We are not Alchemists.

The alchemy of the act of creation happens in between synapses.
So subtle, your hands know things your mind will never fathom.
Your thinking brain is only ever playing catch up.


From the outside, it's romantic. A myth arising.
The Creative Genius. The Tortured Artist. The Eccentric Visionary.
Such familiar phantoms.
All drama and intensity; conviction and passionate purpose, flamboyance and elegant outrageousness.

So much caricature.

Because on the inside, creativity isn't always dynamic.

It isn't always pretty. Or cool.
Sometimes it isn't even particularly interesting.
It lives in the quiet places.
And sometimes more resembles sheer doggedness than beatific ingenuity.
That telegenic flurry of inspiring activity you're imagining?
That's a movie montage.


That isn’t to say that sudden, electric flash of inspiration isn't a thing.
It's just not 'The Only Thing'.


Between the seminal flash and the realized creation there is all the work of creating.


And it is work.
It is sweat. It is muscle, blood and bone. It is creative ADHD. It is schizophrenia. It is loneliness. It is resistance. It is doubt. It is losing perspective. It is going too far out. It is not knowing the way back. It is giving up. It is getting back on. It is lumbering through. It is feeling. It is finding. It is doing. It is looking. It is looking again. It is repetitive. It is mundane. It is grunt work strung together, end to end till something larger unfolds...becomes; till something of value is formed.
It is work.


Myth-makers you do us no favours.

On Ephiphany and The Blackness of Soot.

The peculiar thing about having an Epiphany is that it usually happens very, very quietly.

There are no early warnings. There is no fanfare - no dramatic sound effects or signature theme music no matter how much the general sitcom supra-conscious may have conditioned you to expect something like that.

Quietly these profundities saunter into rooms where your Experiential Self is on auto-pilot, processing and simultaneously perpetuating the phenomena of living.
Quietly they lurk, surreptitiously trying to catch your eye before they have to slink out again so non-clamorous that sometimes the only way you can tell they were present is by that vague sense of disquiet within that tells you : you missed something important.

Of course, the times they do manage to make themselves known, outwardly, it's such an unremarkable event. The earth does not stop spinning on its axes. Physical laws like gravity and motion are not reversed. Time and space are not invalidated. Nothing has changed. But inside you is a cataclysm; a private earthquake and nothing is precisely quite the same again.

It's as though a word or phrase in the topographical landscape of a conversation or cognition shifts ever so subtly and rearranges itself just so, suddenly giving you access to meaning that is immeasurably beyond the immediate and the mundane; giving you one more piece of  the jigsaw that makes up life as you understand it, changing the way you process the world forever.

The first time I remember being gobsmacked like that was over a handful of soot.
Yes, soot.
Or lamp black - that black stuff that collects on things that have been held over a flame.
I found a coat of it on some object I was in the process of cleaning, I think.
And after the first thoughtless smush of my fingers over the surface, I had an involuntary meditative moment that lasted for maybe 15 minutes and consisted of me mesmerized, just staring at this stuff on my fingers for the entire duration.

It was the most absolute black I'd ever seen - dense and lush and creamy. It was solid and amorphous at the same time. So dark and soft. So deep and intensely black that it consumed light but at the same time so pure it was luminescent.

It was beautiful. It was perfect.
It was devastating.

Because no sooner had my intuitive self recognized the perfection than my experiential self needed to make something of it.

I wanted to crow about it as though it were a new species of rare flora or fauna that I'd discovered; as though somehow by noticing the presence of the sublime within the mundane, I had had a hand in its very creation. I'd been given a one-off pass to the other side to see the beauty of the universe and all I could think of was getting a souvenir for when I went back to the real world just so I could say I'd been there.

To my mind, merely sensing beauty wasn't enough if I couldn't somehow translate the insight into something communicable.
What was the point of perceiving perfection if it couldn't be...disseminated; its properties mined, its attributes applied. What good was it if it couldn't be used.

But nothing that I came up with would fit. For years I tried. I'd revisit the memory and think: What? How?

And it came to me gradually, over the course of years. Through a process of elimination, I realized that there is nothing I can do with or make of the perfect blackness that I had witnessed that would create, in another human being, the same experience or understanding I'd been given in my moment with it. This, I came to realize was the reason I'd been tussling creatively with this concept for more than a decade. I had been trying to share it. I had been trying to make it better, clearer...so I could share it.
And so it came to me, just recently, that by it's very definition, you can not do more to perfection. You can not make it better. It is perfection. It is.

And the gift I has been given was the opportunity to see the perfection...not the perfection itself.

I came. I saw. I procrastinated.

I figure I'm just the laziest motherfucker on this planet.

