I have been getting into the airbrush I bought. I got the small compressor that comes with the airbrush. It adds a lot of depth. I find art so interesting. It is so complex and there is so much incredible work out there. I was messaging an artist friend and he sent me some of Nigel Cookes early painting, also Xuiching Tsay’s work. There was a tension in these works between illusion and the material trace of painting normally through abstraction and visible brushstrokes. I see a lot of that in contemporary painting, not that I have seen a lot of it. It is definitely hard to pull off and I get the collectibility of it.

Although I feel the pseudo graffiti aspect in some of the paintings hides the fact that having to go beyond graffiti into new realms is a bit sad. Maybe it is how graffiti is presented in general. It can feel stunted in galleries but I would say graffiti on canvas from the 70s seems less self conscious. A lot of people find ways around this awkward problem of making graffiti work in the white cube setting. A lot of people have aced it by using different media and illustrative solutions, there are a few who have a graffiti voice like Daim, Futura, Rizote, Lee, JonOne, Egs, Horfe, Mark Bode. But there are heaps of people trying to find ways around graffiti forms. 

I thought I would have more to say on the topic but I can see that the range of work is pretty big and the choice to explore a kind of dream state with those tensions of the underlying messiness of reality is probably the major quandary of the world we find ourselves inhabiting.

Just going off topic, I feel it is quite Buddhist to want to focus on the spirit rather than the meat cage, not that Buddhists talk about meat cages but a stink shell. This quandary gets a lot of people as a contemporary issue yet no spirit is considered. Taoism focuses on the 形神 XingShen or body and soul or body and spirit.

So in some contemporary painting work you have the illusion in your head and the illusion you exist within. The dream and reality which is somewhat Romantic thinking and that tension lives comfortably in the ‘screen’ in your hand, and the pull back to Earth of stubbing your toe or stepping in dog shit.

The screen in your hand is the ‘ghost’ and the Buddhist who leaves their body behind is also the ‘ghost’. This looks like spiritual talk but it’s more practical in that the screen can only be an insubstantial reality. If you forget about your body and focus on the spirit you lose the body which is a substantial asset. It should really be about body and soul because there shouldn’t be a search for tension. Not that harmony is the goal either, it is more about coexistence and acceptance of the visible and invisible. It doesn’t need to be a game of one clashing with the other. That then is my take on the contemporary condition.