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[cathalpaint]

Been a while again

I’m back for a bit. Not making any promises about for how long. I do have access to a garage that I’m slowly getting made into my studio, so hopefully I can get back to painting again. I’ve made some stuff I’m happy with. Happy enough to put it up here.

[cathalpaint]

#Drawing #Sketch #planes

Learning from this week.

[cathalpaint]

I've spent about 7 -9 hrs on this. I'm glad to know that I can still mantain focus for that long. I'm miffed that my arms don't like to be held horizontal for asking as the use to. It makes shading a bit of a pain.

I'm going to watch more of my course and see what things I can glean from it to help me improve on my shading and tonal identification.

The lower jaw still irks me. The proportions are correct, or they seem so. But they are probably off by mils and that has a culminative effect of looking wrong. Anyway, it's the best I can do at the moment in terms of skill and patience.

[cathalpaint]

Statement of Intent v1.0.2

I don’t have a studio, nor can i afford one. I don’t have space. I want to paint, but I have many barriers to that activity. Some self imposed, others imagined, some insurmountable.

I want to finish my MA; I want to move forward, but the barriers remain.

The drawings I make for practice and glitches I create scratch a creative ich but they rarely satisfy.

I made an image today. The image encapsulates what want to explore. Einsturzende Neubauten recorded a soundtrack to Faustmusik a play by Werner Schwab. The sound track was composed with the materials such as tables, pages, books, rulers and writing sounds . I need like Einstruzende Neubauten, to embrace the materals. I must use the mechanisms of writing. The forms and rituals.

Desk, pen, pencil, paper, A4 , words and line . These are my tools, my boundaires. Established in view of my barriers and current limitations.

[cathalpaint]

Horizontal Circular Hue Array

My coding is coming on well, I wrote this as an array, using OOP in processing really really quickly. I’m really practicing the format of arrays and using classes. The more advanceed actually challenging stuff is coming up, using trigononmetery, and creating more complex sketches.

This is my days work. A challenge is to make the bubbles shine, pop and make new smaller bubbles. I’ll work on that.

[cathalpaint]

Just Random Thoughts

I don’t have a central theme to this post. It’s just a musing or a ramble. I like many others have been in lock down and suffering from mental helath issues. I have fourtunately had a good mental health team around me and they have ensured that I am getting medication. The difference a set of good eds makes is unbeliveable. This time last year I was struggling to get up in the morning and then spent the day struggling to think.The meds made me sluggish. The new meds have allowed me to be more motivated and helped to focus on getting stuff done. Like getting on with my coding learning. I had a hiccup with the meds last week and the difference is striking.

I have also cut a lot of social media out of my life as well. I still have profiles, but I have deleted the apps from my phone. This has resulted in me haveing no clue about whta is occuring outside of my curated instagram feed. I don’t get embroiled in any agrugemnets that my head can’t let lie. I feel a sense of guilt I guess because there are things occuring in the world stage which are huge like the ‘Black Live Matter’ demonstrations, the covid response , and lifting of the restrictions. I feel like I should be more vocal about these things and recognise thaat my ability to just turn off socail media, speaks volumes about the level of my ‘priviledges’. Lots of people don’t get to just ‘turn off’ these issues when it gets to be too much. I don’t have much to add to any of the debates as I don’t know enough about the problems. So I’m reading and listening to podcasts, in order to better understand. I try to amke my kids aware of the inequalities in the world, but I worry that I’ll bog them down in the rot and not have anything positive to show them. I’ll bumble and ramble along I guess and make a mess of things here and there, but I hope I remeber to tidy upafter myself and that my actions cause more good in the world than harm. I want to do more than hope. I want to make the world around me, and that spreads out from me a better place. It’s overwhelming the amount to be done. But I will try to take it on piece by piece. I feel that my major contribution will be in how I bring my kids up, and how they then influence the world. I’ve rambled enough here. I’ll shush and things.

[cathalpaint]

Not Pong

Today I put all of my coding knowledge together and coded this emulation of pong. It’s not finished but the difficult parts are done. The bats move and collision detection is sorted. I need to add scoring and to fancy it up with bell and whistles.

I’m on to learning about Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). This is the bit I have been looking forward to. From here I can programme a lot of things. My first goal is to rte code the not_Pong using OOP.

Below behold the game.

[cathalpaint]

A little colour

A more colourful sketch than I have been doing of late.

This uses FOR loops to draw the squares along the x axis; and another to draw the squares on the y axis.

The colour is controlled by the mouse movement. Long details below.

