Sometimes I think bad art is better than no art. I don’t mean bad in the sense of boring–I mean bad in the sense of unskilled, shaky, rough. Lacking context too.
My art doesn’t call upon a long history of art and situate itself within a school or have a philosophy, really. I think of my art as Outsider Art, but I don’t think outsiders know that term. I’m inside enough to know what Outsider is.
Kinda like lumpen. I think of myself as lumpen, but that’s not possible, because people who are lumpen don’t know that word, right? It’s a paradox.
Well, kinda makes sense I would be word-paradoxical. I love language. Contradictions are amazing.
fetlife
I was on fetlife. I keep returning there to see what’s up, a vague longing for something different. Not to the point of contacting a random stranger and meeting her in a hotel room. To the point of–did anyone message me? Oh, that person has pretty breasts. No, this art is kinda boring.
Sometimes I think people want to make art that looks like all the other arts. I’m like–why bother. I’m not that into technical skill or proving anything
I make art for the experience of making it, the pleasure of the process. There’s curiosity also–to see what might come out of my body and mind. The result might be nice, something to put on my blog or give a friend. It’s good to do something different–I spend most of my time doing language. Asking myself to try a very different activity is a thrill.
this art
I drew this dick sucking art, based on a little picture on fetlife. It was an advert pic of some erotic website.
Drawing it only took a couple minutes. Looking, thinking, choosing colors, making contact pen to paper, evaluating, adding more, deciding when to stop.
I like the purple on lavender; I like how it’s sketchy, but there’s some content there. A feeling, maybe. Something about the look in someone’s eye, and the grasp of someone’s fingers.
The situation is conveyed quickly: Someone is pretend-forcing someone else to suck the dick of someone else. Many people could feel an erotic charge from this; it’s a trope I’ve seen a lot.
I do, somewhat. I’ve never been in that situation, in real life. Might be more fun to think about and masturbate about than actually enact.
So maybe it’s good other people do it, so I can watch and masturbate, or see the art and feel something. The actor is like a holy person performing the ritual for us, up in front, offering sanctified flowers and light, or host or whatever, to God. They’re doing it for us, representative.
Swami rings the brass bell and offers the cloth, not for himself as much as for all of us. We imagine ourselves doing it too, as him, offering our own prayers. The merit shines out.
Swami is representative, and the objects offered are symbols. There’s the actual, and what’s behind it.
DIY art
I like how people specialize, but I also like DIY. Definitely I accept that engineers build bridges, and I write poems. But making art, I don’t need to leave it to the experts.
Doing it myself can be healing. It can help me get out energy that needs to go. Sometimes I carry around intensities that need help escaping. The motion of moving the brush on the cardboard, the experiencing of putting down globs of bright pink and yellow paint, and seeing what happens when I move my brush this way and that.
I learn about physicality–colors, how paint smells, the handle of the brush in my hand. How I can change the world, in a tiny way, by making something new that never existed before.
Bad art, less-bad art–all the art I make, I add a little something. A tiny bit of my essence or spirit enters. So even if I’m just poorly sketching a blowjob moment photo from an advert, something of me goes into it. A spark of life, a gift from my ancestors, a vibration. What I choose to depict, what I include and leave out.
There’s a collaboration, like wearing perfume. My mom wearing Chanel No. 5 was different from if I wore it. Which I never would.
