Egocentric Masturbation

I had an unexpected and touching response to my foul mouthed outpouring of painfully honest truth the other day. Unexpected in that it came from someone who I have met only a few times but who barely knows me. Unexpected in that the email made me cry and laugh at the same time. I cried like a baby because what he said showed me that although he does not know me particularly well, for some reason, he genuinely cared. For some reason, he was touched by my brutal honesty. Touched enough to come out of his shell and send me a long and deep email. When we first met, we had an involved conversation about how I came to art. Apparently, that conversation affected him so much that he told my story many times to people that he knew in an effort to inspire them. He felt inspired to once again start making art.

He made me laugh because he came up with this hilarious term, egocentric masturbation. I can’t define it better than he does so I’m gonna quote him “Usually, I don’t bother read people’s shit as usually its full of egocentric masturbation. Sometimes people are trying to talk about how intelligent they are or how important their thoughts are regarding some crap or other. Thankfully, for my sanity, your’s wasn’t.” There, thats some egocentric masturbation for you. I inspired someone, pretty major material I think.

So after much trepidation, I am glad that I spilled my guts so to speak. It felt good and I feel better. For those that have expressed concern, I am not going to kill myself any time soon. There is no danger of self harm. every now and then, when things are getting hard, it is good and healthy to have a gut spilling session, in whatever way suits you. Publicly like me or privately to friends. everyone has their cross to bear. Everyone falls down. It is not the falling down that count’s it is the getting up. So I am continuing to fight my personal and professional wars. Everything in life, all the shit, as well as all the good stuff enriches and adds to it. Frida Kahlo used all of her guts, everything in her to produce interesting, beautiful, surreal art which served as punctuation points in her short and interesting life. Hopefully my guts will serve the same purpose. Real and true. So the game continues.



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To Be Honest…

To be honest with you, I am struggling with the idea of chronicling my struggles as an artist and my personal life. To be honest with you, I am worried that the impact such honesty will have on me personally and my career. To be honest with you I am terrified of giving so much away of myself that others can criticize and say things to cause me more pain than I am already feeling. Maybe I should just feel the fear and do it anyway. That’s one of those things people say. To be honest, I am petrified of being seen as a complete and utter failure.

Stuff it. No one’s life is easy. All suffering is relative and worth talking about. Better in the context of problem solving rather than complaining. That’s what I always say. That’s why my blog is mostly empty. One post this year I think. A disgrace. The reason, I don’t feel comfortable complaining, but lately, that seems like all I have to talk about. complaints. Isn’t it funny how when life knocks you down, all those friends are no where to be found? Ha bloody ha. Hilarious.Times like this you know who your real friends are.

I am going to be real about my situation for a change. For what purpose? I don’t know, other than purging myself to an extent. I am not even touching the sides in terms of what has gone on this year in the Damoah family. Shit has hit the fan big time for all of us. I am tired of pretending that I am fine, THAT WE ARE FINE. Why do we do that? Why are we socialised to always say “fine thank you” when someone asks how we are? Is it because we are afraid to complain because there are so many other people far worse off? There are people with no arms and no legs who go round doing motivational talks about how great their life is and how lucky we are to be alive in this wonderful abundant universe. The classic one, there are people starving in Africa. What about homeless people? At least you have a place to live. Food and water. Electricity. Etc etc etc. Blah blah. Hold your gratitude rock. Do affirmations. Live in the attitude of gratitude. Read motivational quotes. I keep striving, keep making phone calls, keep coming up with new ways to make money, keep promoting my work, keep looking for representation, keep building the Damoah brand. Never give up. Never give up.This is what I have been telling myself to do. This is what I always advise others to do. I want to SCREAM. If I was to be honest the answer would be “I am bloody terrible and there have been times when I have contemplated suicide. There have been times when I am in a really dark space in my head. There have been times when I have wanted to jump of a bridge with a noose around my chubby neck. There have been times when I have felt completely impotent when shit was hitting the fan so hard in my family that I felt like all I could see hear and smell was repugnant sh*t. I need help. We all need help. Can you please help me?” Yep, and that’s just the tip of the ice berg.

If you don’t have anything nice to say better not say anything at all. Why the hell not? No one cares anyway. So what is really the point.

Rant over.

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Drawing Surrealism and Life

It has been a while since I have blogged consistently. Sometimes life takes over and you have to go into hibernation for a while to recover. Crazy stuff happens you know. You just have to roll with the punches and keep going, keep living, keep working. Inevitably when you are being hit by an onslaught of seemingly never ending crap, blogging becomes less of a priority as you try to wade through it all, reaching for the light at the end of the shitty tunnel.
I am out of the tunnel, still creating, always creating.
Last year, I signed up to the draw365 day challenge on Twitter. During the year, I have done more than 365 drawings! I have lost count. I have a pile of sketchbooks. Last years drama meant that I was away from my social media platforms for a while so did not post the pics. Today, I posted about 13 drawings- mostly recent creations via twitter. Some from my imagination and one or two are quick sketches of surrealist works from Francis Picabia and Giorgio De Chrico taken from the Visual Encyclopedia of Art on Surrealism published by Scala.
Homage to Giorgio De Chrico. “The Uncertainty of the Poet.” 1913. In my head, the bananas are really plantain and the arse in my drawing is a little bigger 😉
Consciously or unconsciously, I have been influenced by the surrealist movement ever since I was a child. If I can find the crazy sketches I made from my dreams when I was a child I would make adult versions of my childhood dreams. That would be interesting I think.