The colour in processing is by default set up as (red, green,blue). It's basically colour mixing with light.

The red component in the sketch is defined by the distance of the x co -ordinate of the mouse minus the x value of the square on the grid it is over , expressed as an absolute. ( which means its a positive number at all times. ).

The green component is defined by the y coordinate of the mouse minus the y value of the square it is over expressed as an absolute.

The blue component is defined by the mouse's x coordinate minus the width divided by two expressed as an absolute.

Yeah I know. My brain did that many many many times. But now I know what it all means and how it works. So I can actually write this stuff. Yay elastic brain learning.

[cathalpaint]

boolean functions mainly

I’m making good progress with my learning in processing. Much to the irritation of my children. I like to advise them in great detail of how and why I have made such and such a coding decision and what happened and how I overcame the dreadful situation. They are 10 and 7 and really just want to play minecraft.

Today I was covering the use of loops. WHILE and FOR loops. I have done this before,but I actually know what I’m doing as opposed to knowing how to do it. Below is my work from today. (I’m still trying to work out how to embed the entire digital work in a smaller window. I’ll figure it out eventually and put these all in a gallery.)

[cathalpaint]

Coding and the feel of satisfaction

I’m trying to learn Processing . Again. Properly this time honest. I am coding a bit every day to get better. Covering old things I know nad things I thought I knew. As part of this learning I am also trying to communicate the code in pseudo -code. Hopefully this will make my methodology clear to everyone and help me to think in a sequential fashion to solve my coding problems. I’m currently using boolean TRUE/FALSE functions. Below is the pseudo-code and the link to the processing Sketch.

https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/901734

I found this very logical to code. The feeling I get from watching the sketch in action is oddly satisfying. It was the same for coding it.

It uses a truth table. There are main variables the X co-ordinate position and the Y co-ordinate position.

The square has to move in 4 directions. :

1 Left to Right;

2 Top to Bottom:

3 Right to Left;

4 Bottom to Top;

Let’s say the width is 200 and the height is 200. In the code the TOP RIGHT corner is (0,0) so X = 0 and Y = 0.

1.(X,Y) is at (0,0) to move LEFT to RIGHT

X is 0. Y is 0. X needs to increase from 0 to 200.

While the Y co-ordinate (height) remains at 0.

2. (X,Y) = (200,0) to move TOP to BOTTOM

X is now 200. Y is 0. Y needs to increase from 0 to 200.

While X remains at 200.

3. (X,Y) = (200,200) to move RIGHT to LEFT

X is 200. Y is 200. X needs to decrease from 200 to 0.

While Y remains at 200.

4.(X,Y) = (0,200) to move BOTTOM to TO.

X is 0. Y is 200. Y needs to decrease from 200 to 0.

While X remains at 0.

5. Go To 1.

.

[cathalpaint]

All out of gum.

I came here to talk art and chew gum, and I’m almost out of gum.

I started the MA in October officially. It’s a really really good course; so rich in information and the tutors are extremely talented. I had intended to blog about the lectures and my thoughts, but the lectures are so frequent and my thoughts are currently in a whirl and take too long settle, to allow for regular posts. So I will use this as a space to hopefully spew my thoughts out and refine my ideas over time. The big challenges ahead of me are: 1) Managing my mental health whilst on the course. 2) Managing my time between, Uni, some form of work, child care and being social.

On paper..um in pixel format that looks easy to my eyes, and I’m guessing your eyes too. In reality I know it’s going to be really tough. I’m only in week 2 of the course (it feels like week 5) and I’m back in the crisis house. So things are difficult on the mental health side of things. It might seem frivolous to you to want to be social, but my big issue (it’s not a magazine for me) is the feeling of isolation I have. It’s a constant sense of being alone, even in company. But if i start talking about it I’ll get myself down and side tracked. After week 2 where are my ideas at. The tutors are pushing us to look at our own practice and to treat our practice as a form of research. For me this currently entails the nature of creating work and I guess the nature of creativity. If we look at current technologies neural networks are creating works of art using deep learning. One has even created ‘The Next Rembrandt’ . In an environment like this where algorithms can learn to create artefacts and can exhibit creative tendencies I find myself drawn to the question of what exactly is creativity. I think as humans we baulk at the idea that a machine can create. That a series of instructions can result in a unique or creative response. That’s exactly what attracts me to the issue. I think of artists that explore algorithms, not that they would have thought of their work like that. Sol le Witt, and the conceptual artists spring to mind. They thought of the idea as the art, in which an artefact was only a solid form of the idea, not the actual art. My thoughts on this need refining and teasing out. Hopefully here is where I can do this. The other strands to my ideas are as follows ( I might not peruse these strand on the MA but they are elements I think about often.) 1) The illusion of choice. 2) Art that can never be seen in it’s final state; temporally, spatially or both. 3) The scaffolding that exist behind plastic and virtual structures. ( I use the term plastic to refer to physical things in the real world IE not solely digital.)

