three off the top boards

and seven off the lower boards, of which you can see six here

“Nowhere on the Internet will you find a picture of more guys simultaneously jumping off a tree than the 10 shown here”
thanks Shorpy

Hee hee, give me a couple of 10 grand and we'll knock this thing into shape...

... in the mean time, I'll get on with it as best I can. I should be able to get seven minutes together by the end of June, even if it doesn't have the swirling red-saturated smoke and the three dancers. Hey ho.

It does being big by being able to jump from one thing to the next without taking all the inbetweeny steps. Unlike this switching-engine under the desk. Particularly big leaps are sometimes called creativity.

10:36 am

This morning the universe in my mind is focused on a few square inches of paper in front of me. The paper is the portal, the paper is the medium through which the ideas try and escape.

10:44 am

In the dim cold dark matter of the mind images are conjured up like third magnitude stars and whole worlds evolve, collide and dissolve in moments, while feelings and emotions are shuffled and stirred.

10:58 am

As I draw the images, trying to nail the thoughts to something tangible, other images keep appearing, and a whole heap of possibility occurs, bound only by time and money.

Three pages are creating this jumble of type, as you can see by the three visible page numbers at the bottom. On the top page, page 153, the paper has almost completely rotted away, just leaving the ink.

So when books rot just the ink remains, just the letters, the great libraries of the world will eventually become just a pile of letters. In the future Space People will try to put the letters back into some sort of order and create wonderfully inaccurate stories about our civilization.

Photoshop’s clever, damn clever, but at what cost? As well as the RSIs currently impinging on my right wrist, what does it do for the eyes, staring full screen at glaring pixels all day long?

I’ve spent the best part of the last two weeks hooked up to the G5, tapping the occasional key, clicking, interminably, on the clicky thing. And I’ve got some acceptable results, I guess. But I feel flat. I feel stuck.

In the painting studio I pace about, barefoot, whilst flinging paint at the panel and talking to the model – hell, sometimes I pace about [barefoot] while talking to the panel and flinging paint at the model, it’s a choice thing.

There’s something happening. There are deals being struck by the minute. There’s some walking about going on. There’s plenty of vim and not a little vigour.

Taking pictures, likewise, I dance and jig and generally wiggle around [while flinging paint at the model, obviously] and it’s a real-time event, of which the pictures are the product.

But sitting with a computer as my companion? Dear God! There’s no connection, no action, no dialogue.

This is no new thing, two centuries ago people were already worrying about the amount of time office workers were spending at their desks, and contraptions were constructed accordingly.

I don’t particularly feel the need to indulge in the above, whatever it is, but I do need to engage in some physically creative endeavour, hands on.

more here

A full-size man made of riveted copper.

It goes on like this all the way down to the feet.

Photograph showing arrangement of apparatus for Continuous Grid and Anode Potential Tests.

Nothing’s that far from anything else. Indeed, by all accounts, we’re all only ever six people away from Kevin Bacon and, apparently, if you lose your pen it’ll be a maximum of nine inches away from where you are.

Or at least where you were when you lost it, providing, I guess, it didn’t slip out of your back pocket during your record breaking attempt of the North Face of the Eiger. Mind you it might still be nine inches away, in one direction – and several thousand feet in quite another direction. But, as usual, I digress.

Theodoric was One of Us, manipulated digital image

The photographs I’m working on at the moment are not entirely dissimilar to a series of mixed media pieces I did a few years ago:

head and text VIII, 200mm x 350mm mixed media on paper

head + blots, 225mm x 300mm, mixed media on paper

And indeed figures and text have been known to feature in the big oils:

figure with vessel, 1980mm x 1220mm, oil on panel

ummm… the same themes can be seen in the films too:

still image from dusttodust, digital video, 5'16"

still image from dusttodust, digital video, 5'16"

I seem to have spent the last umpty years trying to get words and bodies to lie together.

What a ridiculous idea that Ms Lohan should try to recreate the iconic photoshoot between Bert Stern and Marilyn, even with Stern once more as the photographer. Marilyn had something - charisma, Lindsay is mainly known for not having something – knickers. I can’t believe how bad these new images are.

Bert Stern was the man behind the iconic image of Lolita

and has subsequently become known for taking the last photographs of Marilyn, in a three day shoot, only a few weeks before her death.

Some of these images quickly reached well deserved fame. Today, even the images he decided weren’t up to scratch have become famous, indeed the orange marker crossing out the print has become integral to the image.

Such is the nature of success that Mr Stern is now famous for images he initially rejected. What a wonderful and weird world we live in.

And I’m not posting images of La Lohan because they are really, really, ugly – but if you want to see for yourself click here.

Palimpsest disappeared from our lives around 1440, when your man Gutenberg began using a new piece of paper for each imprint. Only recently has the phenomenon reappeared with the likes of old tattered hoardings subject to waves of pastings by fly posters and the opacity tool in Photoshop.