TACTICS TO LIBERATE THE IMAGE

Maybe that sound like an oxymoron but i do believe that an image can in itself be real. Something besides style.

1. ROMANCE!!! - Layers of existence; The cell is at the bottom, the romantic landscape is at the top. everything in between i am yet to describe.

I am indivisible from my environment- the cell is an attempt to make me. Put it another way. I was trying to work out how to hang paintings, and it turns out the obvious fact is that you have to have a wall to do it. You can try to subvert it good luck there.

~The romantic landscape is one thing (the Diaspora). But I also I like to paint real landscapes, I want to be able to paint in five mins a tszuj of paint that is land that you could feel specifically. LIKE- oh that sighing brown and sinister green is clearly* Berlin, or oh that depressive grass and abominable white beige is unmistakably the terror of the north of Ireland, as if the land cries through our nervous systems. Because why wouldn’t it. I am interested in the colour match. The countryside romanced me ~ after loosing access to my land (promise) at 10 when my grandad died, I forgot who I was till 23 when I started to grow spuds in my back yard again. I also only went out to raves in the countryside. So added onto the romantic Ireland images I saw growing up, that kept by grandad warm** in the country of his oppressors, came the sight of Derbyshire quarries with tiny strawberries and peak districts surpise view on MDMA, ketamine, acid and all the 2C’s. When I became friends with hunt sabs I found a new read on the countryside- a sight of class war and PTSD. A friend showed me hours of footage he collected while out in the fields of tory dogs and horses marching about. He said he couldn’t go out there anymore cause he has panic attacks. I feel that in the north of Ireland - like being electrocuted by a joke lighter. There is a pressure to pick between the imagined land and the real land but im not buying it. and long as i dont treat real land is if it wa imagined all is good.

~ Dreams and feelings are illusions. Illusions I enjoy. Or as I recently heard, the American dream is not for citizens its for immigrants (and the gender dream is for the transexuals) so dare to dream, all you who are contemplating crossing the threshold. Before I transed all I saw was the glimmering lips I wanted to inhale, and dazzling masc secondary characteristics. Now four years down the line all I see is bald heads and hairy arse cracks on the bus. But it doesn’t matter because the illusion leads somewhere (yes i am saying the image is real and can be liberated). Dreams of sovereignty are attempts on sanity. To the cis and to the Irish born in Ireland I should say your vision of what you are - Irish or man is incomplete without us who have been excluded and who dream.

~The somatics of landlessness ~ or what it means to be poor in the landscape. This is something else altogether. For me its how when I ran away from home and matched the miles to the M1 services to hitch I was thinking about Rimbaud and how much he walked. I think of the 4 of cups and sulking on someone else land. Not knowing where to go. Or those times i lived at the field and how shit it is to be disabled and live miles from shops and hospitals and getting fucked over by Ubers in emergencies that cost as much as a weeks food. It's also about how landlessness shows up in the body, and it could be how this break between land and body also shows up in the land. The body-lessness of the land.

2. PERSPECTIVE/DIRECT TRANSMISSION

~Traditionally paintings are of landscapes, sex workers and scenes from the bible. Also a bit of biography and self portraits. I don’t know anything else I’d need to make art about. The only thing I can’t get on board with about painting is the ones of kings and queens. You can say painting is borge but at when I tell a taxi driver I paint I am comprehensible. And painting has an unquestionable value that can be seen. One point of being a painter is no one can question you. But this is only half because the other is to be a male. No more crits as a girl where they say I am more interesting that the work. No more questioning everything, underestimating intention. I was once told I painted a boarder on my painting because I didn’t know how to finish the edges- are you joking? I would just have painted the landscape to the edge like every other landscape painting ever since time began, if I wasting doing it on purpose. The painting of the male painter has unquestionable value and intent. I don't make the rules!

~Direct unmediated transmission with reality. 1. What if life drawing is not about life drawing, it is the praxis of seeing for yourself. Trying to copy reality and wining by being the best at it defies the purpose. 2. Colours that screens can’t reproduce, stuff thats better in the flesh. 3. Back to elements. What the fuck are things made of? We can only find out if we let them talk to us. Time, fire, water, earth (money) what the hell is going on? In a sense all there points relate to the book of Job- remove the cynic reading for a more literal reading- God said, you talk to well of me but never too me, we aren’t having a relationship and without me your life will fall apart. I didn’t cause it too- you never asked me for help, so how could i help? In this case- talk to water. Ask her to tell you. Talk to the earth and time. What I mean is- maybe reality is so much more literal than we give it credit? And what if the foundational mistake is to think it's out there? Up there/on a pedestal? (sky daddy) That we need someone to translate or mediate. Seems to me like the power over people made themselves the middle man between us and reality. The forgiveness industrial complex (confession with a priest). A meme I saw this week sums it up- I cried out to god what won’t you help me with my starving child, then I looked down and saw god as a baby crying. somehow god is angry negelctful and far away. In a more ludicrous example how are dating apps allowed to mediate your connection to others by charging you £14.99 to see people who like you. im tired of being mediated byt things that arent even real.

