Helston We Have A Problem by Dan Bassett
Helston We Have A Problem by Dan Bassett
Where to start… maybe a gameshow intro: Hi, I’m Dan, I’m 38 (not sure how I’m so old) I’m a security specialist and a firefighter. I’m married with two kids.
To talk honestly about myself and my work I had a look through my recent stuff for recurring themes. In doing so it is obvious to me that (my) state of mind is a huge part of the process and often the core of a piece. Picasso said “Painting is just another way of keeping a diary”. I know many people find writing a journal/diary to be a very helpful tool. I certainly find the creative process to be extremely cathartic at best and damned frustrating on occasion.
With regards to Monsieur Picasso’s words, I wholeheartedly agree, although by using imagery I’m allowed some license to exaggerate, the freedom of talking figuratively and the margins offered by interpretation. How many times have you heard “Art is subjective”, of course this is true, but it’s also the world’s greatest bullshit forcefield. You don’t like my art? No problem, art is subjective. You don’t like reading this? Same, probably. Who cares.
I first started using the spaceman a couple of years back. The spaceman is such a powerful metaphor. For me it represents adventure, bravery, independence as well as loneliness, longing and dependence. Yes I know I’ve listed dependence & independence but that’s part of it. For me, very little in life is binary. I enjoy reading eastern philosophy and of The Tao. Yin & Yang is such a cliched thing but clichés are usually true and truly global, not I think, because they have been passed around the world but because fundamental truths are not exclusive of language and nationality. Yin and Yang shows us that there is good, and there is bad. There is bad in the good and good in the bad. And all of it together is life. Nothing is absolute.
‘Now’. I use it as a mantra, because I need it, not as a badge of supposed enlightenment but more the opposite. I need reminding not to be distracted by bullshit like social media. How much better is (insert activity) when you put your phone down for an hour without checking it rather than getting tractor-beamed into the digital heroin of the screen every two minutes? (this does not include Love Island. Never EVER be present during Love Island).
For me at least Mental health seemed to be a completely alien subject for the first 30 years of my life or so. Not because everything had always been rosy, but because I just cracked on without being too introspective and without stopping wherever possible. I didn’t acknowledge my weaknesses or fuck ups unless they were unavoidable. I’m not sure if painting has made me introspective or if I started painting in order to express the results of my introspective rumblings but I would have thought it the latter. Maybe that’s my ego but either way introspection and self expression have been somewhat of a revelation, and certainly more productive than my previous preference for 400 word facebook comments or spoof adverts in the local rag. So for now it’s all about spacemen but maybe that will change, and obviously, it’s never been about spacemen really at all.
Words by Dan Bassett
