#333: The Buffer (Conpartmentalising)

Ink on paper.  Drawing of my face in the middle of the paper.  

The following text is written all around it:

Around me is a buffer that protects me from the outside world.  It is not unlike The Filter and it allows me to know little about the world and live in my own way.  It gives me the ability to compartmentalise and forget everything, pushing it aside, below, or underneath the buffer.  But it makes me narcissistic and selfish, it stops me from connecting with other people and allows me to do terrible things, to have wrong beliefs.  It holds me back, it is a curse.  The buffer must be destroyed and I need to find a way to do this.  Or, at least, to bypass it.  I want it to be like a Magic Circle, that will protect and reaffirm. But it’s more like a protection circle of old, like in Waterhouse paintings and fictions from Battlefield to Renfield or a thousand others - a chalk circle, or a circle of powder, that keeps me in and everyone else away - creating a boundary that cannot be crossed, moved or eradicated.  Or like the empty and solid feeling from Beef.  Not real but there.  A stone keeping me still or driving me away, controlling or manipulating my actions.  I think I want to believe that this is the something that makes me creative.  But until it can be removed, the buffer will keep me separate and away, part of the world but apart from it.  I will live in this compartment until I find a way out of it, as if stuck in an escape room without a timer or a team (inside or out) to help me get out or to let me out.  I must find the tools - give, or lend, me the tools, please.  I want to blend.  I want to be able to talk to you.  I want to rub out all of this writing and remove this buffer, create a new work, create a new me.  I want to chill.  But around me is a buffer that protects me from the outside world.  It allows me to know little about the world and live in my own way.  It gives me the ability to compartmentalise and forget everything, pushing it aside, below, or underneath the buffer.  But… I am stuck within it.  Stuck in a circle.

#332: On being alone, being in groups, loneliness and belonging

A pentaptych of oil on canvas paintings.

The five paintings are arranged in the same manner as the dots on the 5-side of a six-sided die.  

1 - On the top left is a painting titled I’m Alive in Crowds I and II which is split horizontally into two along the middle and shows two similar scenes.  At the top is a football crowd in black and white all staring forward, fixated by the game unfolding in front of them.  One person, beaming, is marked out in colour.  

The bottom half shows a crowd at a music festival, in colour, seen from the stage, and shows everyone watching and enjoying the band on stage.  The same person that was shown in colour in the top half can be seen at the very centre. 

2 - On the top right is a painting, titled A Family Building, that shows a family sitting at a dining table and playing the game Carcassonne.

3 - In the centre is a painting of a bedroom, titled Alone.  A window can be seen in the wall to the left and a bed runs alongside it into the corner of the room.  In the foreground, next to the bed are four mismatching full CD towers with CDs stacked up in front and alongside.  By these, at the end of the bed is a large wooden record box on top of which is a glass of beer.  Next to the bed on the back wall is a bookshelf full-to-bursting with books as well as a hifi on top (the screen on the hifi shows the number 6).  Next to this in the other corner is a PC on a stand.  Along the right hand wall is a wardrobe.  The walls are painted navy at the bottom half, white at the top with a Tottenham Hotspur border in between.  On the back wall are three posters: the film poster for Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, a poster with a still from the train chase scene from the The Wrong Trousers and a football-themed Coca-Cola poster featuring the Football is not a matter of life or death, it’s more important than that quote from Bill Shankly.  Above the PC is a corkboard covered in a variety of ephemera including festival programmes on lanyards, newsletters, photos and drawings.  To the side of the PC on the right hand side wall can be seen a small slither of a poster advertising an Amnesiac listening event.

Throughout the painting the same person can be seen undertaking different activities: lying on the bed sleeping (a thought bubble showing their dream: a version of A Family Building where only the face of one figure is clear), sitting on a beanbag leaning against the wardrobe reading (Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake), sitting on the bed writing in a spiral bound notebook using a mechanical pencil, sitting on the floor in the middle of the room reading the liner notes of the CD being listened to (We Love Life by Pulp - on the floor next to them is the next one ready to go: This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours by Manic Street Preachers), sitting at the computer typing up an Imaginary Art piece (#328: Nothing fits like it used to fit), sitting at the near end of the bed watching a film on the (outside of the painting) television, their face lit up with the light from the screen, the reflection of what they are watching in their eyes (a shot of Gollum from the Mines of Moria scene in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring), lying on the floor daydreaming (a thought bubble showing the dream: another life where they are a former footballer turned musician with a love life in an imaginary country).  

Scanning the painting would reveal another one underneath that shows the same room, much emptier, the bed across the back wall, a different wardrobe on the right and a young teenager playing with a train set in the big empty space.  A portable combined radio, CD and Tape Player close by with a copy of Oasis’ Wonderwall CD single lying next to it and the display of the player showing the number 4.

4 - At the bottom left is a painting titled I Drown in Crowds 2 of three people sitting together in a pub with drinks and empty glasses on the table in front of them.  The two on either side talk animatedly across the third who looks out at the viewer. 

5 - At the bottom right is a painting titled I Drown in Crowds 3 showing a family gathering in a sitting room.  People of all ages are shown milling about, drinking, talking and playing.  At the back, in an armchair, sits someone staring straight out at the viewer.

Not all of this is necessarily always true: it is an imperfect work.  Life is full of contradictions.  Sometimes the opposite will be true.  Often the biggest things are said in the fewest words (here, at least).  Alone can be lonely, or not.  Being with others can be lonely, or not, in all situations.  Sometimes one, sometimes the other.  More often than not.

#331: I Drown in Crowds

Oil on canvas.

A crowd scene with someone right in the middle, only just visible with only their face and arms showing.  Their arms are waving as if they are drowning and calling for help.

#330: Ruins have beauty

Find them, see it.

Everything does and everyone should.