Fradga

Ok. So this is it. Very short update. Working, working working. Art school ends in a month. There are exhibitions for all our work in various places and I have sold paintings in the last month with is wonderful. And very sad. I hope they take good care of my little babies. I have done some work for the exhibitions which means less time for painting and deviant art but I have had some boosts of creativity as well. My computer broke down three weeks ago and I subside without it somehow. 

I do have an apartment in reasonable commuting distance to a major city but no job. I refuse to think about it now Carpe diem.

I spent approximately one and a half week in October on a painting of Ragnarök, the revolution of worlds in North mythology. I had the war in Syria in my mind the entire time. The painting was carried out rather poorly. The lower third of it was not planned or sketched out when I started and as always with oil painting, plans are nothing but planning is everything.  Somehow it became a beautiful painting regardless with a dazzling exuberance of colors. I would have loved to show it to you all but I fear it is quite impossible. The painting is in red and ultra-marine. It looks like the work of a ten year old when it goes through the camera and into the laptop. I will try and soften the heart of the scanner to maybe let it get through unscathed but I am not optimistic. Maybe it was not meant to be seen on screen. 

My circadian rhythm is becoming a bit bizarre again. I spent one week about a moth again rotation day and night, working from afternoon to four in the morning. I learned a lot about oil painting although the actual painting I worked on will be scrapped or at least forever hidden from the public eye. The handcraft was good enough; the idea just wasn’t good enough to carry itself.

Buying new brushes has changed my life

I recently found out that Norman Rockwell was probably gay                                                                                                                                                   

My hands are drying again. My left palm hurts and crackles. Not nice. 

I have deliberately avoided the news recently. It is because of the storm in the Philippines. I don’t want to see news photos or read about it. I don’t need it. I understand it looks like hell over there. I understand they need money. Just send me a bloody phone number so I can text message a hundred crowns or something like that to Doctors without Borders and be fine with that. (I am a poor student and I can’t really give away that much of money that is not mine). But no pictures or graphic descriptions, please. No smashed or drowned kids. No stories about families instantly buried in rapid mud slides. No amputees or cholera epidemics, please. I have become sensitive as I grow older. Take my money; just don’t rub my face in endless, unnecessary suffering.  I have always tried to be a good person and my contribution to the greenhouse effect is probably low in comparison to most of my countrymen. So please, spare me the details.

I am so sad right now.

I question my entire stay in art school. I have let go of so many restrains here, far away from nay normal life. I have had tantrums a few times, maybe four or so and yelled at people who behaved like assholes. I feel like nothing matters out here. I love the people I love and the rest can go to Hell. I do not really trust anyone because I know I have behaved badly and I constantly expect them to hold a grudge against me or be dishonest not to provoke me.
If one of the teachers had taken me aside after the first time this happened and told me, firmly and decisively that my behavior was unacceptable and that I must never do it again, then I would probably have obeyed them. I would have forced myself to control my temper.

But they don't.

I can't really understand that.

I have developed what people call self confidence during these last years. All during my school years, the sanctimony of self confidence was preached to us. It was supposed to solve every problem we could possibly have and would save us from mental illness etc. Most angst and such  among young people is of course caused by unemployment but since no one could or wanted to do anything about real problems they wanted to believe that it was our stature and "belief in ourselves" and such quackery that was the essential to our survival, so that was what we were told.

Of course I myself had loads of self confidence. I was confident in myself as competent and capable of a lot of things but this is not about what one actually is but about what one looks like to others. And to other human beings I radiated insecurity. People treated me like shit, looked at me with semi-open contempt when I talked to them or talked to me as if I was a stupid kid.

I fall back into some variant of this behavior when I am sad and stressed. I then appear repulsive to other people. I certainly do not do it on purpose, but the sadder and more stressed out I am, the more likely it is that I get into these bizarre situations when people start telling me that I am rude and obnoxious.  I have no idea why this is or exactly what I do that is so repulsive to them but I sure as hell know one thing;

People never treat me with disrespect when I am angry

Because then I show strength and so called "self confidence" outwards. I have done that a lot lately and I am getting good at it. When I do that, everyone is polite. They butter up for me, smile extra long and are extra nice.

Self confidence is complete mumbo jumbo. When I was younger, what I did was that I tried to be nice by showing submissiveness. Now I show if not dominance then at least no such thing as submissiveness, because I do not bother trying to be a nice person any more. And people like me better now, even in the long term, I can tell you.

Dogs do not bite their pack members when that other dog shows subservience. Humans however, love to do just that. Dogs are better than people, if I am allowed to generalize quite a bit.

It makes me sad that I need restraint not to behave like an animal.

It makes me sad that people are such animals.

It makes me sad that I am so strange no one knows what to do with me.

I am a sad sack

I had a job this summer. I worked in a convenience store for a camping site. I only worked for five weeks and it was an amazingly boring job but it felt great. I made a little money and I had to pretend to be a nice person again. It was soothing. Plus, I gained a lot of muscles for the 20 km I had to bicycle to get to and from work every working day.

