Naked.

Here's some fun: A guy that makes paintings from stranger's abandoned photos, purchased from the developer.

I feel ambivalent about this. On the one hand: if the people who took the pictures cared very much about them, perhaps they should have picked them up from the developer instead of leaving them on the racks for any old Tom, Dick or Tarquin to pick up. On the other: well-to-do educated guy rips off scraps of the little people's lives, taking them for profit and glory.

Nothing new there, I s'pose.

Lush and thick with impasto and containing within their ranks an image of a fat tourist, they (do not look like but) made me think of Jenny Saville. This is from back when I made one of my spasmodic attempts to get an art A-level. I remember posters from "Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face)"--you know, the one the Manics used for the cover of The Holy Bible--were put up in the halls outside the classroom. I remember marvelling at them, loving them, loving this rejection, this still rebellion. I remember these two girls off my course laughing at them with their sleeves in their painted mouths--you know how teenage girls laugh--tittering because hey, look, a fat girl, naked. God, if you looked like that you wouldn't pose for a painting, would you? Teeheeheeheehee.

I remember how badly I wanted to get a bunch of centrefolds, the most banal, vacuous airbrushed smut I could find, sneak round while there were no other people there and staple them over the paintings. Watch the laughing girls freak out. Well, this is what you wanted, isn't it? This is beauty, this is the sort of person who's supposed to get naked, right?

Sometimes I wish I'd been the kind of person who did that kind of thing. Sometimes I hate that I'm the kind of person who'd think of it.

Anyway.

Something I like: Taking objects that are similar and lining them up in rows. I like doing that. I do it with coins and things. I used to like boxes of decorated noteletts or greetings cards, the ones where all the pictures are identical. It satisfies me in a basic kind of way. It's the kind of behaviour I try to supress, because it's unintelligible to most people and witnessing unitelligible behaviour in others is disturbing. I may have finally found a sneaky way to engage in it...and even get paid. Woohoo!