DECAY

I think that I might be becoming rather obsessed with decay, although it's equally easy for me to believe that I always have been.

My sketch books might never have been the most productive aspect of my own personal artistic history, but flaking rust and  paint and faded signage and ripped wallpaper and ruins have become a large part of the subject matter whenever I've picked up a pencil and weilded it in my own inept and half-hearted manner.

Many, many years ago there was a painter whose name I can no longer remember who created massive paintings of rusting plate steel and pieces of ships which is just about the only "modern art" which I can recall ever being impressed by in an era where a shoddily knocked together piece of carpentry can claim to be a masterpiece despite the lack of craftsmanship being displayed by the - presumably ironic - ineptitude being demonstrated by its creator.

Certainly since I've taken to picking up a camera more regularly in this simpler, more digital era, quite a large number of the many pointless and seldom-viewed pictures clogging up the various storage options that I possess have been of rusty old gates and fences, and buildings in various stages of advanced decay, not entirely unlike where I happen to live, he added with a slight melancholy air.

You see, the thing about decay is that it's all so damned photogenic.

You can look at a shiny new building and be awe-struck by the clean lines and the soaring glass panels, but buildings don't really become all that interesting to me until they've weathered a little and the tarnishing and the scratches and the crumbling has begun.

Before that they're just retouched images of corporate acquisitional and aspirational madness, or sales aids for estate agents and are as bland and soulless as can possibly be imagined, although I hesitate to associate such ideas with "imagination" in its truest form.

It's the same with these "show homes" or "lifestyle" magazines. I don't know what kind of shallow witted morons they believe they're communicating with, but those immaculate spartan interiors say nothing to me of real life and the chaos of the actual, genuine, day-to-day lives of anyone I would want to know.

I know that we live in a culture where we obsess about flawlessness and perfection and we airbrush the already hyper-advantaged until they resemble robots, a phenomenon which then gives the rest of us almost impossible benchmarks to compare our own potato-like countenances against, but there's actually very little of interest to me in that sort of face.

It's the lines and the shadows and the rust and the weathering which tell a story and remind us all that life is something which needs to be lived and that decay and eventual collapse is something which we all share, now matter how little we like to think about it.

Perhaps my unhealthy obsession with decay comes from my own life. I've had to sit by and watch the decay in others this year, whilst becoming increasingly aware - not least in the mirror - of my own crumbling mortality. I see people battling pointlessly against the inevitable in the apparently genuine belief that they're going to live forever and  not be subjected to times crucible like everyone else.