~I used to want a machine in my studio that I count come in and turn on in the morning and then come back at the end of the day and art would be there. This is basically my idea of failing as an artist now- like Damien Heirst who gets others to make his work for him. This is mirror architecture or in other words the matrix. I see now as tech advances how the matrix would come about. Because unhealed humans- with cult like tendencies, chose the mirror that just reflects what they want to see back at them. All aliveness is cut because it just hurts. Only a product that looks like art and can sell, or generate more abstract things like clout is left. The mirror isn’t bad in itself, mirror work can be a powerful liberator, but once the intention is only capitalism, and it attaches to a machine that parasites because it can’t exist without supply, its just a the hall of mirror and no door- we all know those people who can’t let even one bit of truth come into there mind because it is so threatening. then because they chase success the end up being possessed by whatever maintains it. the get a script on how to behave. the demands of the market meets the aspcets of human psyche which will generate the most attention. This cult like thinking is everywhere but for now what matters to me is how that effects art - not the art market or art employment but art.

3. PRACTICE

Lots of artists practices are not what they say it is. When I decided to do 200 experiments into art and do a 2.0 art foundation at the field what I found is that half of my time was drawing or painting, a quarter was writing and then the last part was emailing and filling out forms. I pretty much gave up the form because I don't want it to be my practice.

The artist as capitalist, or market stratigist truly disgusts me. The practice is being seen, being rich, commodifying usually other ideas. The worship of status and money. Because what I have learned about about my artist labour is, understanding what I am practicing is what i am worshiping. Resistance to alienation, tszuj (aliveness), physical world, how I experience it (meaning), and embellishment how I tell the story of that. I am in service of - words, paint, earth. I believe living on the land is making a deal with the elemental beings to make things with it. But this deal has been forgetten and the elementals aint happy.

WORSHIP OF OTHER THINGS (not all of these i think are wrong for all people all the time)

Victimisation (performative- as really vulnerable people get chucked out of art galleries)

Success/medals/awards

Money

Status/power

Superficial newness without internal paradigm shift

Likes

CV

Rejecting what is already known

New materials/technology

Youthfulness

Being the first or the best

Mirror politics or spirituality (empty slogans or ideas not arising from experience but from rules to try and fence in the chaos- things people heard someone else say)

Appearing to fix social issues but making them worse- ie GRAND UNIONS ART RESIDNCEY IN A PRISON

Art as a hook to hang whatever you want on (art as just a way to get what you want)

Expanding into everything (politics/care/social work/technology) container-less or art as anything.

Middle management or managing others - being paid more than other on projects.

SERVICE TO ART/GO DIRECTLY TO WHAT YOU WANT

Dignity

Aliveness

Showing new paradigm or searching

Practice - Experimentation, failure and surprise

Doing what you actually wanna do

Treating everyone on the project as equal (economically)

REASONS TO PAINT A PAINTING-

To irritate a family member

To offend Irish respectability I was maimed by not via the English part/as oppressor.

To see someone naked

To get back in with the Irish

For attention

To show off

As a joke

To stake a claim to what paint can do

To connect to the moment

to feel the sweetness of being

To find something out about colour, perspective or the picture plane

To have an unmediated experience with reality /touch reality and document not the reality but the touch

To be dedicated to paint (as a form of earth). Paint as matter, not as relocating matter and forcing paint to comply or into commodity. Giving the paint its freedom.

To be in service of art

___________

*landscapes and clarity are inextricably linked

**land is also inextricably linked to warmth like an open fire but element earth (comfort)

Image credits -

1. Howth, Dublin pen pencil felt tip high ligher on paper 2023

2. Sunset ilkeston 2023

3. Photo of the side of lidl ~ gay bwitish nationalism? 2021

4. The body is in the mind acrylic and oil on gesso paper

NEXT WEEK!

last bit of my notes from my show - NEW HORIZIONS (ART SCALES) ! because i LOVE diagrams… layers of existence and polarity and binaries and contradictions and overlaps !!! more than ten totally made up maybe dichotomies (HORIZONS?) of ways to think about what art or image can be for your consideration !!!!!!!!

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