Days, months, years

Ball pen on paper

This is a self-portrait showing how I am lying down.

I did this while waiting for my student to show. I have to repress the instinct not to doodle during lessons: the desire is especially strong with beginners who can be very tedious indeed. It's suprising how difficult learning a language is for most people, and it's surprising that people often don't realise how difficult it is, so they start language lessons with incredible optimism. But, unless they are motivated by the possibility of gain- such as the chance to study or work abroad, etc- they usually give up fairly soon on.

Anyway, lack of storage space means that most art I make now has to be small or disposable, which means the doodle is now re-habilitated as an art form for me. The internet has made looking at images, usually diminished and always pixillated, the norm and little works of art seem to suit the scale of the computer screen and its intimacy well.

With the internet much is lost- scale, texture, weight; but some things are gained- concision, accessability, speed. I miss the physicality of big painting, but I cannot add to an already big storage space problem by painting more.

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If anyone wants anything of mine from here or my Flickr site then drop me a line: the prices are so low they're almost shameful!

The Unavoidability of Cliche

These sort of images of weathered surfaces- walls, doors, faces even- are perhaps a photographic cliche. Nonetheless, they are extremely enjoyable. This is partly because they reveal something that cameras are especially good at, which is the surface detail. This detail is particularly evident when the photos are black and white.

At what point should a subject in art be avoided because it has been done before? When does it become exhausted? What is the difference between a cliche and a tradition?

With so many images available so easily online it is now very evident how unoriginal most of them are- and I include my own work in this generalisation.

Maybe the only way to continue making art is to accept the limits of originality with humour?