Nothing is true.
Everything is permitted.
Something makes me want to dance.
Anything can happen if you just believe.
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
In the end, neither was selected.
Both are guilty.
Either will do.
All is lost.
Sometimes I think it’s important to share a bad painting. It doesn’t have to be a painting, of course, it can be a poem or a story or whatever. Sometimes it’s good to soften the focus around what we consider to be “good” in order to let “okay” into the frame, or “interesting” or, as is the case with this painting of a desert–even “bad”.
There are several reasons I think this important: the first being that a simple scale of good and bad when applied to artistic endeavours is generally unhelpful. There are, of course, matters of technical aptitude that can be applied to art (in any form) and yet even these rules break down as we switch through mediums and styles, reminding us that art is not a set of rules that cleanly differentiates between what is good and what is bad.
I might add that art is not “the opposite” of such rules, but rather: it exists distinctly apart from them: art cannot be bound by any system of rules or standards, it is an ever-changing living communion between the artist and the world; it is nature and nurture and it is neither of those things. It is the breathless voice of the wind.
Another reason that I feel like it’s important to share “bad” art: although, as artists, we may claim to exist beyond these rules and suppositions mentioned above, we are undoubtedly cowed by them. It is easy to feel obligated to exist within these arbitrary scales and it is no secret that the artist is the harshest (and often cruellest) judge of their own work. However, the simple fact is this, and it’s such an important fact that I’m putting it in a quote block:
You can never trust an artists’ own opinion of their work: this includes your own.
Thirdly, distinct and yet related to the points I have already made–we live in such a society where the much of what we see has been highly calibrated to appear “perfect”.
What we don’t see is that even when something appears perfect it is actually a composite: built from the effort of years, built from practice, built from dozens of rough drafts. For every “perfect” painting perhaps ten bad ones must precede it. For every perfect sentence the same. And still, perfection is such a vacuous concept; if Leonardo DaVinci were alive today would he claim that the Mona Lisa is perfect? Personally I think he’d want to burn the thing, or have another go at painting it. Because that’s what artists do.
By sharing images of the process (which many people do online), or even completed “bad” paintings like my desert, we open ourselves up to learning and we can help others learn. Instead of merely showing the best of myself I also seek to show the imperfections and in doing so, I become more true to myself; I become more real.
My “Bad Painting of a Desert” is a practice piece, it is me messing around with (digital) brushes while the TV is on in the background, it is me studying images of sand dunes and of clouds and of colours and of trying to replicate what I see (or perhaps, even more importantly, what I feel). I consider it a “failed painting” which is to say that I had no intention of ever posting it, but then for the reasons above, I changed my mind.
Maybe, one day, I’ll create “A Mediocre Painting of a Desert”, maybe I won’t. In essence it’s unimportant, because from the very moment I hit publish this work ceases to become a “failed painting” and becomes something else, it becomes exactly what it is and what it always was: it becomes “Bad Painting of a Desert”.
It is art.
And it is not the only “failed painting” I have shared so far. For others, check out Egypt and Shovel; both of which see me experimenting with entirely new mediums. Objectively, neither of them are good paintings and yet, by virtue of their very existence, they are art.
So? Don’t be afraid to make bad art and if you’re brave enough: share it. Because the world needs it. Other artists need it and maybe… you need it too.
I had a shower yesterday and the water was still hot. I stood there and let the stream run for a while against the knot of tension between my shoulders where anxiety gathers and turns to pain.
I stood there for a while and felt my muscles relax and I thought to myself: I’m having a shower and the water is still hot.
It was a soothing thought in a time when it feels like we can’t take anything for granted: tinned foods, sanitary items, tomorrow.
It feels like this, in part, because of a virus—an unliving, self-replicating killer. It also feels like this because the existence of said virus has expedited the breakdown of many systems that help maintain the status quo.
But there is another, more fundamental reason that we feel like we can’t take anything for granted: because we can’t.
If we are actors on a stage than those institutions that keep everything feeling normal are like the stage sets—the fake trees, the picturesque skyline. But the set is falling apart. The background has vanished and now, alone on a stage with the stage lights beating down on us like hideous suns, the illusion has crumbled. The words of the script elude us and the narrative structure of the play has gone all to pieces.
Our routine falls apart and we scramble. We fight like animals over rolls of toilet paper. We scrub our hands until the top layer of skin is gone. We scrub our hands until they are the hands of skeletons clutching soap. With our skeletal hands we keep scrubbing until the soap itself wastes away and with it all our hopes and dreams, circling the drain like soap bubbles.
We have never been able to take anything for granted. And yet society spoon-feeds us the notion that everything’s fine. Television commercials broadcast smiling faces of people way too excited to be doing their grocery shopping. They show perfect family picnics where not a single person is missing.
