Headscan

Ever wondered what would happen if you scanned your head? Well this is pretty much it with a twist and an agonised expression. Using a cannon flat-bed scanner this was done in 2002, saved to disk and printed on photo-quality paper at the Kodak Express where i was working at the time.
While a quite grotesque image, it holds a certain power for me. i consider it as a self-portrait from an ugly time and place. 'Lost in a Godless universe and completely out of shake-n-vac', i thank whatever it was inside me that kept on producing images. No matter what happens, however desperate i become, i can still make a picture.

Naughty Boy

So its Friday, a day worth misbehaving on. i, alike to my Melbourne co-conspirator have various responsibilities which on occasion seem far less important than going down to the local for a nice cold beverage. Its not like i'm not doing anything while i am here - surely this blog counts? So this is an image of me hanging out at the pub blogging away - see how much i concentrate on what i write here? Thank-you to Little Mick for the distortion inspiration on this particular image, The Little Mick Chronicles.
Even in this strange little pub - people don't seem to notice a laptop anymore. It is good to see that mobile computing has become accepted by the general public. People still sneak a sly glance, but i think that is just to see what you are using. Which by the way, please forgive me for a brief ramble about my machine (but i just love her so much!), is a G4 Powerbook, 100-gig HD, SDRAM 1-gig, 17-inch screen with a superdrive and Her name is Moovunway. Ok - that is enough about her gorgeousness, She will get a big... something.
i found it a most interesting experience to take Moovunway out of her usual habitat, if only to test the limits of her battery.

Life Expectancy

We all have a limited amount of time on this planet. You can even visit a site which when given some personal details will extrapolate your own life expectancy (which can yield some quite dull results when you pretend to be an alien being).
Expecting Life, however is a far different statement and of far higher concern to us average folk. Many of us spend a lot of time expectantly waiting for our lives to happen, thus nullifying any concern for our actual life expectancy. Why worry about when you are going to die when your life has not even begun.
Now far be it from me to pop-psych us all, nahh screw it - i'm gonna give it a shot anyway. The dichotomy behind this frame of thought is as such - the fact that we can die having done anything or we can live having done nothing - what i like to call 'nihilist potential'. We can potentially do anything - why we do not is where it gets more complex. Everybody has a different reason for not yet having composed that magnificent opus, penned that genre changing graphic novel, painted that new movement into existence, written ourselves into literary history or even kicked the winning goal for Liverpool in a Soccer World Cup. 'I'm a procrastinator', 'I had a bad childhood', 'I'm in a research phase', 'I was struck down by leprosy in my prime', all of which are quite valid amongst the myriad of reasons for not doing what it is that we know we should be doing. It is the sheer variety of reasons which prevents them from being the core principle that prevents us from achieving our infinite potential.
A fear of death is hammered into us from birth - it is a part of our culture. Death follows Life. Thus if we live just bellow the full potential of our lives, filling it with mindless distraction - of which there is a greater myriad than even for just 'not doing' - we can at least avoid the conscious possibility of our own inevitable death. Just simply not living is a far more attractive proposition than waiting to die. We live our lives expecting life and when (or if for some) we do achieve the life we had hoped for all that time, we switch to watching our extremely fearful life expectancy. In the end we fear our 'potential' as much as we long for its achievement. Our fear of death stops us from doing anything - how does that make any sense?
Now it is time for me avoid freemassonary conspiracy theories of mass mind control and instead move on to a more positive conclusion to this diatribe. It is also a time to compress the core principles of what i have been rambling about. Life is finite, potential is infinite and as such you have a short amount of time to do anything. Why don't i just go do that?

Workspace
Where We make stuff is very important to Us. This image was taken after i had cleaned up the Darwin space, a later post will show the beast it eventually becomes. i have been led to believe that a messy desk is a sign of genius - all i know is that i cannot even find my own anus when my desk is messy. It drives me nuts, but it can go on for months - until i get a new toy and need somewhere to put it. Necessity; the mother of invention and a clean desk.
'Every night and every morn, some to misery are born. Every morn and every night, some are born to sweep the light, some are born to sweep the light, some are born to endless night.' - quoted from 'Dead Man' and further quoted from the poetry of William Blake.
The clearing of a desk is not dissimilar to the sweeping of light - what once appeared as incandescently imperative is swept away to reveal a blank space, an endless night. i like my messy desk, the tidy one makes me uneasy - i can't wait to put some stuff on it. Most of the time i do not care to know where my anus is while i'm at my desk anyway.

