Finished this today - some ghostly cars on a rainy drive home.
Tried out some new stuff mixed with some old stuff, pleased with how this one turned out. Available as a print in A5, A4 or A3 from jamesshedden.etsy.com - take a look!
A work in progress. Trying a few new things out, going well so far. Wait and see…
Watched Meeting People Is Easy today and Blade Runner (Director’s Cut) yesterday. Signed up for a Society6 profile - another place for me to network with other artists and hopefully sell some work :)
A new image today: journeying away from the world of starry skies and spiky trees, and towards a kingdom of real things (as previously mentioned - people, sports, music, food, etc).
I’ll grapple with issues of culture and politics, but first, something a little more simple…
I included some typography as it’s another thing that I’m acutely aware is lacking from my portfolio. I was going to include “Have you drunk enough water?” as a dedication to my girlfriend who mocks my unshakeable belief in the curative power of water - it’s the first question I ask her whenever she’s feeling unwell. I went with something more simple in the end.
To water…
Narrative
I finally got round to reading the Philip K. Dick piece which I linked to yesterday - actually it turns out it’s a transcript of a speech rather than an essay - or that’s how it reads anyway so I’m presuming that’s what it is (I could just check on Wikipedia but would rather continue writing).
Anyway, it’s the full story, straight from the horse’s mouth, of something that’s referenced at the end of Waking Life (where it first got my attention) - a series of coincidences in Dick’s life that compelled him to believe that time and reality as we commonly perceive them are illusions projected on top of - and thus obscuring - an entirely different scenario. However, this scenario isn’t unfolding parallel to the one that we perceive - it’s actually just one moment in time. Although we perceive time progressing, in reality we’re being distracted from the fact that we’re actually in one specific period of time. Dick believed, due to an unsettling set of overlaps between his book Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, the book of Acts, and real-life experiences, that the real date is 50AD and that the present-day illusion which we travel through is an emulation created by Satan (who likes to ‘ape’ God) to prevent us from realising that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is imminent.
If you read the piece, you’ll probably feel inclined to pick apart Dick’s reasons for believing in such a scenario - and in an argument of logic you would almost certainly win. But I like to think that it’s really more of a discussion about to what extent reality is ‘real’ and to what extent reality is a story - a different story for each individual that is built from experiences and beliefs derived from those experiences. Dick believed that the present-day reality of television and Disneyland is ‘real’ enough that he’s willing to participate in it - but specific experiences in his life suggested to him that there was another dimension to the objects and events around him - not a verifiable dimension, but one that he suspected was present.
There’s a quote from Waking Life that I enjoy:
Before you drift off, don’t forget, which is to say remember. Because remembering is so much more a psychotic activity than forgetting… …as one realizes, that one is a dream-figure in another person’s dream: that is self-awareness!
I like the idea that remembering, in comparison to forgetting, is a mental activity most bizarre - if it is psychotic, then I think that creating a story to apply to one’s life in order to make sense of experience and memory must be equally if not more so. My life is a narrative, populated by characters and ideas of my own creation. My friends and family are real, with feelings and thoughts - but they can only communicate approximations of those feelings and thoughts, and in turn I am only able to interpret what is communicated to me. As Aldous Huxley wrote in The Doors of Perception:
We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves… …Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.
So other people are only capable of being characters in my story - the plot is influenced by their existence, but it’s still me that decides how the plot should be best expressed. And the last sentence from the quote from Waking Life reminds me that it’s important, for my own level of self-awareness, to appreciate that I am also someone else’s interpretation of me in their story; I’m an approximated character in a story which is being played out on a completely different ‘island universe’ to the one I inhabit.
I like to advise people (and myself) to “keep up the narrative” - I work in a bit of a vacuum at the moment, making images (and songs) with only self-established deadlines and briefs - and it’s easy to lose track of what you’re doing and lose the enthusiasm to keep doing it if you don’t remind yourself what you did yesterday and how that affects what you’re doing today - and what you’re doing today, and how that affects what you’ll do tomorrow.
Did another image today for fun (as opposed to for the benefit of my portfolio) with this YouTube channel’s list of Christopher Hitchens interviews as background listening. I’ve resolved to include real things in my next few pictures, such as toothpaste, animals, food, people…
For now, here is another abstract, unpopulated corner of my universe… Click the image to see larger version.
Also, today I watched Impostor, an adaptation of a Philip K. Dick short story. It was released around the same time as (and isn’t a million miles away from) Minority Report, also based on another short story by the same author. I haven’t got round to reading this essay by Philip K. Dick but it’s been open in Google Chrome all day, waiting for me to finish my image. And tidy my room.
