My meditation practice has really ramped up in the past month. My goal was to integrate simple yet effective meditation into moments when I could. Walking meditation, biking meditation, even a simple five minutes on my knees at work in the back storage area. Suddenly, everything is different now.

Perceptions and beliefs have changed perpendicularly. Anxiety is now capable of being overcome with raw immediacy, although, this is a skill that I am still improving. My capability to string together experiences without tire has grown. I can work a ten hour day, bike home in high gear, and then sit down for an hour and a half and work on artwork. I can wake up, meditate, and immediately dive into the place where creativity is most fertile.

Social interactivity and short-radius perspective have transformed from facades and illusions into more representative examples of their truths. Stripping away, stripping away, stripping away…

My current art work and it’s process, which provides an intense amount of excitement in my life, is to what I owe the bulk of gratitude for this transformation. The past three months have really been about “getting it,” the simple epiphany, the burst of light that suddenly reveals. Coupled with a positive attitude about leaving my Twenties, as I worked through my process of making Art, I began to realize what I was doing. I began to interpret my own work, and I began to see the correlation between subconscious revelation and physical construction. I began to get my self, to understand a level of Who I Was I had not yet approached previously.

I cherish this dynamicism I now possess. I feel grateful that through my discipline and concentration I have honed focus. And as this excitement in my grows, so too does my work, both in it’s own concentration of composition as well in size.

Some discoveries:

Mental thread gets really tangled quickly once the first snag gains tension. The spool unfurls, and like a feline pawing maniacally, everything becomes knotted and lace-like. Every so often when this occurs the only remedy is scissors, or something sharper, like the mighty pen.

Parents are more important than I ever figured. From the discovery of things that would become creative influence, to the first indelible memories of life, and the crutches and crosses one carries with them into adulthood. And, most of them are rotten. Which is very saddening yet highly reflective of the state of humanity.

Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe were (or are) the real Gilbert and George.

Why translates into how. Process transforms into product. Children become grown-ups.

Parenthesis are incredibly sexy.

Over the course of the past two weeks, while having an existential shift in all aspects of my life, serious moments of reflection and examination have led me to a place of creative clarity. We all have forests or fires we must occasionally go through. Sometimes forests on fire, dense foliage ripe with black carbon smoke and the heat of fear and confusion that seems to overwhelm the safety of the plain that surrounds.

The number of times we seem to walk through these fires, to draw ourselves back into the conflagration, the inability to extinguish certain emotions and thoughts and behavior patterns struck me as uncanny. Repetition seems to be an innate piece of our human fabric. This need to re-taste, re-hear, revisit… to re-experience both bliss and pain on various levels so as to offset or enhance the diametrical opposites.

I began to think of the moments of drama in my life that spiraled out of control. Were they self-created? Did I bring them forth in to my life to shake up the existential snow globe? It is pretty watching the little chads of plastic snow dawdle around the miniature figurines and eventually settle underneath it all, anxious for another disruption. In fact, the whole point of a snow globe is to pick it up and shake it. They are boring-by-design just sitting there, unstimulated. Life contained in a globe, going nowhere, dying out ever so slowly through some minute leak that no one can seem to find. I always thought the snowmen looked happier as the water tornadoed around.

Let’s think of repetition in terms of artist’s work. Andy Warhol could be described as a king of repetition, incessant reexamination of a single image, both separate to themselves and as a complete whole. Warhol, throughout his career, used imagery and photography of everyday objects and experiences, things that existed in daily life whether we paid attention to them or not. Boxes of soap, hammers, electric chairs, car accidents, suicides; all these elements of life became the medium. Reprinted over and over and over again in colors from day-glo to black. How often do we confront the image of an electric chair, though? Do we forget that this unforgiving punishment exists in our society? Do we fail to notice the design of our mass-produced consumer products? Couldn’t we just focus on the beauty of the colors of packaging or are we just concerned what those images contain inside: granulated soap.

Now what of magazine racks, a grid of images repeated into themselves? Layer of beauty queen over beauty queen interspersed with 36 point type hyping the next fad diet or advertising the most recent illegitimately born Hollywood baby. Is repetition reenforcement? Do we revisit the same ideas and dramas in our lives to reinforce what we experienced in the past, or are we convinced that the more we try, the sooner we might experience something different? At which usage of capital punishment will all crime suddenly disappear? Which box of soap will really clean all the dirt away?

