There is a picture that hangs in our back hallway. It’s an original – pastels on paper – in a rudimentary, colourful style. The artist is my fiancee, Isabel, and the subject is our rabbit, who died yesterday. She was very important to us and I could write a lot about her but it wouldn’t feel right or be very interesting to the rest of you, so I want to say something about art instead.
The picture by generally applied artistic standards isn’t very good, but of course I love it, more so right now. Most of the writing about art on this weblog will be about looking at art, experiencing it, enjoying it or not – not much will be about doing it. But more so than music and perhaps even more so than writing everyone can make or ‘do’ visual art and while 95% of the time you’ll make something hideously embarrassing you will sometimes make something that works, that is special and captures its subject in some deep way. Freaky Trigger is all about communication, but some art need only communicate something to its artist. (This picture of course communicates to me too, and here I am communicating to you, so our ‘manifesto’ has not been entirely betrayed!).
So anyway, if there is something that you love, have a go. Draw or paint it, or sculpt it, or take a picture of it – or dance about it or sing about it or even write about it. For God’s sake don’t share what you do with the world if you don’t want to, and think twice even if you do, destroy it at once by all means or put it somewhere private – but it’s worth trying. Isabel did and because she did we have something that’s enduring and special to us.
(Another thing: all you cunts who gasp and crow over ‘outsider art’ or ‘naïve art’ or ‘kitsch’ or ‘trash’ art – that stuff is by people who are just trying to capture something important to them, it may be a little odd or a bit crap but it deserves more respect than you with your laughable madness fetishes give it. And if our painting ever ends up in some charity shop being pointed at by some sniggering hipster bastard I swear I will return from my grave and with ghostly fingers pull his guts out through his arsehole.)