living + creating

A [not so] brief journal-type entry.

This is partly because I've been re-reading Derek Jarman's diaries which always makes me want to write something similar.

But also lately I've felt I haven't made much art. It's not uncommon - I go through periods of great productivity and then times when nothing much at all happens.

This tends to be because my energies are devoted mainly in one direction. So one month I might be studying and making plans for the future, the next making art, and the next living.

Especially in the last two years - and increasingly in the last six months - living has become the important thing. Not just going out to pubs and clubs - more meeting and spending time with friends, getting to know recent acquaintances, and meeting new people.

This may seem like a pretty minor and quotidian thing. But from the age of nine I was quite isolated, bullied in school, and unhappy. I never had more than two or three friends and most of those bonds felt pretty insecure.

It is only since 2008 that my social outlook has begun to expand. Importantly since 2010 I've learned to show how I feel a lot more, and be willing to open up, to give to the people I care about.

Although friendship was always sacred to me (speaking as an atheist) it was too vulnerable and frightening to give love and show I cared. But since I started to do those things I found that I get them back.

This is why when I'm in a heavily social phase it becomes so utterly consuming. It means I'm so busy doing things that I don't want to create as much and also write less.

Anyway this entry's gotten away from me a little. I also wanted to pick up on the Jarman diaries. They are representative of anything I find inspiring that I want to emulate. I start enthusiastically - then find I'm not that interested, or don't want to be too obviously derivative, or just can't be arsed putting the effort in.

I suppose my point is that often this comes down to being enthused by something during a non-creative phase, trying to make something when I should be planning or living, and finding it just doesn't work.

Once I wished I could reconcile these phases and do everything all at once. Now I think it's just something I have to respect. I'm also aware that the breadth and depth of experience in my living will inevitably feed into my art.

People and experience are incredibly complicated and rich, and it's hard to make sense of them immediately. Art for me is a way of investigating things I don't understand - or which I feel but lack the vocabulary to express. So I use objects and sounds to try and figure out what these vague thoughts are.

Once it was the art which was centrally important - because it was all I had. Now - although I couldn't live without art - living is the vital thing.

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