1 Down, 51 To Go

Without committing myself to anything yet, my initial, vague and probably crazy idea was to add to this blog every day for a year.

In tandem with this I would try to produce a new painting and a new painting every week for the same period.

Therefore, along with 365 short articles of existential blah-blah would come into existence about 50 new pictures and 50 new poems over the next year.

Except life doesn't work that way. Especially creative life. There are long periods when for either inspirational or practical reasons it is very difficult to produce consistently worthwhile stuff.

Then again, I have proved to myself on my Paris and I photo blog that I can keep up a journal for more than two years and I'm just waiting for my new iPhone to continue with that one.

So although my idea is as stated above, I have no idea if I will actually be able to stick to it.

But having said that I have produced this week's poem, written about an hour ago, and inspired by this blog for its existence and a recent iPhone photo (above right) for its subject matter. It's called...


Fear of Absorption

The dark worms come
And they eat the night
Swallow the shadows
And tear at the tunnels
With dark worm sounds
Like shreaking iron tombs
The mirth of the devil
His metal in wounds
And mental home rounds
A horror house funnel
The gallows they borrow
To feed your fright
As the dark worms follow
And still you run

I'm not really sure how to incorporate my pictures and poems into this new diaristic-type blog. After all, I have other blogs for the finished items, Infini2 and Mystic Rhythms respectively. Should I therefore not publish the finished items here too? But I know myself and that might be one of the reasons I'm currently keen - for today at least - on this new permutation of Abstract Mystic; I hate unfinished items and love finishing and publishing things. So this blog should force me to both start and finish more stuff. That's one of the ideas anyway.

Maybe I'll also throw around bits of unfinished paintings and wandering verse to see what happens. And hopefully it'll be interesting to discuss the creative process 'in public' as it were. But this possibly goes against a couple of the basic tenets of producing 'art'; namely that not only should the 'art', be it verse, paintings or whatever speak for itself, but the more writing about it you're doing, the less you're actually doing it. Which is also known as procrastinating, amongst other things.

Trying to describe a painting solely in words is pretty futile. And strangely, but just as validly, the same goes for a poem. How can other words be used to describe other words accurately? Without using the same words! Impossible.

Of course, useful background can be given, as well as insights into the creative process and decisions being made, which is pretty much what I'm going to do here and which some people appreciate.

The poem above was deliberately created. In other words, the idea didn't come to me spontaneously. I quite deliberately said to myself, ok, now I'm going to write the first of this coming year's 52 poems, let's go! Then I looked at my recent iPhone photos and saw one which inspired me. I didn't want anything too gloomy but as you can see I didn't succeed as far as that was concerned. Hopefully it isn't too negative though. I'm just pleased something actually came out at all to be frank.

That'll do. More tomorrow, maybe, if I have something worth saying or sharing. Maybe the start of a new painting - now there's an interesting idea.