I know not what I do, but I do it. The world of fresco and making things has merged into a world of simply manufacturing, but in a good way. I keep pouring chemicals into molds and making things I sort of like because I don't really know what I am making any more. It's like the machine is in control and I am just the worker. The joy of being the worker is that I get to see the pieces before they are moved into new stages, the stages that allow them to be marketed as things. When I pull an item from the mold it is new and this is only once. No matter what I will continue to work on these items until they are presentable in some form and therefore their beauty is reduced to objects.
Because there is no home for this work I keep compiling batches of "frescos" and "screen paintings" here and there. Lately my favorite invention is when I salvage some piece from weathering, being left out in my backyard, and I clean it off, seal it and put it in a frame/mold. I like the effects of natural weathering on the pieces I have made, but there is no consistency with the items that I am making. I find myself lost in a puddle of poop-like things, dirty and ambiguous, but then when I look at them as something to work with they come back to life. I am hopeful that one of these pieces will be the essential way that I want to make new pieces, but that hasn't happened yet as everything appears to be so different to me. Any time I try to repeat a process it fails and ends up seeming like a waste of time.
I know it is delusional to look upon one's own work and see more than what it is, but I can't say I have seen anything that looks like this before. This is what it must feel like to be original, something that I have admired, but have spent my entire life printing other people's crap while avoiding doing anything original myself. This is why this feeling is strange, because I rarely get to enjoy this feeling since I have been a hack most of my life. My only regret is that I have not been able to see this clearly until now, later in life, when I don't have enough time left to do all the images that I think need to be done. Sure, one million different items may be just as good as one super item, but I don't think so. I need to settle on the form of the simplest version of my work and deal with it in the simplest of ways. I need to fight the complexity that tells me how to make it fit with every other piece of work that represents all of my skills and just go with the effects and simplicity of the item itself. I need to stop putting myself in my work and just let the inspiration be the work, but how?
The techniques are nothing without the context and the context is the skills as much as the inspiration. I like to think about the world of art as a cave wall brought into cities for the elite to admire the instincts of life, but I am interested in the wall as the art and I cannot pull my mind out of the wall long enough to focus on the art.
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