My favorite teacher on the art school (I have never yelled at him or even at anyone else when he is present) does not like my paintings. He is all into idea based, conceptual art. It finally became clear to me when he asked me straight out if I could appreciate such art and I had to admit it wasn't really my thing. When he has been in my studio for the official weekly "studio talk" (supervision to make sure we actually work and don't just sit around drinking red wine and smoking pot all day) he speaks very little. He has told me he thinks I have done some great stuff during classes when we had special tasks, performance and such. But in my studio he is just quiet. I thought it was his personality. And then, the last time he was around, I showed him all my landscape sketches, little pencil studies of rocks, mountains and trees and so on. No finished art works. And all of a sudden, he started talking. He had loads to say about those sketches. They were creepy and vicious in a subtle way, he said.

So, what I am trying to say is; I am developing into a pretty nasty person out here, one of the few teachers whose opinion I care about probably thinks my art sucks, not because I have no talent but because my choice of medium does not appeal to him. My art is not in contact with the modern art scene. At all. Plus he thinks I am so creepy that even my paintings of fucking Swedish summer landscapes creeps him out.

That is sad in a funny way.

The entire art tradition that I and many others around here come from ceases to exist as soon as one steps into an art school. It is not part of the Art Scene and therefore it is uninteresting. This becomes a bit strange when some teachers try to compare your shit with someone you have never heard of but who is, indeed a part of the mentioned art scene and then claim that there are obvious similarities.

Some people I know say time and time again they want to come and visit me out here, some ask for it repeatedly. Yet, their notoriously lousy planning always makes them call their visits off in the last second. Seriously guys, come on and get your asses out here before it gets so dark you won't be able to see the pretty scenery.  

I am sad without you.

My study of the manosphere and redpill bloggers has become a bit of an obsession lately. Manboobz.com is of course responsible for the sounder features of the obsession, skimming the hilarious cream off the brew of Anglophone misogyny, rippling in the sewers of the internet. First I wanted to mock these people, then the pattern of massive tragedy of their lives and constitutions emerged. Especially one whose name I will not reveal, because he is intelligent and talented which is to say the least unusual for such people. He is incapable of most stable human relationships and is addicted to everything under the sun. Like all intelligent addicts, he knows exactly what he is doing but he is incapable of stopping himself from doing it. He writes like an angel about how he has mechanized his habitual internet dating until it resembles his job as a phone salesman. Beautiful words by a man who makes everything that could be beautiful around him as ugly as possible.

So sad. I have to stop reading that sadness.

That is why I want you guys mentioned above to come and visit me. I want to hold you and remind myself that I am capable of love and be a little less sad.
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As you might have noticed (or not) I have not updated that much lately. I am trying out a lot of new stuff, new mediums and all does not result in finished product suitable for uploading. Have patience and hopefully there will be more engagement on this page in a foreseeable future. To followers, commentators and other people showing appreciation of my art: I love you. You make me want to keep struggling. I hope you have a wonderful fall with crisp blue sky and autumn leafs in yellow and red and all that. (Or other regional varieties of a wonderful fall, for those who might live in warmer climates whose seasons I am not entirely familiar with.)

Summer is warm at the coast. I wake up when the sun bakes me in my bedroom early every morning. It enforces activity. Being indoors is simply impossible.  I have a job for the first time in years. Only for a month but money is money. I have a paradise to be in during daytime. I draw landscapes, rocks and plants.

I do not really have any finished paintings to contribute with and will probably not have so during the following month. This means the page won't update very often during until school starts again in September but who knows? Keep your eyes open.  

I have learned several different techniques lately, copper prints for example, delightful. I have also animated a film of about ten seconds together with my beloved colleagues. I have also tried to read The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. She was fun for about five pages, then her style of writing became like eating a gallon of oatmeal with no salt in it. I doubt I will finish that book, after all, what she wanted to say with it has been cleared out allready in the first chapter so i have a hard time seeing how it would be worth the effort to carve my way through all of it. A neo liberal obsessed with Stalinist architecture, have you heared anything like it? I wonder what she would have though of Rågsved. For all of you to whom Rågsved means nothing, I can enlighten you that it is a working class suburb to Stockholm, famous for being a misscarriage of modernist architecture and less than well though through housing projects undertaken by the Swedish Labour party. I bet you Ayn Rand would have loved a tour through Rågsved if one had just avoided to tell her about the context of this magnificently ugly, dark heap of dirty concrete and filthy bricks.    

I am obsessed. I do not tell anyone about it. I put no words on it nor do I let its sick nature worry me. I just lie in the sun, letting it flow through my mind and my body. Beautiful, beautiful sickness.

Things are simpler, more childish out here in the middle of nowhere. There are less intellectual and sociocultural challenges here. It feels easy to let go, sliding into a toy world of superstitions, fairy tales and silliness. I have to hold on not to slide so far I can't reach up into reality again although I am having a blast down here.Paradoxically I feel like I was right in August 2012- I have finally found people who are as close to peers, a place to belong, as I will ever come. And that is, I have found people with whom I have something to talk about. I do not think I will be able to grasp the magnitude of that until I lose it. And I do not want to lose it.

I love you guys.