One Artist’s Passion and Dread

admin — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 01:44:07 +0000

Desire for liberation. I am driven by a movement parallel to death. Somehow this must be integral to art. But what about art moves with death, and why do I go animate as a wild puppet in this movement? Head turns, sludge and pinwheels. Heavy red apartment floors. Alcohol, cigarettes, and delirium. Sitting before an old typewriter and changing glasses. Light flashes, sloppy developing, fingers in acid. Still getting poems and art in the mail. Snug, black, leather boots and muscles in legs making sure steps on concrete, cutting paths, sliding through halls. Body going thick with blood at the sight of these girls. I get dizzy, want to fall down terribly and make a big commotion. I stomp slowly toward transformation, but through a strange and dense outer path. Captivated by exposed, undulating flesh. Scaling inebriated creep along the outside of third story apartment building during rainy night. So bent can barely talk. Crossing streets against lights, nearly looking. How can someone this reckless care this deeply? Sometimes I can hardly move. I go immersed in the surrounding sounds/noises. My best art is in letters to friends. I am overwhelmed by trees in the park, turning. The blood gathers in places in my body and hardens. Walkman headphones shooting screeching guitars, heavy bass, crashing drums into my brain. I run around, let myself go, conjure up all the energy I can. Channel it into art work. Draw with long sticks in ink or cloth in powdered charcoal. At night, crazy, running across streets, hiding behind cars. Mushrooms in painting studios. Lost in dark geometry and buzzing electrics. Each intersection as another knot in maze of cord. Unfathomable consciousness charges the air in electrical mystery. My interior is deep and dark. Or right there, smudged and prickly on surface. Perhaps all this moisture is a powerful conductor. I wobble and the moisture runs from my mouth. I draw and paint, fight with the surfaces. I need to paint on panel, scraps of wood and chisel at it, burn it. I am struggling with everything. The biggest steps on concrete falls. My apprehension of some of these girls is nearly unbearable. I swoon with tortured lust. I want to crash through everything and land in some raw, inner space. Sometimes I am completely empty, with only a recognition of the play of light on surfaces, patterns, textures. Sometimes my mind moves, but always within the loneliness and dread, passion and contempt, desire and anxiety. Smell of oil paints. The pale light reflecting all the grimy surfaces. I put such energy into writing notes, but perhaps they mean nothing. I throw all the sticks of my despair, frustration, anxiety, anger, depression into the fire. The fire: my drive to make art, my belief in creative exploration and expression. Fire burns me. I am hot and burning inside. No end to sticks. Blood gathers in my body. I am always hard. The flesh keeps me dizzy. Red room spinning around, pants down around my legs, girl’s dirty hair in fingers. The phenomenology of submersion. Each knot fierce in its mass and uniqueness. All vividness dangerously charged. The light here, and the dirt. And everything moving. How can this want be manifested in the depiction of form by line, tone, color, texture? I am trying to acquire technique, which means method, control, discipline, knowledge, while simultaneously trying to break it all down smash it by lack of method and control, against unknowing and purposelessness. Look for meaning in the bits and pieces remaining. All frightfully cracked and shattered and then stitched and glued together to show this process, to show the lack of belief in any conventional goal. What does it mean, focusing on the dissipation? Depicting the annihilation? Putting real life in the static and flat? Where is the sense in this? Can it be done? I gaze at the interconnected relationships of all these details with wonder and trepidation. Everything is so perfectly complex it’s frightening. Each passage is rising and falling. And there’s always something hanging at the edges that’s crystalline, super-detailed, and in gleaming cartoon color. I know it is related to chaos theory and fractals, or insect mentality and their colonies, or arabesque patterns. I know there is meaning here, but it is constantly unraveling. And desperation and hunger course through my tissue in double-time.

SF by Way of D

admin — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 00:11:18 +0000

(D for desire, doom, debauchery, deviancy, depression, drunkenness, degeneracy, depravity, despair, disorder, destruction, disintegration, dissolution, death…)

Clouds blowing through dark sky as I cross the Bay Bridge. The lit skyline rises before me. It is approaching midnight. I stick my head out of the car window and howl. The school is silent under the moonlight and the stones are cool. It is the first stop I make and I pee on the outside walls thinking “this is my new home.” In front of the hotel where I will stay strut half a dozen big-legged whores with thickly made-up faces and numb looks. I buy cheap scotch, find a place in the park, listen to Seventeen Seconds, and fall asleep in my car. When I awake a Chinese man stands before me swinging a chain around his body and blowing a flute. I check into the hotel, meet my future roommate, a nice, cute and tough girl. At nighttime I go out, towards South of Market, looking for something to eat. Police cars are interspersed between hookers, pan-handlers, street people, and thugs. Later, I feel that a sinister presence is trying to get into the room through the keyhole in the door. The next morning I see small burn marks around the doorknob, and a cloven footprint on the carpet just before the door. This is a bad omen, and I feel fear and strangeness moving in. My car is broken into and the stereo is stolen. The signs are clear to me: if I am to succeed (or even survive) here I must swim with the current and embrace the craziness head on. I walk up Haight street, look for freaks, and score some acid…

The drug-induced, sensory-overload, subconscious plundering tactics are a way to establish inner necessity, to discover what’s meaningful by deconstructing previous notions of art (sacrificing previously held notions of identity). Pulling out that which is hidden. A questioning by contradiction of various conventions I have concerning painting, myself, and society. Looking for something in the repressed, the hidden.

I drink from a bottle of beer wrapped in a paper bag sitting against a wall and watch the prostitutes down around the corner. I‘ve never seen any this close before and I’m fascinated. They call to each other, get into cars which take them away, get driven back and emerge from the cars gesturing and calling to each other again. I watch for a few nights until one of them approaches me. She tells me she’s seen me watching her night after night, and that she knows what I need. She asks if I have a car around, and without thinking I point to it—it is sitting only fifteen feet away—she gives a big grin—her two front teeth are missing—and says, “let’s go.” I can’t think of any reason not to, and soon we are in the car. After she asks me to put my money on the dash, I place the fourteen dollars down that I have, and she swipes the bills away, she leans over me, supported by her knees on the passenger seat, gets my seat reclined and my pants down, and lowers her round, black face down into my lap. Her cool mouth slides around my stiffened flesh. I pull up her skirt and run my fingers over the warm, dark skin that’s bare underneath. She moans and gyrates, sticks ass out, her cheeks press up against the passenger window. Formally dressed, elderly white people leaving the theatre walk by, trying to look away and keep composed. The street seems to glow and my mind spreads tingling outward…

San Francisco struck me as an enchanted city. It was small enough to walk across, and yet packed with interesting architecture, people, and energies. A year or two before this I had gone to the city to visit a friend, and he had taken me around and showed me some sights. I had hung out and gotten loaded with some neo-hippies on Haight, seen a beautiful, tough tattooed goth chick fetch a huge snake out from behind an apartment off Market, went to a trippy, dark and dreamy party full of sexy, made-up people moving in slow motion through dim, colored lights, and wandered around the halls and studios of the Art Institute. The whole place seemed exciting and alive, and I started to think about the idea of moving there and going to art school. It seemed to be the perfect environment to creatively rearrange oneself and encounter something inspiring.

DirtyBloodMachine » Dirt

One Artist’s Passion and Dread

SF by Way of D