Forest House
Good evening - I’ve finished my latest image (see previous posts for various stages of progress), here it is:
I worked fairly hi-res with this one so I’ve made a larger version for you to scrutinise - click here to have a look. I’ve now set up an Etsy shop, which can be found at http://jamesshedden.etsy.com and you can buy an A5, A4 or A3 print of this image from there.
Here’s some detail shots below too, just to show off:
Good morning. I present to you: some stuff.
I enjoyed writing my last blog post, which contained a bit more information than normal - it’s inspired me to document more often and in greater detail. If it interferes too much with the illustration content of this blog then I may start a new one just for personal journalling.
I spent the first half of yesterday doing a few things I had been meaning to do for a while. The first was to count all my spare change that’s been lying around for probably about 3 years. I counted £20.50 which was pleasing. I also found a lot of foreign coins, which I took a scan of (see below).
I’ve toyed with the idea of scanning and throwing away a lot of the detritus that’s collected in my drawers over time. I reason that I just think they’re pretty and like to look at them occasionally, and now have a document of them to appreciate whenever I like, without need for referring to the objects themselves. But then as physical objects they serve as more tactile reminders of experiences - holding them can evoke strong sense memories of the places I was when I first received them. I guess I just talked myself into keeping them.
I’ve also got a collection of shells that I wanted to document similarly. I don’t think I was seriously considering throwing any of them away, but I did like the idea of scanning them anyway. I think another reason for wanting to scan any of this stuff in is to begin a rudimentary visual catalogue of things that I take with me; things that I’ve decided not to throw away for particular reasons and have travelled with me wherever I’ve lived. I will feel more inclined to put them into deeper storage (ie the high-up boxes that don’t get opened) now that I have an immediate reference if I need it. Progress of sorts…
Whilst I counted coins I was kept company by the existential, emotional musings of Jesse and Céline from Before Sunset by Richard Linklater. I watched Before Sunrise the evening before, and Waking Life the evening before that. I am a big fan of these films, and interviews with Richard Linklater posted on YouTube provided the backdrop for rest of my morning of organising and scanning.
The content of these films made me wonder whether every conversation could be categorised as a conversation you’ve had before, or a conversation you haven’t. ‘Small talk’ is typically a collection of conversations you’ve had before. Anyone who has spent a substantial amount of time around me will be aware of my predilection for conversations I haven’t had before - about identity, perception, purpose, etc - conversations in which I’ve learned something about myself by the end that I didn’t know, or couldn’t express as succinctly, at the beginning. That’s not to say that the two categories don’t appear together in the same conversation (in which case it’s probably better to read the term ‘conversation’ as a particular collection of exchanges within a larger talking session), or that one is inherently better than the other. Conversations you’ve had before are probably an essential precursor to conversations you haven’t had before. But I do prefer having conversations I haven’t had before, and so do the characters in many of Richard Linklater’s films.
Other news - my latest model is finished (see below) and today I’ll probably do some Photoshopping. I set up an Etsy shop for my work, although I don’t have a lot of work on there right now.
Updates
I’m still here and still an illustrator. Some updates:
Firstly a kind-of-finished image that I posted a preview of a while back. I resolved it (up to a point) around that time too but didn’t post it as I was intending to add a bit more to it. However too much time has passed now for me to go back to it, so here it is:
It’s part of my ongoing campaign to populate my portfolio with images involving people and popular themes (music, science, sport, food etc). In this case I think the people look a little too statuesque and lifeless (probably due to lack of facial features…).
In a similar vein I jumped at the chance to do some people-based illustrations (see below) for Amelia which you can see in context here.
I was prepared for the images to look a little weird - I have to experiment because I really don’t have a set way of illustrating people in my current style. I’m taking notes and looking and what works and what doesn’t, and have a few different ideas I still want to try out, but either way I’m quite pleased with the people in these images.
Aside from that I’ve been spending most of my time divided between:
a) a fairly large web design project that may be rearing its head sometime soon, in which case I will duly publicise and
b) my band Hoshal Patrick - recording videos, new demos, sprucing up our MySpace, Last.fm and soon our website as well - which I have been publicising quite heavily on certain channels already.
That’s all for now - as always, new projects in the pipeline and new images on the way…
I’m knee-deep in web stuff at the moment and severely neglecting my blog - some publication news, new images, and links to interesting things coming soon.
For now, in an attempt to inject life into my currently stagnant blog, I have here a document of what I did on my day off today…
