The Fine Art and Design Blog of Darren Daz Cox

I remember reading a sci-fi story in my scandalous youth about how humans were offered a trade of advanced knowledge for something the aliens didn’t have and the aliens finally accepted the idea of paint from us. I think that is so cool, after all, if you had the technology to make things non-corrodible and had holographic 3D artwork etc you could totally miss out on (or forget) the magic of paint!

~*gold starfish and box and ceramic mutant made in 1984 by Darren Daz Cox*~
Trust me, if you are feeling bored, depressed or have writer block, try this, buy a can of gold spray paint, get some rocks off the ground, or those old seashells laying around, and spray them (outside! safety first!!). Spray paint dries very quickly! Then gather up your handful of treasure and gloat! Gold makes you feel better, it just does, and it doesn’t have to cost you a lot of money. There is something magical about making something old and ‘worthless’ look shiny and precious, it will make you happy!
~*The Tempest - acrylic and tinted glue over an old framed print by Darren Daz Cox plus gold painted figures made by an artisan lost to history but still appreciated!*~

Gold paint unites all things it touches, from the humblest plastic toy and rusty Zippo case to archaeological artifacts that The Antiques Roadshow obliges us to keep in their ‘natural state’ if only for the sake of monetary compensation.

These clay figures, above, had been collected by my step-dad and passed on to me. They had spent decades in a satin-padded glass-covered display-box, a coffin, and while they might have some historical significance to a particular scholar, they are now painted gold. When you think about what they represent, a proud family, it seems to be a nice tribute to the artist because I’m guessing that had he owned a 7 dollar can of quality gold spray paint he would have sprayed them too, rather than to have them remain scorched from the fire.

Oh I know how ‘authentic’ works but really, we spoiled modern world people totally romanticize the external parts of primitive living. What primitive cultures have that we can’t exploit we are generally taught is merely base superstition, yet the chances are you’ve had some pretty deep thoughts and even profound experiences while sitting around a campfire under the stars and heck, the Dogone tribe in Mali, West Africa, has more astronomical knowledge than 99.99% of our college graduates and they don’t even have electricity or a written language ha!
~**~

The title of this post comes from a comment by noted art therapist Liz Beck who suggested that kids tend to give up on art at this age due to "the realization that there are better artists in your class than you, so why bother?"

I remember that point in my life, pre-pubescent, aware of girls but not feeling any pressure to chase after them, taking my family situation for granted, starting to really appreciate music and fiercely wanting to be a good artist. but no thanks to the school system that tried to tell me I was of average ability. My best friend was Richard Winton and he tended to draw vehicles and the ‘cross section of a vehicle or head-quarters building with bonus action’ genre which is similar to an opened up doll house, but obviously a lot cooler.

Richard’s brother, Edward aka Wod, was an artist too, in fact he was the best artist I had ever seen, which is saying alot because I had been to Florence Italy and read Jack Kirby/Stan Lee comic books! Wod had a keen imagination as well as a confident art style. Have you drawn comic books with a ballpoint pen? You don’t make mistakes!

It wasn’t a competition, not like school where they would give you a C for your best effort, we just accepted that Wod was the ‘best’ as we would whomever was the best at sports. Me, Rich, Wod, my sister Sonja and our friend Mark Elliot all collaborated on the first of a series of spontanious sci-fi graphic novels that Me and Wod continued. War was the basic theme,  our generation had grandparents who had served and tv glorified WWII as it glossed over the aftermath of Vietnam.

I remember what we drew, it was pretty horrifying if you didn’t know how utterly innocent we actually were. Bullets flying everywhere, heads exploding, severed limbs, corpses, various stages of torture and the loss of sanity.  Years later I was the main artist for my high school newspaper and somehow managed to have a full page sci-fi comic with a similar anti-social theme. 

I was thrown off the paper by religious fanatics pressuring the school to do so after they noticed ‘eata featus week’ wriiten on the t-shirt of a character in my comic. The gore and smoking and alcohol drinking characters somehow went unnoticed! Ha! I was a punk kid but the editor should have been fired not me, I’m a rock star! Deal with my glorious eccentricities! ~Thanks to Nicola Aaron for being as cool now as she was then!~

There’s a lesson to be learned here, namely that no one bothered to explain to me why what I did had offended people, they simply kicked me off and that was it, nice and clean. That didn’t stop me from drawing but eventually I outgrew drawing violence as a source of pleasure.

What strikes me most about the suggestion that kids give up on art around age 11 is that,  to me that was the pivital moment in my life, and now some 30 years after that point I can’t think of anything more important to my ongoing happiness than sticking with art.

Art therapist Elizabeth Beck was explaining to me how one of the tools that she uses to help her patients is a theory of creative and mental growth created by Lowenfeld & Brittain (1987).(she wrote) What this theory postulates is that all children go through specific cognitive developmental levels that can deduced by the stage they are in artistically. There are 6 developmental levels:

1. The scribble stage (age 2-4)
2. The preschematic stage (age 4-7)
3. The schematic stage (age 7-9)
4. The gang stage (age 9-12)
5. The pseudo-naturalistic stage (age 12-14)
6. The period of decision (14- )

above "The decaying theatre" (working) and below "The red room" also in progress!

I wrote this on the fledgling Flickr group called ART, THERAPY, PSYCHOANALISYS AND AESTHETICS

I think the very process of creating something is healthy. The connection of your mind directing your hands to make something, anything, allows your subconcious an outlet (other than just dreams!).

You can perhaps see an example in graphitti, that is often portrayed as just vandalism, gang tags or a result of ‘frustration’ or hopelessness etc. I’m not necessarily talking about the brilliant stuff, the artists who have the bravery to go large on trains and walls but the other stuff too. The signatures on mailboxes, the names carved in rocks and trees -the things you might have done when you were young and perhaps ‘grew out of’.

The idea of you changing your world, adding organic lines to ‘boring’ spaces and often spontaniously using creativity where society frowns upon it is healthy in my opinion, it shows you in a small way that things can change and that you are an agent of change and that is an empowering feeling.