Posts Tagged ‘driven’

Inner Need, Internal Desire

Friday, April 9th, 2010

Perhaps what I wrote earlier was misleading. This was not my intention: I have wanted to offer thoughtful and generally accurate guides, but pinning down messy, complex states with a line of language has always seemed for me to be a daunting and futile task.

I feel now that I should stress a point: There is an Inner Need, a reoccurring Internal Desire, and it has torn against my insides to be freed, to course through my body and become manifest into a formed expression in the world. The tearing of this Inner Need has caused a sort of psychic torment. I’ve experienced an unbalanced force of pressure between my inner and outer realities, such that the inner pressure calls for an outer event of suitable expression to balance the difference and alleviate the torment. Some outer expression is called for, is seemingly necessitated, by this Internal Desire.

But what type of expressive manifestations are an appropriate remedy? This is not an easy problem, and finding fulfilling, or even adequate, solutions to it has consumed much of my energy. I did not start with an appreciation for an art form. Not really. I didn’t enjoy looking at paintings or photographs, or listening to music, or watching movies or reading books, so much that I said to myself, “hey that’s neat. I think I like that. I’d like to try and learn that.” I started with this burning discomfort of Inner Need acting as a driving force, pushing me on a desperate hunt to find a suitable form of expression, for the purpose of offsetting a consuming sensation of inexplicable pressure.

Maybe painting wasn’t the perfect choice. It was very frustrating for me, and I struggled with it, at times quite dramatically, throughout the entire duration of my practice. But, I didn’t know what else to do. I tried using different media. I tried using psychotropic substances. I tried engaging in various life experiences. I might have tried drilling a hole in my head if I thought it would have helped. As it happened, I did what I could to try and get through it, usually on a day-to-day or very short-term basis. I developed an art practice, both disciplined and experimental, with experiential and philosophical aspects (of a type), a certain habitual regime of intoxicant use, and fell into an uneasy balancing act with wave-like states of passion, anxiety, inspiration, frustration, relentless determination and insatiable desire.

I feel this explanation is closer to the heart of the matter, and that it would be misleading to speak of my process as an intellectual sport or an obsession I had with trying to determine meaning or something that operated in a predominately rational or coherent way. I believe that all these other elements have a place, and that I have operated by a form of logic, but that these must be understood from the perspective of this Inner Need, Internal Desire.

One Artist’s Passion and Dread

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

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.