I was talking to a young aerosol writer a few years back and he mentioned that the first time he saw my aerosol work he thought it was just some work by a complete tripper. He had no way of connecting to it or seeing anything much in it. I can relate to that perspective but in a different way. When I was young I saw a lot of abstract graffiti. It was very artistic and I also saw work that wasn’t artistic maybe a year later that started to dominate the scene. 

I loved abstract aerosol work but I was not ready for it. It took a while to get the maturity and knowledge. It can seem like a waste to see technical work defaced but every artist creates their own reality even those tagging or doing filled in throw ups. There is a very prominent crew in Sydney called ‘Reality Sucks’ and that acronym sums up a lot. I make my reality through art and someone then puts their reality over it. It just keeps going on and on.

Very few people live in reality, we are mostly living in our heads. I mean you could be in a housing commission with a neighbour that smashes furniture and screams all night. I was at Randwick Plaza, a kind of small dump with a few shops. Normally I have to check the public seating to make sure there are no shit stains or bad smells from the local homeless people who come in and normally get kicked out.

Then people want to win the lottery to escape reality, or get a sports scholarship or anything to avoid the shit stained seats at the local plaza. The bloke in the wheelchair who went between Randwick and Bondi Junction hasn’t been seen since being stabbed in the street in Bondi Junction a month or so ago. So yes reality sucks but the real question is why should it suck? Well we live in a corporate landscape to some extent. 

The plaza in Randwick has the only decent supermarket which sells nasty stuff posing as food. There is a liquor store owned by the same supermarket, a locally owned fruit and veggie shop and an Asian supermarket that is also a news agency. A chemist, a hearing aid store and a Sushi store. You walk around Randwick and there are a few empty stores which have helped the homeless with little nooks and crannies under cover.

It is a bit of a hellscape with a little oasis here and there. When I do my Qigong I get a dose of reality, I come into the present and I find that mostly I am engaged with reality. A lot of people are either working too hard just to survive or working hard to live a more lavish life. There seems to be no middle ground anymore. I like the way Tom Elard described in his blog the cage fighting mentality of social media. Aerosol culture is no different.

Fundamentally the world has changed so much into a publicity cage fight and the old world I paint today is not just seen as tripped out but is in a senseless world of male aggression. I am not blaming men though but let’s remember that nobody can get the help they really need and reality keeps getting further away from reality. There is a legal and illegal market for every drug under the sun, everything is synthetic, your drugs are cut with fentanyl and every correspondence is a scam.

What I wanted to get at though after all of this shouting at clouds is the best place to be in all of this mess is reality. Your internet device is just trying to pose as the answer to everything, reality don’t forget is right under your nose. Yes reality sucks but it is all you really have, your phone isn’t just a camera with a lens but the whole device is a lens to a world that doesn’t really exist in your reality a lot of the time. There are many people arguing over different narratives created by people chasing advertising money.

Remember to keep some mental real estate handy for reality, if the world is following whatever narrative from the interwebs or whatever your only way to survive is by living in reality. If you find like minded people make a food co-op or something, food is labour and labour is reality too. Yet say someone has ideas not really based in reality, sometimes the reason they don’t want to change is because reality sucks and it can be hard to change gears and get in reality.

Also in our society you don’t even need to be in reality that much, you have endless entertainment, endless distractions. You could drive your car to the plaza and avoid the shit stained seats, you have your headphones in and whatever else. You might go to a different mall in a different area or you are always looking at your phone and helping out billionaires. What really amazes me though is the universe out in space is basically how the ancients navigated Earth and now it has become another distraction and hardly anyone knows how to navigate with the stars.

Space has become specialised and a fascination in a world that offers everything, and that includes shit stained seats at the plaza. Imagine homeless people on Mars, will we see shit stained seats somewhere in the solar system other than Earth? That is my point, reality doesn’t really suck, it is just that we have no agency over our reality. Or it is clouded by lies and distractions and pointless ideas that are manufactured to keep us locked out of the collective reality we really need. The bad part is we just go along with it.