I have been in a contemplative mood of late. I am getting a bit emo powered and doubting peoples integrity. I am not talking about close friends, more peripheral friends but what is it that makes those friends ally with someone who clearly doesn’t like me? Although then the part I don’t like is kind of under the surface and then you realise it isn’t the first time.

Then someone else comes to mind who has been talking for decades about getting together for a painting session. It never happens and they won’t make their supposed fanboy liking of me public. It’s like a dirty secret or something. Mostly these things are meaningless and the way people you don’t really know that well anyway act is of no consequence.

Now that I am writing about it I have kind of let it go. Also I have to remember what really matters. Self mastery, peace of mind, stability and a connection to nature. I might sound like a broken record but really I am a kind of long loop. I have done a lot of reading lately. Quiet days at work helped the page count. I have been through a few books and I was glad to stop fiction for a bit.

The kind of drivel you can get out of some writing (mine included) only helps contrast something that gets you. One thing that really irked me and I am in the same trap is exceptionalism in art. Sometimes what people call guilt ridden art theories become stifling and then you are supposed to find some way in. Yet you can’t find a way out. What I try as an escape hatch is accountability but you’re still stuck. 

Nobody is ever really accountable and then art is supposed to be the release valve? We admit collective guilt, we look at the inhumanity, the degradation of nearly everything. Yet the same shit keeps going on anyway. Is this just so we can make more art about it? Of course we want to make a difference but economic and military power are what are really keeping the meat grinder going.

Sometimes exceptionalism seems wonderful in art, the attention to detail, the cooked ideas, then you want something with smarts, concepts, wank factor, but you see something in it. Experimentation, an angle, the everyday can finally be seen out of context, the white cube highlighting thingyness and nothingness. It’s like an escape hatch into a new trap. Yet they can’t hold you after closing hours. You are free to go and feel small somewhere else.

The truth is they didn’t even realise you came to look. I wanted something messy, or unadorned like a piece of bare MDF board with a small sticker on it. Your eye was drawn to the sticker then back to the bare MDF. I wanted to break the porcelain cup so I could go on Youtube and see how to glue it back together. I wasn’t going to finish it in gold and apply some real skill. Super glue would do.

I would never drink out of it, actually I would probably throw it out. Then I am back to painting on walls which I did on New Years day and it seems like I have done something that is really nothing. Like it has no pain or struggle, it isn’t meticulous, that is my broken cup. Yet the manufactured one, the perfect one wouldn’t do. That would be something else, I keep showing the fractures, yet I haven’t let that happen to myself.

I saw something the other day that I can’t really share, but it was like someone who feels sickened by the world they step into gets verbally abusive about it. They say derogatory comments to someone who will never understand the pain in themselves or in others. They are constantly made the victim. Yet what is the solution to these deep malaise? 

Normally being alone to work on yourself is better than stepping into the world you hate outside of yourself which is really what you hate about yourself. If you feel worthless, degraded, or feel surrounded by those people you have to find a place away from everyone. Yet if you step into a more ‘normal’ world you have even worse feelings.

The only answer is to disengage, find a quiet spot with those demons and calm the whole situation down. Then rather than project you can internalise. I mean all of these words are lost on the protagonist because they are in that world. Nothing anyone says will help. I remember a similar situation yet it was quite different.

I was painting in a very disadvantaged area. I was close to the road, further in the park were tents full of homeless junkies. The place was littered with used needles. The chair I used to stand on had been pissed on. It was a nightmare but I got my work done and photographed it and promised to never put myself in that position again.

All in all I stuck to my word. I never went back to that kind of mess. Yet those places have kind of grown, more in the homeless department than the junky side. A lot of people live behind churches in tents. The problem just got worse as the luxury apartments kept going up. My painting experience was in 2009 when I was near that tent city near a freeway. The saga continues.