help it if these images pop into my head and demand attention, an airing at least. Here's how it goes so far:
"I stood with the Sabatier knife held above my head like some latter-day Excalibur. The King lay dead at my feet. The King was dead, long live the King!
He had been due to die today anyway, just on a suitably consecrated altar not the kitchen floor."
Somehow, and I'm not sure how, yet. This takes place today in a world in which a form of volkish tradition rose up in the UK and embraced the Celts as a pure race.
I'm still working it through, and it may be too big for a short story, but I like my background to be sound. Already the parallels between the Red Clydesiders in Glasgow and the events in Munich in 1919 are rather astonishing. Glasgow didn't have a Thule Society and nascent National Socialist group fighting back the Communists, that I've found, yet.
Monday, February 19, 2007
Friday, February 16, 2007
For Relaxing Times, Make It Satori Time
In a circuitous way I discovered this week that I'm an Existentialist, a Romantic and an Anarchist. I prefer to use Gnostic as a short hand, but that does have the added connotations of demi-urges and other mythic entities. Not that I'm averse to that association, but it does blur the image.
But also I'm not an Artist. Something I had been laying claim to. The parallels are strong. I make marks on paper; these marks are images that I collect together in a way that aesthetically suits my need to convey a message. Some of them, this one, 'A', for example, were once closer to a more obvious picture of a cow's head.
I am also much more pleased with the fact that the images I create give many different readings and interpretations to the observer. Pleased because I feel these interpretations involve the observer much more than photographs or paintings. There is, in my opinion, a deeper reaction. Most art is passively passed by, ignored or interacted with in a >blink< level response. Maybe my work requires the observer to stop a little longer to truly see what is there?
Technology has affected my art in the same way as it has all fields of endeavour. It has allowed me to more readily arrange my shapes into the collages I want and to have them distributed further.
I think we have established that my art is the equivalent of oil paintings and sculpture. But I am not an artist. Not even, as I had amused myself with the idea, an out-sider artist (I have no formal training past an 'A' in English Higher). The reason, pure and simple, is that I do not live the life of an artist. I have chosen that instead of living in penury, eeking out an existence eating stale bread and whoring with prostitutes in my absinthe riddled insomnia, I would hold down a 'regular' 9to5 job and practice my art, like some furtive secret vice, in the evenings and on weekends. I haven't given myself over wholeheartedly to my muse, nor nobly sacrificed the balance of my bank account to writing sketches of verse for tourists on the banks of the Clyde.
So the official representatives of art, who rolled up in their fat, black pickled-in-formaldehyde half-limousine, hair coifed just so, wearing factory-worn black Armani denim suits handed me an official cease-and-desist order, then crapped into Jesus-shaped cookie-cutters and left the contents in my garden. So, just so we're clear, I'm not an artist.
But also I'm not an Artist. Something I had been laying claim to. The parallels are strong. I make marks on paper; these marks are images that I collect together in a way that aesthetically suits my need to convey a message. Some of them, this one, 'A', for example, were once closer to a more obvious picture of a cow's head.
I am also much more pleased with the fact that the images I create give many different readings and interpretations to the observer. Pleased because I feel these interpretations involve the observer much more than photographs or paintings. There is, in my opinion, a deeper reaction. Most art is passively passed by, ignored or interacted with in a >blink< level response. Maybe my work requires the observer to stop a little longer to truly see what is there?
Technology has affected my art in the same way as it has all fields of endeavour. It has allowed me to more readily arrange my shapes into the collages I want and to have them distributed further.
I think we have established that my art is the equivalent of oil paintings and sculpture. But I am not an artist. Not even, as I had amused myself with the idea, an out-sider artist (I have no formal training past an 'A' in English Higher). The reason, pure and simple, is that I do not live the life of an artist. I have chosen that instead of living in penury, eeking out an existence eating stale bread and whoring with prostitutes in my absinthe riddled insomnia, I would hold down a 'regular' 9to5 job and practice my art, like some furtive secret vice, in the evenings and on weekends. I haven't given myself over wholeheartedly to my muse, nor nobly sacrificed the balance of my bank account to writing sketches of verse for tourists on the banks of the Clyde.
So the official representatives of art, who rolled up in their fat, black pickled-in-formaldehyde half-limousine, hair coifed just so, wearing factory-worn black Armani denim suits handed me an official cease-and-desist order, then crapped into Jesus-shaped cookie-cutters and left the contents in my garden. So, just so we're clear, I'm not an artist.
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