(I’m on new medication and either its starting to have an effect or my mind is tired, either way my thoughts are cloudy.) My starting idea is below. 1)I have used processing to create a basic drawing program. 2) reduced it to 90 characters, ignoring the white spaces between the characters. 3)the information was translated to binary. 4) the binary was encoded in to a visual image. 5) the binary of the program was transferred to a canvas in pencil. ( it needs to be tidied up a lot.) The idea is that, the code that creates the drawing program is a scaffold to allow creativity. By drawing binary on the canvas I have in my mind at least drawn a scaffold that allows infinite drawings to be made. The canvas is not a only a drawing but a gateway to infinite drawings. But only if you understand the syntax used. ( I don’t really know why that last point feels important to me yet.)

[cathalpaint]

MA day 1

This probably could have used a better title, but I wanted to get as much of an initial impression of my first day at Hallam for an MA with little or no time to think about it. I’ll come back later to insert stuff less impression but that I fond funny. I’ve been upbeat most of the day, with the promise of new things and beginnings and the unknown which will build. A constructive unknown. Knowing I can do this because I've done it before when i was less prepared. The day was really just a run down of the ins and out of the course structure the main aspects of it. The assessment stuff and how the modules will unfold. We got to get a more informal feel for each other on the course and sense of where we ( well I did at least) we fit in. The module stuff I’ll come back to. The day culminated in a really informal meeting with the rest of the MA cohort ( there may be other students yet to arrive due to visa and travel stuff.) I got chatting to a few of the other people on the course; 4 teachers by my count which is interesting, and 3 / 4 straight from the BA and one from a non teaching background. I knew we were going to meet the other MA students, but it took me by surprise all the same and I think my mind had had enough just whirring from initial thoughts and ideas from off the basic introduction to the various elements f the course. I get a kind of nervous energy that I expel through chat in some situations, this was definitely one of those. I had lots of odd humorous thoughts that wanted to shout out, but I knew they were just annoying and not funny to anyone but my stupid head. (oh in slips some self loathing) At the end of the thing I stood around, feeling I don't know what. A need to do, I guess. But it was a dead zone in my head and all that was required of me was to either mingle or just go. Most people had just went anyway. I hung around for a bit said some banal shit and left. Leaving the room is where my head/mind/brain whatever my anxiety began to kick in. I was in a whirl, a mad beast in a head, looking for something to panic about. I asked my self what was bothering me. (other than getting work which definitely was not the source of the chaos in my head.)It was just my head my brain looking for an element; a threat to jump upon and blow out of proportion. A reason to say well this wasn’t right or that will be a problem. I’m aware of all the known problems and although I’m not yet on top of them all I have plans. Not great plans, but ways to at least begin dealing with the issues. If only I found my mental health as easy to deal with.

So none of theses things were in a problem. You’d think that realising this would help dissipate the noise and churning of my mind. No. Instead I found my self trying to not just break down in to tears. Having to control my self rigidly. I want a space where these things the tears the panic can just come to the surface and be done with. I'm not even sure it is a panic, it's just an intensity of everything, formless but urgently demanding; all consuming in my mind if I let it be. I’ve just had to bury it for dealing with at another time.

How did I do that. well I made a list of 3 things I wanted to accomplish today. (This was number 4 i.e. not on my list but in doing it I realise how useful this could be for me over the course off the...um course of course. (It might even be a good decompression tool for me.) Then breaking those tasks into smaller elements, that I can work at immediately. I still want to crash and burn at time though. I need that space to be vulnerable, but I can’t do it one my own because I guess I'm worried about it spinning out of control and I want that comfort of an other human. I don’t need them to tell me it will be alright; just a presence that will allow me to know that I have someone there. Just being there would act as a safeguard to me spiralling out of control, to damage levels. I still hurt my self. Less visibly but left to my own self at the moment these overwhelming emotions emerge and a need for them to just stop, just stop, and then I get hurt. The modules are fairly straight forward. 60 credits on ART Practice- In my understanding making things ( mistakes successes and so on) some documentation our thoughts on how and why we are making and having an opinion about it all , Art Context is 4 strands all designed to try to push the way we practice / make produce and display and to think about how we do this. each strand is 30 credits. Basically choose one of 2 choices as they are delivered. First choice is : A) Drawing on/from the archive. or; B) Assemblage and collage. And then: A) Art Writing or; B) Curation - time and place. A very rich layered course. I’m taken by all the strands like everyone on the course was, but being aware of time constraints I’ll opt for assemblage and collage, then curation. That's me on this for now I’ll edit and move stuff around and be back for a bit Thursday. I have a lot of thoughts to think out and this will be where I air them either immediately or after I give them time to breathe. Right now its time for tea, rice and some mysterious veg concoction I made. Tomorrow I’ll try to start moving my stuff over. I also have therapy tomorrow and it will be the last session fora while because, I’m not finding time with everything to work on the therapy. I don’t want to be without that space as its the only one I have that is there for me at the moment. So I'm a bit terrified at the thought of being bereft of a space for a while. So until next time.

