Consistent inconsistency mostly.

Does my heart break when I see people in Haiti having to eat dried mudcakes to stave off hunger while the 'developed' world turns its crops to bio-fuels? Of course it does.

Does driving a V8 and leaving my computer on just in case I might want to use it make me feel guilty? Not really.

Uneducated, pro-nazi idiots make the hair on the back of my neck stand up on end but I've voraciously read anything I can get my hands on about the Waffen SS since I was a kid. Hypocrisy? Yeah, probably.

Was the Holocaust a shameful fact? Surely was. Does it give Israel the right to treat the Palestinians the same way? Hell no.

I believe in peace for all, but hope for armageddon. A twisted son of Nihil.

Am I a 9/11 conspiracy theorist? Nope. Would I put it past the Bush regime to try something like that? I reckon they'd try anything.

Do I believe in god? No, never have. Do I believe in the eternal soul and spirituality? Most assuredly yes. I know I have a soul. I call it something else, but that's what it is.

Do I believe aliens are among us? Sorry, bud. Nope to that one. Do I believe in life on other planets? How could I not? I know I look at the stars and hope.

Am I on drugs? Not anymore, but I stand by anybody's right to get fucked up on whatever they want.

Do I believe in equality? Uh huh, with all my heart. Do I still objectify a beautiful woman? Yep, guilty on that one.



Where am I going with this rambling crap? Nowhere really. I'm pretty happy with my consistent inconsistency. It allows me to blithely submit two opposing works like


IT WOULD BE A SMALL WORLD



and



BLINDED BY THE SON



without feeling too bad about it.

It does leave me feeling somewhat disconnected from my ideal of what being an artist is, but I struggle with calling myself that anyway.

Time passes, shit happens, things change.

What started out as a week and a bit doing 16 hour days sorting a big festival animation turned into a bit of a meltdown. I knew it was coming, but let it happen. Falling into the moment and obsessively creating and working until I just fell apart.
Stress, lack of sleep, shit going on inside my head and out. It all piled into a bit of a mental gibber.
Ironic really as I've also been doing some public speaking on behalf of Like Minds. A community run group who talk to corporates, educational institutes, government departments and business about how they deal with people with mental illness and how they can treat people more compassionately. About what mental illness is and how it is just one small part of a person, not the whole.
Fucking hilarious. Not.
I've never really had to deal with much in the way of prejudice or ill-feeling, but some of the horror stories told by the people I speak alongside have been harrowing. Vulnerable, fragile people do not need to be treated like shit and it's made me sick to see it going on in my own community.

Maybe I've gone out in sympathy. It's great to be crazy.

... and if anybody remembers the band that used that as an album title - MAJOR KUDOS to you. LOL.


Me and the whanau just flew in from Samoa late on Saturday afternoon and have just managed to begin to get my head back together. Six foot four and economy class DO NOT mix.
Not that I'm bitching though - Samoa was an absolute blast. I had really high expectations going in and they were all surpassed. I've got plenty of writing to do over the next few weeks because I want to get it all down before the memories fade too much and I managed to amass over 250 photos during the past 10 or so days and have those to sort through as well. I also managed to collect some cool fabrics and bits and pieces featuring designs I hope to adapt to some new art pieces. I've also started designing my own patterns reflecting my heritage and things that are important to me. Isn't learning great!?!
Suffice to say I've come back fully charged and tremendously inspired by what I've seen and done. It's going to be hard to get over the 10-beer lunch pattern I established, but Duty Free should see me right through to nearly Christmas! LOL.


I managed to get a tailor-made black lavalava (kind of a wrap-around skirt looking thing that men wear in the islands) that should go great with my leather jacket and boots. Don't wait for photos though! I'd never realised I'd look so great in a skirt. Look out New Plymouth this summer!


We also managed to make a trip to the Robert Louis Stevenson museum and house in Apia. So cool to go to the place so many great adventure books were written, especially for a history nerd like me. LOL.