I think we emulate repetition throughout our daily lives, if nothing else, subconsciously. I think of how many times I’ve stood in front of the mirror, prepping to go out drinking or cruising at a bar, to get the appropriate look. And then to remember it to replicate it in future trials. The homogenization of pop culture demonstrates this current need. Collagen lips, thick brow makeup, six-pack abs, and tight asses squeezed in jeans, all in an effort to replicate the beauty of something else, but in hopes of getting it just a little bit better personally. Reexamining someone else’s beauty for your own.

And in terms of repetition, what do we notice? Do we suddenly realize the all-over image, or do we begin to pick out the elements we disregard when viewing something once. Do we notice the pimples more (there are now twenty-five of them in grid form) as well as the blemishes (the blurring of corners that suddenly present kaleidoscopic?)

And what of non-representational image. What of the sky? While we view the sky above as sky, each representation of the sky, each day, is different. Same element, different presentation. Take Gerhard Richter and his production of color grids. Here, he repeats 256 rectangles, all of different colors in varying hues and shades of the spectrum. Same structure, different emotion. Individually, when focused on discretely, some rectangles appear violent or glum while their neighbors may be serene or joyful. However, it is just 256 different representations of the same model. A single photograph taken once and printed with the slightest variation of value over and over again, and placed side-by-side. Why does this affect us so deeply?

We are faced with the confrontation of repetition each day. The simple “hello” of answering a telephone call. Sugar in our coffee. The stroke of daily masturbation. Somewhere we expect to find the answer, the repercussion, the reply. A different reply. We dance on the edge of insanity, barely containing the illusion of life we walk in.

It’s time for a status update.

Status updates are everywhere. They are the newest component of every web social interaction utility. Because we suddenly all need utilities these days to socially interact. “Hello, nice to meet you, let me turn on my talking utility.”

Hanging upside down is where I seem to feel happiest lately. Ironically, as I finish little art pieces here and there, upon turning them 180 degrees, suddenly they look like what I had intended. Does this all have some symbolic or subconscious undertext here? Do I need a psychological analysis web utility to help me discern what is going on in the mechanics?

I wonder if there is pain as part of the metamorphosis process for caterpillars. If, at some moment in their grand transitions, there is recognition of destiny and that in the process of transforming there is an element of nature-sadness or nature-pain that the living creature goes through before it gets it’s wings.

The weather is beautiful in San Francisco but I’m suddenly overcome with the excessive brightness of it all and the exposure to myself of methods of construction.

I have had quite an interesting week. There was a resurrection. There was enlightened escape. There was pen involved.

Most of the artists I respect and learn by have branched into several mediums or combinations thereof. I equate it to making two variations of an ingredient for a meal, or working with two sets of tools to build a common structure. It is an efficient way to mix ideas, to manipulate space after it has been created, or to shift perspective through negative spaces and around objects.

These unique prints are important to me as they generally form great circles into other sections of creative production.

Focusing on one thing for days on end becomes monotonous. It becomes myopic. It stirs insanity and cabin fever.

I like to branch out. I find working in one medium to be boring and droll. I think it is fantastic that some artists perfect one task and work it endlessly to every possible finish imaginable and then find more ways to manipulate some more. And, on some levels, I envy this skill. On the road map of creativity my path takes a few hairpins and tunnels, and one of the detours in my agenda is collage.

Collage is the visual remixing of life. It is a creation of fantasy arrangements or advertisements for (in)sanity. It is a way to piece together unspeakable emotions that are somehow captured during the moments of haute-couture runway shoots and psychiatric medication commentaries. Collage is very versatile. Though not always forgiving, errors can be simply cut away and new material can be glued over in place. You can weave legs and layers of flowers into combinations only imaginable to science fiction writers and horny teenage boys. It is simple, accessible, and requires the most minimal and inexpensive of tools: some cardboard, scissors, glue and few old magazines.

Sometimes when you get lost trying to make images you must return instead to images already made. In the process of trying to speak the language we forget the text. We go back to read again what we learned from and cut out the pieces of the puzzle we failed to understand prior.