It's been a while since I've written anything else than the very fine escalation posts that were rarely scattered through all summer long. Although if you follow me closely on twitter, you must have noticed the large number of new items appearing in my very own brand new cargoh store. And you might have read the product descriptions I've written for every each one of these lovely slap packs, but I still think I owe you a bit more of an insight in making all of them.
First off, the Rorschach-like adaptation of human growth.
I had told many people about the idea that was constantly getting back to me on almost hourly basis. Human growth was not a new theme to be brought into blippy's world, but the dissection of this process was. As usual, I was searching for a very short, strong character or symbol to illustrate this matter. But at this point I had no idea what was I even searching for. Any searches of the word or the symbolization returned progress as economical ladders or people climbing ladders to some sort of money grubbing success. That was definitely not what I had intended to say with the sticker. At one point I considered bringing in the school knowledge and portray the process as a mathematical progression with no end, but that would chop down the auditorium to people who have pleasure in re-reading their old mathbooks. At one point I got the idea down on paper. In words it would be that "Human growth is an infinite progression." Now I just had to return to the visualization for the second time. The huge lonely oak that toppled just outside my fifth floor window snapped right into my daydream-like idea process with a single thought. A tree. A branch that always keeps reaching for the skies, never stopping, never judging the natural process of growth. And that was it. Everything that we do, every single thing we start every day is completely unique and new to us. Even when regressing, it is still a part of the progress. It is all part of the sophistication of the human mind and body, reaching into infinity. And so the black point in the centre of the page spread out to the borders and grew into the one and only Branching you now know.
Our very own wheatpasting dream put down on a bit different kind of sticky paper.
Just a year ago, as we were marching through the nightly streets of Riga, the fact that depth lies within the viewer became known to a lot of people. Mostly though, they were the street cleaners that had torn off almost all of the thin paper scrolls of the many city walls. Now, a complete four seasons later, I was certain to bring it to you in a 105X70 millimetre format. A bit different than almost all of the stickers that I had produced, I already had the idea and the text I wanted to put on it. And frankly, the visualization came almost as easily. For many weeks, the desktop background for my personal computer had remained the same image of a blue-ish background with a graphical sketch of a box with four plates attached to it. The main reason why I had come to love the wallpaper was that I had learned to quickly change the focus of my eyes to see both ways of the optical illusion. And as the image was perfectly suited for the idea I was set with, I constructed a digi-mockup. Just putting out an optical illusion was too much of a wild card for me, so I wrote some text that I later skewed and resulted in the sticker that has since become one of my favourites.
Empty set or the glorification of the ideals.
A late night idea building session that had already produced the depth sticker was refusing to finish itself. Our ideals set in a different perspective resulted in emptiness. A complete sense of nothingness that turned out being a lovely minimalistic sticker that closely resembled the very old days of [bli:p]'s. Minimalism has always been more or less about the bravery of the artist and the vision he has put into the idea. I've talked about the importance and depth of this genre for many years now and it was time to bring it back a bit as clean as ever. It is hard to think of anything as clean as a white sheet of paper. That sense of cleanliness and complete purity of thought and space is rare in this world. But even that is very far from being what is considered as emptiness in this world. An unimaginable state of purity, the feeling that cannot even be described as white or black, the feeling of no colour, materiality or thought of the idea itself. The only true ideal of the modern over-sophisticated world. So I went straight for reaching back to our roots. The idea was that there are two ideals, a material equinox where the body has made or received as much as it could have and the moral state of complete emptiness in which the mind and the body has been completely freed of any of the before mentioned opposite. And more or less mathematically, I drew the sketch that seemed like a match made in heaven with my wonderful tagname. Empty set.
The canvas just much smaller.
One day I just gazed upon the finished ideas I had made and decided not to pitch for anything new this time, but refurbish the old, great ones I had already produced in different mediums. There it was - Free ad space. As forgotten as ever, this once leader of [bli:p]'s ideas was never transformed into anything else. Obviously, there was something to be done about it, so without further messing around, I create FAS, the slap version.