I saw fruit bats flying around both at night and during the day. Man, I love a good fruit bat! Also saw plenty of lizards and a bug of some kind that had HUGE eyelash things.


I went swimming in water nearly as warm as a bath and sat on the beach and watched crabs dig holes in the sand.


I made friendships with locals that will last a lifetime and hopefully my new friend Efeso will be staying with us on his first trip out of Samoa early next year. It'll be great to get impressions of New Zealand from a totally clean set of eyes.


I learned a little bit more about materialism, humility, spirituality and the things that make people truly happy. These things I'll take to heart and use to improve myself.


I also learned that New Zealanders can be just as much a bunch of ignorant wankers when they're are on holiday as any other nation. Shit, we've still got a long way to go when it comes to integrity and honesty. Just because somebody doesn't have a massive plasma TV and shag carpet doesn't mean they're ignorant savages people! It just means they have different priorities. I hate bigots and I hate bigoted kiwis more than any others. Embarrassing? Hell yes.


I also learned I can live without the internet and my cellphone for over a week (as long as I've got LOTS of distractions). LOL.


Look forward to more over the coming weeks ...



... anybody remember The Ballad of Jerry Curlan?

Hello people,

How's it? I'd like to say a big thank you to all the new people that have been checking out my art. Your comments and critiques are much appreciated and always read. As the people that have been watching my art for a while will tell you (hopefully) - it takes me ages to get something finished, but it usually turns out ok in the end.

The last few months have been a bit of a blur. Slammy died. [link]

And I learned to trick Premiere Elements into doing a cool flame thing made out of 20 different static .psd flames I made that I added a 'wave' effect in Premiere Elements and many, many slightly overlapping layers.

It reminded me of my time as an apprentice typographer at a newspaper in New Plymouth. In my break times I would often sit and plot massively intricate geometric shapes using only vertical and horizontal lines and various curved corner codes on paper purely as numbers and code on an x and y co-ordinate plot.

Then, during work time (LOL) I would transpose the code onto a computer screen using no mouse (20 years ago - pre-mouse), a black 12 inch wide screen and green type.
You then sent the file to the typesetter. It basically did its balls and let out a bit of smoke. Hopefully if it worked you ended up with a crazy pyramid or box or something, if it didn't you ended up with 60 feet of wasted bromide paper and co-ordinates that exponentially seemed to get worse. That pissed off the lazy bastard who had to watch the typesetters (like that was hard). It meant he had to go to the darkroom and reload the film cannister. Taking up five minutes of his otherwise boring life.

Hey, I was only 18. It was all about me! LOL.

Gordon was his name. He'd been me (the apprentice) 30 years before. Had had about four wives, everything was morbid, chased after everything over 40, loved the nags and Scotch and damned near had a heart attack when we gave him joke golf balls filled with talcum powder for his 25th anniversay at work. He actually tried to hit one. It exploded and he had a flashback of some sort. He had to go to hospital and everything.

The whole basic reason for the shapes was to twist your mind. I loved optical illusions and remember a Victorian-era book I had read that had moire pattern films you moved over the top of each other and make propellors move and birds fly and stuff. Wicked. My ones seemed to work best on drunks and the stoned. Ahh, good times.

I would also like to say a HUGE thank you and hugs to the group of people I have been communicating and sharing with over the past year (just realised - just about exactly a year too!). To show my appreciation to everybody and celebrate getting over 1000 hits on the piccies, I would like to post to any of my watchers that want one a DVD of about an hour and a bit long of animation and moving stuff that I put together to music. The music I've used I have paid for as a royalty free deal, and, no offence meant, it can be pretty average. But, if you would like one I suggest a MASSIVE tv, a great sound system, your favourite music and a little bit of what you fancy.

It seems I'm still doing the same old stuff: Intricate patterns and shapes in my head, designed for large format and transposed to computer - just now with colour and texture and all sorts of whizzy effects. Wicked. I'm nothing if not a creature of habit. Ahh, good times.