Unless you follow the news, you could easily be fooled into thinking that this world they show in TV commercials is real. That there is no civil unrest, or war, or starvation. No illness or murder. It’s almost like that John Lennon song.
Many people are simply incapable of comprehending a world that exists beyond their daily lives—it is merely beyond the scope of their comprehension. Others must train themselves to not be affected by it daily, less they quicken that soapy, spiralling decline into the darkness of the drain.
One way, or another; we all find a way to get by.
Until, inevitably: something happens.
It can just as easily be a personal tragedy as a global pandemic. Sometimes, nothing specific triggers it at all. But the moment is easily recognised by that sudden sense of free-fall. We are Dumbo trying to fly without his magic feather.
There are books about it—The Plague.
There are TV shows about it—The Leftovers.
These events, whether personal or collective, make us realise that everything has changed. And yet, if we go outside, or even stand beside a window and even just look outside, we realise that nothing has changed. It’s the exact same world that we lived in before. There’s still sun and trees and the sky is blue and the clouds still drift lazily across it.
It can be maddening. If someone was not wholly in control of their faculties they might want to throw themselves upon the ground and beat it with their fists and scream, over and over: “Why do you mock me, sunshine, with your saccharine glow? Why do you tease me trees with your rustle of uncaring leaves?”
It is the heart of absurdity. That irreconcilable paradox that exists every day and yet we turn away from it. We drown it out with the act of living: a sort of beautiful, tragic illusion that humanity has created for ourselves. But a white picket fence makes for a poorly defence.
Once you’ve witnessed the absurdity for what it is—it cannot be unseen.
It will change you; perhaps it already has.
When the world goes through a collective experience like we are now: a pandemic or a war or, say the hypothetical disappearance of 2% of the Earth’s population (please watch The Leftovers); that sense of free-fall, that existential moment of crisis when Dumbo realises that he doesn’t have his magic feather becomes collective.
Such is the dilemma we now face. Not only a virus (although in Italy, military trucks have been assigned the job of transporting coffins), not simply an economic downturn (although the stock market has crashed to levels unseen since the 80s), not simply a cancellation of sporting events and the closing of pubs and the supermarket shortages.
The true crisis is yet looming—how we make it through the next bit.
People are going to be hurt by this in ways that they haven’t even realised. An empty roll of toilet paper becomes a pathetic metaphor; there’s nothing left for us to wipe the shit away with. And so coated with the excremental truths of reality, we become like soldiers returning from war.
We stare into nothingness, because we realise now—that’s all there is. The supermarket shelves are empty. A meal for a day becomes a unit of currency. A day becomes a unit of currency. Our lives stream by us as though rushing towards the next great tragedy and like foam we break against the rocks.
This is an important time to look out for the people around us and not only out of fear that they are developing a cough. Now is the time for us to realise, in this collective moment of incomprehension, that the world does not make sense.
The world is not fair. Everything we stockpile today may be taken from us tomorrow. That our very breath—each individual one—is the thing: for that breath is the singular moment from which your next breath stems and your next and your next.
No matter how scared we are of contracting a virus: we all still need to keep breathing.
Keep breathing.
For decades, anti-Democratic interests have been working to erode the public trust in the institutions that define our government(s).
By increasingly leveraging pre-existing fears (and in many cases, hatreds), these interests have sought to create an increasingly polarised discourse.
They have succeeded.
Fuelled by misinformation—bogus facts, fake news—they have created a daisy chain of logical fallacies in which society finds itself tangled.
Truth becomes malleable. Centrism is branded inherently foolish (at best) and disingenuous (at worst). We find ourselves sliding—left or right—the rope flaying the skin from our hands. Despite the pain, we cling even tighter.
And in the great gulf between us, the fraying thread of Democracy becomes ever weaker; until, eventually it snaps.
Both sides will be hurled roughly aside, landing heavily, apart from each other, and each side will blame the other for causing the rope to break.
The rope—once taut, now limp—remains affixed to our bloody palms. And it now becomes a whip with which each side seeks to enslave the other.
Democracy, forgotten, is the emptiness where the centre used to be.
The game is now a war.
Once again the world will descend into great darkness.
For how long: who can say?
When Alice climbed through the looking glass, who could have imagined what she would discover on the other side—a world so utterly different to our own and yet, necessarily, defined by our own concepts, for strangeness cannot exist without normality.
Beyond the glass, Alice discovered a world where the seemingly immutable laws of reality could be bent and reshaped. The such a place the laws of physics, time and space, become as playthings; illusory and changeable. And this journey into a world beyond limitations is only made possible through the looking glass itself, which serves as a lens through which we may glimpse these other worlds.
Reflective surfaces have long been objects of wonderment and strange fascination. Even a puddle of water on the prehistoric steppes must have been influential in the human development of self-hood, as the primitive human looked simultaneously down at the ground and back up at himself, clouds gathering like thought bubbles around his head.