Human hands?
The newest of our fine wonders around our minds, the HoP sticker was one of the hardest I had to work on. It all started just a few days back, when I misclicked my skype chat history screen and instantly ended up in this year's May when I was talking to one of my mates on daily basis. Back then we had great plans for this summer that we had planned out in great detail involving skateboarding, pasting street art, making explosives for the heck of it and many other really fun things. In retrospect, with the summer almost passed away, a lot of those things fell through. And as sad as that is, this gave me an idea. A human mind is usually portrayed in a pursuit of happiness. As with every one us, some sort of ideal or dream is always there to be achieved, never leaving the mind in rest without any ambitions for a better life. And while many blindly follow what they seem to want, the truth is that our only true need is the chase. Disguised as a survival mechanism or the natural need for the infinite growth, our happiness may as well lay within the dream of the future that has reached certainty.
Remastered economy.
I was never quite happy with the way econ turned out. At that time I was calculating a weird formula for the way to determine how large the frame should be in comparison with the size of the artwork itself. Using that formula I determined the old looks of economical creativity which seemed very nice at the time. The opinion changed after a few weeks later, when something just seemed wrong with it all. But, as always - laziness took it all over and I never reconstructed it. Mainly because I didn't know what to reconstruct in the first place. Now, many months after the creation of one of the first blippy's stickers out there, I sat down and found the vectorial graphics of the old piece. It wasn't long until there was a completely new EC available for your purchasing in the cargoh store.
Dictionary work.
An acrostic was my secret dream from the beginnings of this project. Even before summer started, back when it was really cold outside, I had fitted a large poster of plain paper for me to write my thoughts down every now and then. The paper grew in tint every day, resulting in most of the pieces you can see from [bli:p], one of them being this magical weapon of the witty. One night I sat down, opened a dictionary and just made it. I didn't have any secret intentions, I didn't even have a certain idea I wanted to put out, it just put itself on the paper placard and was forgotten for many months. But then, just a few months back my cousin came to my place and upon seeing all the stuff I had put on my wall said that I should really do something with that piece. Frankly, I did. Being one of the closest new things I've made to [bli:p]'s original beginnings, the read-only piece of SARCASM turned out to be nicer than I had expected.
Framing the innocent.
A wildly interpretable art piece that was one of the first new things to be put out in the cargoh store. Easy, light and minimalist. The perfect recipe for a classic blip-piece. The borders have been discussed for many, many times here, but this time it was just one of the facets that can be taken away from this piece. Here's why. It's a way of pushing away the frame to fight the borderlines of our lives, a fight for growth and possibility. A way of pushing away the frame for the art to escape out in the world, a way of understanding what it means to you and the world. A way of thinking outside the box, or frame in this case. The depth lies within you. Take, interpret, understand.
My absolute favourite.
More than a year back, in the cold light of the night, I sat down with my notebook to play with any idea I could get. Time passed and that was exactly what I needed. I spent a few hours moulding the sentence and a year frequently bringing it all up in my brain and thinking it all around. The sentence survived the changes of this art persona's works, the symbolizations came in, drasticly shaping the art more visual than ever. Back in the days I would easily put out the rather long sentence out without any doubt at all, but the problem was even then I just didn't feel like the words would be it. It was a bit too long, too cloggy to suit itself without any visual interpretation. And finally this summer I opened my old notebook and found it. It clicked and I understood how I would create the best thing I've ever made in my career. The blocky watch that was a pain in the arse to make, turned out to be perfect for the text I had prepared. What better than an image or a symbol that vaguely, but understandably points a thought towards it's intended meaning. The sentence that could be understood in any way, now gained a sensible, unobtrusive meaning that still left a bit of space for interpretation. And I love it as a child of my own.
There. That's all. Cheers.