[cathalpaint]

something about logic and emotion Part 1

To write this safely, I have had to use a lot of my therapy tools and hand write it out, to slow and focus my mind.  One of my core strengths is my ability to generate a zabilliion and 5 ideas and scenarios in my mind extremely quickly. I'm not saying I'm better at this than anyone else, its just one of the things I do well. My logic and creative mind kicks in and takes my mind whirling through thoughts at speed, its too much too quickly. So a technique I developed is to vocalise my ideas this forces my mind to slow down. It focuses my mind on 1 or 3 ideas which my mind will chase and flip between. Generally from talking to my therapist I think it's fair to say that ideas cause emotional responses. Like thinking about a bungee jump conjures feelings of fear, excitement and so on. These emotional responses cause physical responses. Fear can get the adrenaline pumping and so on. This all helps us identify and respond to risk levels.  My mind is great at generating the ideas, but it a bit addicted to the rush of new ideas and chases each idea as far as it can before jumping to  another tangential idea and running with it. Its fun, honestly it is. (If you've spoken to me after I've been painting I'll complain of a head ache, being tired and yet I  will talk about lots of ideas that my work will lead on to and where that can lead and where that....... (yawn) but I'm also quite manic in my actions being a lot more active.  Unfortunately my emotional mind is not as quick to keep up I think. All the emotions get pushed to one side and don't get dealt with. This would not be an issue, but for life and it's general demands; I have to react to events, and the emotions from the whirling mind don't get dealt with. (I should point out that my mind does this even when I'm not  painting). I guess I use to be able to just push these things away or down and deal with them somehow - I honestly have no idea how I did it. But since the start of 2016(?) 17(?)  something has given way. And the thing I did -what ever it was- no longer functions. So instead all the emotions sit there stewing unprocessed, unlabeled, unacknowledged until some stress or event triggers the dam to burst. This next bit is hard to write. It's how my body reacts. I've had over the past few nights this happen hourly or so -  I was really grateful for sleep last night. I'm not sure if they are panic attacks, but that's what I'm going to call them. When it kicks in my right hand starts to shake and twitch. Then I start crying randomly. It stops and starts over the course of 30 minutes or so. Sometimes that's it just uncontrollable crying. Other times it gets more extreme. I curl in to a ball, my anxiety peaks and I lose the ability to form words, both in my mind and physically. In my mind it rages.  I have no idea what it is but it causes at its worst my throat and chest and all muscles to tense. I make a horrible tortured noise and then it reaches its peak where I can't even breathe. I become a tensed up ball of bone and flesh. My thoughts are wordless and too, too fast.

Then my body releases itself and I hyperventilate to get air and the cycle repeats. This can go on for 10 minutes until my body is sore and exhausted. At it worst I was having these for 30 minutes with little break in  between( thank fully the rethink team were there for me). My body might be exhausted but the anxiety is still there. This is conjecture, but at this point my logic mind is broken and I'm just reacting, not thinking. Maybe I see my self as a threat I don't know, but it can lead to self harming. I'm impulsively hurting my self. The unwanted thoughts of suicide will crash in again and again. It seems to be the only solution to end the nameless and formless torment. If  I fight that urge off I can end up in the panic attack mode again. Then suddenly it stops. I might get lucky and that is it for the day. WOOO! Mostly it cycles (i'm not sure of the timings) pretty much every hour for whatever length of time. 

This is about as much as I can handle right now. My hand is letting me know I need to ground myself.  In my next part I'll be using metaphor to get ideas across.   

[cathalpaint]

Lupercalia eve.