That's what brings me here at 3:45 a.m. on a Thursday morning gwaping at a computer screen while subjecting my neighbours to my most recent John Mayer compilation. (Ironically featuring 'Midnight' a track dedicated to insomnia and urban alienation. Good theme.)Now the thought swirling around in my brain, mystifying the fuck out of me is: Where do all my good intentions go?

Today was supposed to be about creative exploration. Today I was supposed to turn a slowly moulting mountain of gateway paper representing 8 years worth of doodles and ideas and rough drafts into at least one actual artwork.

Instead I took a nap that lasted 6 hours.

The narcolepsy is just a reaction. The real problem is writer's block, or my version of it, anyway. This is an abject, paralysing fear of commencing, of committing, of eventually fucking up SO badly in SO many ways that they'd need a whole new decimal system to quantify it.
It's like stepping off a cliff...once you 're airborne, you don't know how far you're going to drop and what shape you'll be in when you land. The average person tends to put it off for as long as he or she can.

The good news (I'm guessing)is that I'm not alone! We are a generation of procrastinators and lazy motherfuckers!!(how else do you explain the grammar in text messages and the tomaguchi phenomenon?) To avoid doing any real work we have all perfected a whole host of ingenious evasive strategy.

I know people who, everytime they need to begin a new project, will defer the inevitable by attempting to re-organize their entire CD collection - alphabetically, or chronologically, or based on favourites, or based on which bands had members who had maternal aunts named Gertie.

Spending an hour plucking your eyebrows(with toe-nail clippers),scraping the grunge off the grouting in the kitchen tiles with a toothpick, trying to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes (even though you don't smoke), volunteering to make absurd market runs (you've just discovered that there are no spark plugs in the house - horror of horrors), meditating upon the whorls and lines on the soles of your feet to see if you can find any hidden alphabets spelling 'Paul is dead', these are all acceptable evasion tactics.

Now the question is, has Humanity always been such a bunch of putter-offers, of procrastinators, of slackers or is it just our generation?
Like, I wonder if Plato had to play 249 games of solitaire before he sat himself down to write the Republic.
Or if Einstein would spend an hour combing his facial hiar into animal shapes to add to his bag of party tricks before he went to work on the theory of relativity.
Can you imagine Jesus before the Sermon on the Mount: "Water. Wine. Water. Wine...no, water. hic!! hee hee no, th-hass wine."
It's a wonder anything got done!

Notice by the way, how in true diabolical fashion, I have managed to defer my start up problems by making them yours...What? do you see any finished artwork lying around the place?

Sanctuary

The work week, the work life, is spent in people's houses trying to turn flat boring whitewashed walls into the gateways to some exotic other realm using colour and my meagre imagination. Part of the job becomes about blending unobtrusively into their environment, their intimate life spaces, their homes.

It's a kind of involuntary voyeurism...outside, looking in through the plastic wrap of professional distance. Like second nature I read their lives from the encrypted code of their possessions and professions; their habits and their humours.

Amazing. like fingerprints and faces, no two are the same...each room coloured by the distinct aura of it's inhabitants.

The happily married, the hopelessly single, the bitter divorced.

The tiny rented apartments and the sprawling manor homes.

Homes warm and frenetic with light and laughter and love and homes barren and screaming with the trapped silence of mausoleums.

Catalog perfect homes and spiraling mess homes.

Homes that let you borrow their sunsoaked peace and homes that feed you hollow disquiet.

Homes rich and pungent with the smells of cooking and homes rank with the odour of wealth.

Homes with pictures of friends and lovers and pets and mothers taped to walls and refrigerator doors and homes spartan as monasteries.


And in the homes, the people...
The sweet apologetic ones that can't quite make up their minds.
The exuberant ones that talk a mile a minute.
The narrow fault finding ones.
The sneaky ones you know are going to try and work you over.
The quiet ones with the guarded eyes that you want to please the most because when you do their wonder is the purest.
The terminally design challenged ones who couldn't possibly trust you or their own sense of style...not without a signed affidavit from their mighty interior designers.
The arrogant patronizing ones who think they could do your job in their sleep.
The adventurous ones who let you go the distance...and come along for the ride.
The bewildered ones who don't understand any of it, but know you'll somehow magically figure out what they like.
They all let you in...and you stay a while...a tourist in a borrowed sanctuary.

Shared space is a shared life; it's inevitable that they'll talk to you and tell you things...sometimes just because you're there. Sometimes because no one else is.
And you'll see them as they are...in the inner sanctum...ceos and society heiresses, accountants and movie stars, mothers and lovers and newlyweds, rich men's wives and single working girls.

And you'll learn a lot...about style and wealth. And grace.
And you'll see that sometimes a blessing may be a curse...
and maybe a curse isn't necessarily so.