Blog 3. Inside the dog, inside the Fishtank

These titles aren't going to get increasingly more complicated, that's for flippin' sure. There's me thinking i can just bang one of these out on the fly, hang on a mo....Here we go..ahem. Sometimes I think I hear screaming and then I realise it's coming from the inside not the outside, sorry, no, actually it's not that bad 99% of the time. As I've got older (Jesus! here we go Grandad..) time has seemed to incrementally speed up a bit, it's not that the end is nigh, I'm not that fatalistic, but I feel like I have a lot to get done and have that impending feeling that something might get missed out. Or that I might not become the realised artist that I think I have the potential for. Each painting I paint I notice some sort of improvement in either something technique related or how I can convey something I have conceived. They're little steps forward on this far reaching path before me. I have a lot of ideas, far more than I can realise, I realise.

In a previous obsession (one of my previous obsessions) I was all about juggling, couldn't get enough of it. I still juggle and you would think that after decades of doing it I would be the absolute nuts at it but meh.. I'm not you know. I'm quite good even taking into consideration decreasing amounts of time spent chucking stuff around but I'm not balancing six things on my head, bouncing a football from foot to foot, spinning a penguin on one finger while juggling a whole fruit bowl in the other hand. I still, disappointingly, drop stuff whilst juggling, all the time. The reason I think that I didn't reach the heights I would have wished for juggling wise is that I tried to play with all the toys at once and got a bit good at a lot of things. I did club juggling, ball juggling, ball spinning, diabolo, contact juggling, hat juggling, yo yo, kendama, ring juggling, balance tricks, devil sticks, cigar boxes, bounce juggling and probably some other stuff I can't think of right now. The point being relating to my current obsession with and desire to become good at, art is.. that's too many things to try and focus on at once if you (me) want to get really good at something, which I do.

So with art and ideas relating to art, my options as to where to put my attention are forever tempted in myriad directions and even within one discipline, say oil painting, I have many options in terms of style, subject, application of paint, outside influence (or lack of it, if that's even possible), commerciality, originality, staying within or outside of conceived boundaries and even whether to care or not about what I produce (do I believe in the integrity of the paintings or do I aim at hitting a cash sale formula irrespective of whether I like it or not). The pool is deep to be sure. I figure that narrowing the field of focus presents the opportunity to become very good at one thing and then, from that point at which one could truly excel, skill horizons could be gradually broadened so that excellence can permeate more and more aspects of whatever it is that someone chooses to put their energy into. Nice in theory but I know that really I'm not that kind of guy and my ideas are like setting off a box of loose fireworks, i.e. they could go in any direction. But I'm resisting doing all the mediums, oils for now (apart from the pencil drawing). In terms of subject, well you got to stretch out a bit eh, I'm on the road to fine art although not leaving abstraction behind. I love painting portraits and animals but maybe one day I'll do a landscape I'll let other people see.