Introduction

Hello and welcome to Brain Candy.

As you can see this is my first update so I'm probably going to ramble on a bit before I get comfortable. I chose the name Brain Candy as the title for my blog because everything I'm going to be posting here is, for me, eye candy that stimulates my brain (and hopefully yours..) I suppose you could look at it as my inspiration but I tend not to like this word and I'll explain why;

When somebody asks 'what inspires you?' I've never known how to answer it. It's too personal of a question and there's too many variables. What's inspiring for one person may be viewed as criminal by another. So my responses have always been vague, shrugging words like 'everything' or 'friends' or 'other artists' because I never know how detailed I'm expected to be. Inspiration is ubiquitous and for me can be found in anything from what I ate for breakfast this morning to a life changing event that may have happened years ago. The music I listen to, the conversations I have, the people I see, the articles I read... moods, dreams, nightmares - the list is endless. 

This blog is going to be both a personal account and a documentation of my project development because I find it hard to draw a line between the two. I, personally, cannot confine art to a category in itself so I will be pretty much sharing anything that I feel is an influential factor in my life, thoughts, creativity and so on and so forth!

The tag line 'Imagination is the factory that makes legends' is one of my favourite quotes from a song I listened to quite recently by the Bullitts featuring one of my favourite rappers Jay Electronica.

[Intro. Lucy Liu]
And then there was him
Without words, he told me I was all he needed
He transformed my entire outlook on life
He made me believe again
And just like that… I was whole

I was on to something
I knew there was more
Before there was nothing
With him I had all

[The Bullitts]
Monogram hologram
Seeming realistic in a dream
My phonogram
Analogue emotions in a stream
Wave radio
Beautiful fire gasoline my love

Running like railroad train
Whistle like wind in rain
Bitter moon and sun exchange a glance
Turn away…

Close your eyes
Radio lies
Here’s dynamite sonic in real-time
This is your life
Cradle and knife
Everything grow until die

Here we go, stereo
Turning volume down again
My merry go
Mystical reflections call a pen
Write heat explode
Falling nearer to the end my love

Running like railroad train
Whistle like wind in rain
Bitter moon and sun exchange a glance
Turn away…

Close your eyes
Radio lies
Here’s dynamite sonic in real-time
This is your life
Cradle and knife
Everything grow until die

[Jay Electronica]
Have you ever had that feeling like you been falling for weeks in a well?

I was on the verge of dying like E.T. in the bald spot in the forest, right next to the speak and spell…
Tryna phone home but the signal wouldn’t reach the cell…
Tryna hold on a little longer teeth and nail
Without a hand to wipe the tears away from my cheek when they fell

When I couldn’t get peace from a pipe or chiefing an L
I thought of the words of pastor Dunn when he said;
“Son, at first they screamed hosanna on the highest then turned around and crucified the christ after a week in jail”

Stick to the script like paper clips and coffee stains
Never let a seed of doubt deter you from your lofty aims
The will us much stronger than the flesh
And it only grows stronger when you’re going through duress
Imagination is the factory that makes legends…
Close Your Eyes and dream B.I.G. like Faith Evans

I just threw the lyrics in if you're bored and wanted to scroll through them!

Anyway enough of that (I told you I'd ramble) I'm going to get back onto the topic of my first year art project - 'My Sense of Space'.

I'm not going to lie - when we first got this brief I was a little bit apprehensive and I suppose the reason for this was because I had always associated 'space' with being three dimensional as opposed to flat or linear. This posed as a challenge for me because I would be mainly interested in drawing, painting, graphics and basically two dimensional art forms. At the beginning I didn't really know where I was going with this concept and found I was hit with a copious amount of different ideas on how I could convey the notion of space on a 'flat' surface.. After a few days of brainstorming and writing and confusing myself I came to the realization that I wasn't in the correct frame of mind. Instead of shying away from sculpture, ceramics and installation art I decided to re-approach the project with the understanding that art cannot be divided into '2D' and '3D' quite so simply. My project is going to stem from drawings, sketches and plans which will hopefully then develop and expand into an array of different mediums - in both dimensions.

After nearly a week of not being able to settle on one concept I decided to man up and take to my sketch pad with the theory of 'headspace.' Prior to that I had been thinking a lot about clutter and the influence it has on a space and vice versa. Needless to say the only clutter I became familiar with was the clutter I was creating inside of my own brain by trying to wrap it around a load of different angles that didn't make sense to me. Ironically, all this 'clutter' turned out to be a kind of blessing because it was the intention of clearing my mind that shed light on the perception of headspace.

I'll leave the introduction on that note and from here on in will be updating the blog as often as possible with my project development, interesting finds and general babble!

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