Landscape Painting, one year on...

I am a slave to flow, a full time addict. I seek it in everything, it is my drug of choice. I have found flow in nearly everything I have done. From Mountain biking to Music, from Photography to Sex. Flow is me, I ♡ Flow, Gimme mo' flo'! Getting back into the painting seriously (after an 18 year hiatus) I have had a mixed bag of effects on my psyche, It definitely satiates my craving for flow better than my day to day (make money) work. However the deeper and deeper I get into it, the harder it becomes to snap out of it. To deal with everyday, socio administrative nonsense is becoming harder. Flow comes in fits and starts there is no rhyme or reason to it. It wafts in unannounced, unprovoked and often at the most in-opportune moment. It is magical, other worldly, inter-fucking-dimensional. I feel so overwhelmingly blessed to be able to tap into this seam of universal magic, it's a blissful substance to mine; precious, heavy and transcendent. When I'm in it I am connected to something way beyond human, I feel native, wild and inextricably connected to the wider universe. The sheer wonder of it all, the vast infinite possibility of everything and nothing. However, like any addiction it causes many problems, I often transition back into the human world of admin, communication and consumption with such a heavy crash that I get a kind of psychological hang over, an overwhelming sense of futility and emptiness. It is troublesome, it pains me and I feel the constant need to flee civilisation. I try to mask it with loud music, laughter and blissful ignorance but alas the ceaseless inanity of the human sphere is getting harder and harder to ignore. Let's face it... As westerners we are guilty and enslaved, bitterly divided in strange and psychedelic ways, whilst still clamouring unified at impossible mental constructs, money, status, love. We operate on such a self defeating level all con-fixed in a idiotic trance of mass psychosis, lost in the minds of others, lost in our own minds. We know it's madness, we are aware of the stupidity yet we go along with it... Regardless I do not wish to dwell on the twisted nightmare that is western civilisation. It is what it is and the natural world will in time eradicate it... Fatalist perhaps but unequivocally true... The meek shall inherit the earth etc etc etc.

I realise I am lucky, I have an escape route into my own 3 dimensional existence. I work for myself, I can drop everything and paint, I can run to the hills, I can stand at the bottom of a waterfall and stare at the impossible and endless interactions of falling water. Watch the clouds until they please me. Bark at the bogs that suck at my boots. Zone the fuck out, loose my human. As I grow older my life seems to be turning further and further away from humanity and it's ever deepening lunacy, painting has really accelerated this rejection, it has solidified my resolve in instinct, in the flouting of rationale and whole heartedly surrendering to the present and the actions of now. After all we have no future or past without the present, the system knows this and does everything it can to subvert and codify the reality of biological existence on earth. Yet I am human... My mind and tells me to run, to rage, to will-fully eviscerate society but my over arching instinct is still human. I need other people, I am a pack animal and this is my nature. What is happening in society and the wider human sphere is natural. WE ARE PART OF NATURE!!! Not detached god-like deities.

Anyway this rant has gone on long enough. I hope you like my paintings... in many cases it's hard for me to say that I do. Stereotypical torture... Death by narcissism... Shameful arrogance. I am struggling being a human and my paintings do help me deal with that. I have no qualms with being an insignificant bag of meat spinning on a tiny rock in the impossible vastness of creation. This is a concept I am happy with and I hope that humanity can get a grip on this concept soon, before it is to late. Remember if the life of the earth is mapped onto a 24 hour clock, humanity has existed for 1 second and western civilisation for 0.14 seconds.