And to think—the undead, already lost to this world—are rumoured to have no reflection at all.
In today’s world, the magical looking glass is no longer something that exists only in stories. No longer must we hope to find a still pool of water in order to see ourselves. You do not need to go to the bathroom, or even keep a compact mirror in your handbag. Because we all carry one with us: each of us possesses a looking glass no less magical than the one that Alice climbed through.
In common with Carroll’s absurdist fantasy, our looking glasses not only reflect the world back at us, but become portals through which we can view and shape reality according to our own whims and desires. They reflect reality; but only in as much as we want them to.
Our instagrammed faces, distinct from our real faces, become something that we can control. And as such, these fictions become something we cling to, perhaps even addicted to, as we increasingly seek to shape reality in accordance with our desires.
Those images stored on a server far away—are not us. They possess none of the physicality of a real person. They are mere reflections, trapped in time, possessing not even the material reality of a photo album. The selfie is unreal and yet, increasingly defining of humanity.
Increasingly: reality is defined by unreality.
Everything is now recorded: not only a child’s first steps, but every step. Reality is transforming into something else, it is splitting into a sort of dual-reality: that which is lived and that which is digital and they are becoming ever harder to tell apart.
And yet, no matter how high definition our displays become, no matter how much data we are able to store and retain and recall at an instant—the digital mirror, these looking glasses into which we all spend so many hours wistfully gazing is not real life. It is an illusory jumble of machine-code and dead pixels; true dead pixels, forever devoid of life, because a pixel is never truly alive in the first place.
The looking glass is evolving. Already it has moved from our desks into our pockets and—much sooner than we think—it will be wrapped around our faces. Before we even allow ourselves to consider the implications everything we see we be a digital reflection of the actual reality that exists beyond the lens of unreality.
This strange new technology will bring strange new possibilities. Our world, previously constrained by the laws of physics, is being replicated. And concepts previously believed to paradoxical, chaotic or unpredictable to meaningfully explore will suddenly become plausible, or even likely.
We may not be able to rewind the real world, but the digital chronology is different entirely. If you sleep through an entire meeting or lecture, you could simply watch it back later. Or remind yourself what somebody said to you a mere moment ago when you weren’t actually paying attention.
As we increasingly dwell in this changeable reality we will cease to be living in the present and as a result, reality itself will slip away from us. We will have become time travellers.
Beyond the lens of the future, reality will become something else. And eagerly we will rush to this place in order to escape the many failings of the real world into a reflection of reality that will allow us unprecedented control over our own experiences.
We will become detached from the concepts of time and space that have so long tethered us to this material world. And humanity will truly emerge us gods—each of us dwelling at the centre of our own personal universe, with little cause for concern over what transpires beyond it.
“Oh what fun it’ll be, when they see me through the glass in here, and can’t get at me!”
— Lewis Carroll, “Through the Looking Glass”
But what will become of the world we leave behind?
That which we call Depression and label a mere illness is far more than that.
Depression is the gaping pit at the black heart of our galaxy. And even from this vast distance, some can feel its cosmic drag on them towards endless, inexplicable oblivion.
Yet, even in the face of total annihilation, whether by chance or godlike machination, the very fact that we exist and can stand against the darkness in a brazen show of defiance is important.
We can create: art, life, dinner. Things that are are no less beautiful than unseen rainbows, the glittering light of long-dead stars, a taste, a smell, a breath. Similarly, these things are no less futile.
Importantly, however, futility does not negate beauty.
In fact: the case may be that it is the unlikely coupling of those two concepts that gives possibility to love, hope, happiness and the desire to rise each day to see the sun, which–even in all its radioactive glory, must face the same existential conundrum as us.
Whether or not the sun knows that we exist, we rely on it for sustenance. So too are we bound up in this cosmic causal web with ourselves at the centre. It is inevitable, there is no other valid point of view.
We are not separate from the universe: we’re part of it. We’re integral.
You are integral.
You inherit something. Something mundane–let’s make it a serving plate with bevelled edges or something–that you keep because you remember from your childhood. For a while it sits in the cupboard: untouched, revered.
But there will come a time when you will look down at your hands, stained red with the blood of the human heart you are preparing for use in a dark ritual (or from slicing a tomato) and you’ll realise you’re using THAT plate.
You will find yourself frozen for a moment in your blasphemy. Red drips from your hands.
But it’s okay: because a plate was meant to be a plate. And even if you stain it, or it falls from the bench and shatters, the world will move on, you will move on and that plate you kept for some reason is still just a plate, whether or not it’s in pieces on the floor or in your cupboard.
In the end, only memories that are real. And in the ending after that, even your memories will fade away.