This was going to be a post about the ongoing exhibition in the Circle Gallery in Sheffield, but I've been really busy with life and not had time to even draft a post. (*shakes fist at life) Instead, you will be led astray by workings and smearings in the cave 'o paint. (I wonder does it sound more mysterious in latin, BRB) -De spelunca pingere- meh.  I got side tracked there. 

Below are two shots FRGMNTFD of the first how it is now and the second experimenting with stencils. ( I stuck the stencils down and painted a portrait over the top then removed the stencil letters) The letters spell (minus vowels) FRaGMeNT.

This  image (below) is a better photo of V//D. I need to work some subtle marks into the 'pacman' shapes and balance one or two things up. I'm going to try to make the reds more punchy, digitally to get a rough idea of whether it's a genius move or a complete suineg (reverse of genius) move.

 #cathalpaint #artcan ArtCan #mentalhealth #wip #sheffieldartist

[cathalpaint]

Square Peg - with Artcan in the circle gallery

I probably should go into my mental health issues, but I'm still dealing with them and its quite difficult to clarify my thoughts on it, due to the nature of my thoughts. It has been hard for me to find moments of brightness in my current gloom, however one of those fleeting moments was brought to me by Kate Enters of Art Can.   

I've been  a bit flaky in getting work done over the last year, but Kate showed faith in my abilities and asked me to produce two paintings for the 'Square Peg' exhibition at the circle gallery in Sheffield.  It was hairy at times, but I got there. The work produced I am really proud of, it's strong and does a good job of communicating my intentions.  The exhibition was a group exhibition and I was honored to show my work among such talent. Over the next few posts I intend to speak about the artists I have met and exhibited with.   Below is an over view of the works on display in the Circle Gallery . The exhibition is worth seeing, the way Kate curated the works helped add layers of nuance to the works, drawing subtle connections out. 

[cathalpaint]

Something about renewal and fresh starts

Blimey 2017 was a year! I've had mental health issues and the world seems to have not faired that well either. I have learnt a lot about myself this last year, but I'm not here to talk about that right now. I have neglected my website for too long so I'm going to redesign it and hopefully get a decent bit opf motivation to post here consistently. I do a lot from my  phone and the squarespace apps are not the best. I can never be certain that the post goes through. When it does images sometimes go missing.  

[cathalpaint]

something blurred and fading

Read this don't read this its not for you anyway. I pay the money for this blog so I'll put my shit on here if i want.   

How does the depression affect me? Today I don't feel hopeless and pointless, just angry that I have to be here. I want everything to fail and isolation to be entire so I can just get on with ending my existence.  Other days I'm bombarded with suicidal thoughts, elaborate ideas on how to end things quickly. Ideas that make me wish I was an engineer or at least had more dubious contacts. Stillness and regularity of thought processes is not what the depression brings me. When I'm not ,angry and focused on how to suicide myself, I'm numb, empty of everything and welcome it. Then people ask me how I'm doing. I don't want to tell you. How is the treatment working? Is it? I'm here going through the treatment, like Sisyphus. I've got his mythical out look on my future. Don't look too deep into a myth. I see the treatment working. I see me 'fixed'. I see my inevitable collapse.  They say they can give me techniques to manage. Heh. Manage my life. Spend my days looking over my shoulder watching for suicidal me. Then after a life of 'managing my mood' I can finally die of old age. or disease. or whatever.  Why am I doing the treatment?  I honestly don't know. I have cliched answers. For my family. Because I have a part of me that wants to live? Fuck knows.  What do I want?  To die. Feel like everyone is guilting me to live. I know they love me and worry about me but I feel trapped in this life. Like I'm not allowed to be me, because the me now will take me away from everyone. I'm loaded with the responsibility of everyones happiness. I want to cry. But it solves nothing.  Things become too much and I want to hurt me. They have suggested the rubberband idea, but that deals only with the pain, not the fact I want to damage myself. They want me to engage with the treatment, but I want to disengage with life. Today I'm angry and want to tell every one to get fucked. To push what ever buttons I can to isolate myself. What I do know is everyone has their limits. Push hard enough, long enough and they'll give up. Some find they are able to deal with the pushing. So I'll shut down instead.  Everyone is telling me to live, when we're all going to die anyway. I can't be arsed waiting anymore. They say my suicide will effect my kids and Su. I know this. But when I'm dead, Iwon't care or worry about that. Callous? yeah, but logical. All my issues can be boile down to one soloution. yeah its perimant and there is no going back from it. Fuck it. I'll do the treatment get the help I can get. And fill you in again on my stuff at some point. any ways.m laterz maybes.