INDEXED IN «illustration»
X001
X001 (Digital and handmade collage. 2007.)

X001 (Digital and handmade collage. 2007.)

Over the last three or fours years, due to a select few incidents that I wish not to recollect really, I’ve lost a number of essential works,  creative pieces, and photos: some are in storage, some lost on malfunctioning hard drives, some lost at a gas station on Staten Island, NY. X001 was the first of a series of collages I was going to do — I apparently had more time and inspiration to do these things at the time, especially given the fact that it clocks in a lot of computer time. I’m already on a computer enough as it is with work, music, and various social networking functions. I really liked how this piece turned out and wanted to more. A twisted fantasy world that tapped more into the surreal, arty side of the collage work I was already doing for promoters and bands. I was planning on putting a number of these in Vexxed, a zine that I’m still spinning in the mud about actually completing. Perhaps this will happen sometime this year.

Over the last couple of years since moving to England my graphic output has become more utilitarian for the sake of income and holding a job and not so much for creating art. I think most of creative energy has been sucked into music right now and any fuel for visual work has been exhausted in the big 8-cylinder, Ford Bronco that is the mainstream “creative” industry. This will, I hope, change soon. I would love to do more art-based pieces soon as the ideas are there; it’s just the time and energy that needs to be mustered up from somewhere.

I have until recently been doing all my work since 1999 under the moniker The Wax Museum — an entity which has closed as of this year. I’m starting afresh and figuring out a best angle of approach for the new: under the name JJD Works. Some developments with this should take place sometime within the next six months.

IT’S AUTOMATIC (001)

I have a good number of notebooks littered with these things: random scribblings jotted down when I’m really only half thinking about them. They’re usually found in pages of actual, functional notes and itemized lists; tucked away into page corners or in between lines. I’ve been doing this for activity of what I guess we could call “automatic writing” for years and when I have the chance to look back on them when flipping through a notebook some of them seem almost genius in their fractured flow and others just don’t seem to make any sense at all — some are even entertainingly funny.

I can recognize some of the writings as random cuts out of a conversation or a train of thought that I was running in my head at the time. Some of these were writing during some half-aware phone conversations, most of them of a business/work nature. Others are random bits of lyrics that I cycle through my head as I build a melody and probably some loose method of recording those words in a more permanent manner.

Anyway, this is a first installment of a possible series of entries called “It’s Automatic” — pulling and analyzing these weird little bits of prose in cluster of their own. This particular group is from a thick (30mm) ring binder of A4 notepapers I have at work, dated from June 2009 until now, usually intended for the documentation of phone numbers, design specifications, to-do lists, and other trivial calculations…

GLORIOUS ERRORS FROM THE SAPPHIRE PIT

Many things come into my head out of the blue and more and more I’m starting to write them down as they come. Lately the practice has been to write down any “bad band names” that spring to mind but this page came from one that was blank and morphed into mainly sort of cryptic phrases (with a few dumb words thrown in).

AutoAug0509