Current Reading

i think We have always had a soft spot for the writings of Umberto. Although densely loaded with historical reference and metaphor, he always laces it with a good story. i, personally, really appreciate this. You can fact yourself up to the eyeballs, but it won't mean a jot if you cannot connect a decent story with that fact.
Take me, for example and my fluxitive ability to remember names. If i'm introduced to someone by name, i'm being given a fact - that person's name. Whether i actually remember that name can go two ways here, depending on whether that person either tells me a good story or we have such a good time that i end up with a story to tell, if neither occurs they become a nameless face. The fact in effect becomes associated with an emotional response, a far stronger neurophysiological trigger than simply repeating their stupid name in your next sentence (never works for me). Besides which, do you really want to remember the name of someone who cannot tell or make a good story?
Back to Umberto and 'The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana' and my surface value critique (i've only read the jacket and first chapter - although i will let you know how its going). So far it is the story of a man who looses his 'episodic' memory - which is formed through differing emotional responses to sequential episodes within an individuals life experience (see how much i have learnt already!). i believe this is his first illustrated novel, which made me love it more before i had even opened it. i know what you are saying, '...a book by its cover, blah, blah', but i know what i am getting with Umberto textually - and given my affinity with pictures, he just sweetened the deal. Yeah, yeah, i know what you are saying now too - but did i ever promise you an un-biased critique?
So just go buy it, borrow it, steal it, then eat it and try to forget it.

i have come to the conclusion that site design so far as the internet goes is a tricky process. The above lame sketch is testimony to this. Before you lay a finger on the keyboard it really is best to have a clue what you are doing. Design and layout with good old paper and pen can be mind bending on its own. Then you need to decide whether you will use one of the various html authoring applications on the market or if you are going to write it yourself. Either way you then have to get fluent with its use and depending on which you choose you then have to decide which ftp app to use. It doesn't stop there either, consider accessability - blind and deaf people use the internet too and they tend to sue your arse if your site, for example does not talk to them where there is text. i'm serious - the Australian Olympic Committee was successfully sued by a blind user in 2000 and forced to pay a fine of $20,000. For the beginner it seems like a never ending series of poor choices and failures - i'm feeling quite daunted at the moment. Today was meant to be site building day, i think will just go and roast a chicken instead. At least i have this blog to vent a nerdy sob onto a cyber shoulder.
Get back on your adjustable office chair nerd.

A little more art history, this image predates the previous post by three years.
'Throat', acrylic on masonite, 1992.
On my eighteen birthday i was given the choice of an airbrush and compressor or a car, lucky i chose the airbrush as i would probably be dead or horribly disfigured by now. Anyhoo, you may or may not recognise the early influence of H.R.Giger here. A very curious man who according to the biographical entries which accompanied his series coffee-table books could not pee or shit separately, he had to evacuate both his bowel and bladder at the same time. Weirdo.
What i found intriguing about Giger at the time was his freestyle use of the airbrush, exposure to his work seemed to free me of the restrictive nature of masking. A technique which was heavily peddled by the conventional texts of the time, of course these were instructive texts which hadn't changed much since the twenties when the airbrush was developed.
Thus, my early airbrush efforts became a combination of drawing, brushwork and freestyle airbrush. Thematically i was also guilty of blatant rip-offs of Giger's work, i'm fairly sure he didn't notice, i was only a college student living in the ass-end of the planet after all.
i have recently returned to the airbrush after much time away and am very much enjoying it.

Ahhh, the artists agony. Here is a little of my artistic history. This is detail shot from 'Venus, Cupid, Chastity and Time', acrylic on canvas, painted in 1995.
Originally painted by Agnolo Bronzino around 1560, it has been given various names and interpretations over the centuries. In his day Bronzino was a mover and shaker of the Florentine scene and became one of the most important Mannerist potrait painters.
My treatment of the original was to lineate tonal forms and segregate colour, more an exercise in technique than anything else (although i did find the way Cupid is cupping one of Venus' exposed breasts rather erotic!). The reason for this was quite simple, the painting half of johndouglas is red/green colour confused, apparently quite a common thing amongst the human males of this planet - although a difficult thing to rationalise for an emerging artist. Thus, a system had to be devised, a system where my treatment of colour was less based on my individual perception of it (something i have come to realise is highly subjective between all individuals anyway) and more based on ratios, correctly labelled containers and accurate record keeping. So it was this work which formed the basis of my handling of colour since then and as such represents an important piece of my art history.

Another day in paradise as the time approaches 9 a.m. and the temperature approaches 30 c.
Today is a painting day which seems a leisurely activity and it probably would be given an airconditioned studio. This of course is not the case so we shall be painting in short creative bursts with intermissions of equally creative attempts to cool an esculating body heat. There is a curious balance between acclimatising and adjusting the climate, kind of like playing tag with the environment. At the moment i'm it and there are beads of sweat on my top lip.

Hello There, disenfranchised pro-literate, how u doin?

Let us begin with a brief description of this individual's life;
First of of all johndouglas is not its real name - this is a miss-guided preconception of an artist's folly from the mid nineties which just simply stuck. The individuals behind this pre-miss-conception have since faded into mediocrity and assumed 'real' jobs in the 'real' world (all hail the great and mighty AVERAGE).
There is not much truth in what the entity entitled 'johndouglas' expounds that is actually based in any kind of fact - the reason for which being that it is relatively impossible for two separate individuals who compromise the substance of the whole to effectively communicate to the planet any sense of comprehensible truth (such is the human condition), (i'm not even sure why he said that).
Thus - you may expect on this blog a constant stream of irrelevant diatribe and the occasional interesting picture. Links will be provided to the true (or in fact further fictitious) authors of these ramblings.We wish you luck, good health and incredibly fortuitous financial gain.

Sincerely johndouglas.