~Apokalyptyk

Well here it goes... I'm putting pencil to paper, maybe even get around to properly inking some of these.

Faces... ARGH!
Still life's are the things I'm best at, it's probably my maths-brain that makes the more geometric forms work better in my mind. There are a couple of things I really want to work on... finally when i have them fleshed out properly and I've really worked on technique (which isn't much chop at the moment), I'll put them up.

It'll be a 2-part work called Eulogy. I might as well detail the back-story of them. It isn't your usual macabre sort of "I'm dark and depressed so I'm going to do stuff about death"... they're supposed to be visual eulogies to two people I knew.

When I worked in a cafe in Parramatta Sydney, there were two particularly larger than life characters who came into the Cafe. Jan (pronounced Yaarn) and Mark. Jan had the creepy ability to drink 12+ espressos in a single night, walk off home without caffiene jitters and go to sleep. All the time he was drinking the coffee he'd read poetry. Poe, Heaney, lots of English and American poetry, nothing pre-1800 and mostly stuff post 1930. Jan died of an overdose. He was a lonely man and I knew it, so did many people at the cafe, but it was very hard to get to know him truly because of the walls he'd built around himself. He was a really nice guy. When it's done it will feature a simple espresso shot-glass and some poetry books, his favourites and also some who write about isolation and loneliness. I'm planning on it being pencil/charcoal but I'm still fairly weak on using charcoal.

The second one is for a very unique guy who was called Mark. He had a mental disease, schizophrenia I think it was, and he would often have arguments at the top of his voice with the voices in his head. He had a long story but basically he was a genius who had been cursed. In his more lucid times he could sit and write down all these scientific theories scattered with much more random ideas. When I sat down and looked carefully at some of this stuff, it was very advanced chemistry, physics and mathematics (which are areas I studied in my first degree). Everything was so scrambled it took me 30min to figure out what bits connected together. He was a bonafide genius and clearly understood the chemistry he was writing down, but it was the scramble and flow of consciousness that stunned me. I heard from people that he'd left his family because he felt guilty about the burden he was to them. He was homeless and travelled around Sydney, moving to the places where the free psychology clinics were (which were all closed from what I understand). So he lived in a park near a river, it's actually a very beautiful location (other than the occasional late-night mugging and the crap that gets tossed into it). One day he was found dead laying by the river, he'd died in his sleep. The cause of his death doesn't really matter. It was a tragedy to lose someone who could think clearly enough to write down high-powered science, left his family so they wouldn't have him as a burden and then had many many people turn up to his funeral. For Mark I am planning to have a stack of papers being teased/tugged at by the wind, held down by a coffee-cup on a park-bench next to the river with a particularly scenic bridge that is near where he died.

The obsession with the coffee-cups is just that both of these people were connected to me through the cafe, it's how I knew them. There is something special about that little brown roasted bean.

So there you go, maybe there'll be something to show in a week or so... I need to dig my scanner out of where-ever it is right now before I can put anything up.

Maybe I'll figure out how to do modular visual art, just like the modular music I'm working on with a long-time and close musical friend. Needless to say my taste in music is wierd... Stereolab modularism combined with as many styles as I feel like picking up on... so far it's Tool, Tori Amos, stuff similar to Mogwai, minimalism like Low, Flaming Lips... and the list goes on. Who knows if that will ever really appeal but at the moment it's the internet audience we're after... go post-rock!!!