In 1924,  many artists considered that “the time had come to liberate expressive form, to release the  world of the subconscious of dreams and of pure psychic automatism.”

“They were willing to give shape to their nightmares, paranoia, suppressed eroticism, and the dark side of the mind.”

“The surrealism defined by Andre Breton was outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations”

(All of the above quotations were taken from the Visual Encyclopedia of Art on Surrealism published by Scala)

I just adore that description. It feels so much like where my thinking comes from in terms of the birth place of my work. Where I started from when I would sit in my bedroom as a hormonal teenager, daydreaming and drawing crazy otherworldly things that always felt just beyond the grasp of my own reality. This is what I am  going back to now. Hopefully, in studying, reflecting and allowing my dreams to impinge upon my reality through my work once more, I will be able to go back to the place where I began and really go deep inside of myself and bring out something true and real but at the same time unreal that causes you to wander. Wander about yourself, about life, about things that we humans may have difficulty in comprehending in our conscious minds while at the same time confronting the reality of what is.

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Seasons Greetings

Seasons Greetings to you,

They say that Christmas is a time for giving, sharing and magical moments. My wish is that this principle is one that is carried all the way into 2011 and beyond.

This year, I have been busy working on a project which I hope to share with you soon.

Have a fabulous Christmas and a prosperous new year.

With love from

Adelaide Damoah and the Team @ Damoah Arts
x

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Self Censorship

 

If you have read my bio, you will see the following statement about me“An artist who is inspired by the inner recesses of her being”..
I am acutely aware of the fact that I have not been that person in my work since before I was consciously producing work for the public…
A conversation with a lawyer friend of mine reminded me of something I have had at the back of my mind since I started producing art for public consumption. In some ways, I have become a self censoring artist. I don’t live under a dictatorship that demands censorship of its citizens. I live in a capitalist society that believes in freedom of speech. A society where racist buffoons are allowed a public forum on national television to voice their beliefs. There is no dictator that says that I can’t paint naked women if I want to, or reverse the skin colours of noted icons. There are films and video games out there depicting extreme violence and sex which appeal to the most depraved element of our psyche as human beings. Yet, I am guilty of self censorship.
Why? 
I have wanted to express the dark desires that pervade my soul. I have wanted to express more than conscious controlled thoughts about society’s ills and let people see the real me, but some THING constantly holds me back.
What is that THING? The self censorship THING. IT is a disease that is eating up my creativity. I feel the need to exorcise IT. To cut IT out like one would cut out cancer. To irradiate IT and blast IT into non existence. But then, I might do my OCD thing and literally vomit everything that comes to mind with no sense of inhibition onto the canvas. Constantly spewing out all of the nasty, crude, vulgar and sick things that come to mind and that I suppress as well as the beautiful touching things that make me feel alive. Would that lead to a great piece of art, or just a vulgar expression of basic human emotion that no one wants to be confronted with, lest they confront themselves?
I have no problem expressing my emotions, my thoughts and feelings. I can do that when I want to and quite eloquently if I may say so. But something stops me from doing this in public. I feel like I need to do something about it before it destroys my creativity. I need to be more intuitive in my work. I want people to feel me when they see my work, I need that to be the case, so I have to let go.
But then are the public not sick and tired of people doing this? Putting everything out there for the whole world to see? Are we not all bored of those tired celebs constantly splashing their private lives every where? I dare say, a lot of us are, but never the less, we devour all of that media information and juicy gossip with voracious appetites. But then, I am not a celebrity. I don’t feel like confessing the particulars of my private life in a tell all interview with OK magazine. I just want to express myself through my work. That’s what artists do is it not… Unless you are Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin, very few artists are seen as celebrities. Expressing one self in art is not quite the same as confessing dirty secrets to a tabloid magazine. It is not tacky like that is it.
So why do I do it?
Maybe its because I went to Catholic school? Maybe it was the early Jehovah s witness teachings of my Mother and her sisters? Maybe it is the total respect I have for my parents, and a fear of offending them, even as an independent grown woman. Maybe it is a combination of things. Maybe it is just who I am.
In my next piece, I will dig deeper than I ever have before. I will stay honest and true to what I see when I meditate and go deep into my subconscious and truly express those things to the best of my ability. I will try and show you those things in my work simply because that need has always been there, and that need has to be satisfied. It has been a long time coming…
No more carefulness for me in my art.
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Art and Fame

I was just flicking through last summers edition of Art Review magazine and I came across an article (Art and Fame part 1by Niru Ratnam) that struck me at the time, and it is a recurring question for me as an artist…

The article asks the question why artists who seem to connect with the conciousness of the general public (think Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Murakami et al) seem to be of so little interest to the art world? Why is it that as an artist it seems almost impossible to have both credibility AND popularity?

Artists and art enthusiasts any thoughts? Can you think of anyone that has been able to successfully marry the two seemingly opposing qualities?

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