My Art - a tentative and probably temporary attempt at an explanation and justification

I like to do certain things that some folk would consider art, others pretentious, others crap.

They tend to be associated with three recurring elements: unfinished or seemingly rough work; the idea of fading away, decay, including shadows and reflections; and the idea of automatic creation, fast, aimless.

I have no idea where the attraction in these things came from. But right now, typing this on my laptop in my wee office at home the sun is coming through the window and casting shadows of the vine leaves and branches that have grown up and over the window there. As the sun's light diminishes with a cloud in its way, the sharp, quite focussed shapes of the leaves and branches turn into a foggy blur, and when the clouds are thick, they disappear.

I like the quite focussed shadows, not totally sharp and distinctive, enough vagueness about them to be interesting to me. And I like the much blobbier ones when the lighter cloud intervenes. In addition I like to observe the process of change from one aspect to the others and the return to the original. I don't know why.

That's where the opinions come in from others.

Artistic. Interesting. Really like that.

Very arty-farty. God-awful pretentious. I'll never understand why you can call that art.

Crap. Fucking waste of space. A con.

I'm now comfortable enough within my skin about all the things I do, and why I do them, that opinion - praise or criticism, rejection or complete unawareness, is all OK ie, indifferent, to me.

I could theorise or play amateur psychologist to try to explain my work. There are obvious things. Unfinished work could symbolise the infinite cycle of change that is life or the universe. Fadings surely represent death, old age, dying, maybe sickness, which in turn could be a political metaphor for social sickness. Reflections could be another metaphor, symbolic of a mirror-image way of seeing things, parallel lives, parallel universes, multiverses. And the automatic art could be indicative of a view that sees all life as art, therefore anything, a brush stroke, a piece of wood cut in half, or as classically done, just stating that an object is art, as Duchamp did, anything therefore everything is art.

But in reality as far as I can see I just like these things and I like the process of "making" them.