Cosmopolitan Interview Continued - the open Lines

Now you used definite shapes or completely closed shapes most of the times but there were time you used open lines....why?
Very good question, the whole shapes represents individual...individual with roots elsewhere who having detached themselves from those roots and coming to the city began attaching themselves to the sub-culture of the cosmopolitan life. This is why the shapes overlaps in some placing in varying degrees.....

                                                  cosmopolitan



But the open lines represents individuals who are seeming rootless. That is they had no previous roots as it were..

Are you saying such people really exists...born without roots?
Speaking abstractly..yes. There are people who will just tell you that they are from the very cosmopolitan city that everybody seems to have found there way to and this people when you look at them are not really traditionally from that city. But they have become so dis-entangled from the past and all there previous roots and at the same time become so entangled in that city life that they have become the true indigenous of that city. They are the open lines....the true cosmopolitan and people whom the rest are turning into even subconsciously. And because they are so open they are the ones who represent the adhesive factor that binds all the various peoples and differences together. They have access limited by the limitations of the individuals they interact with and not by anything that has to do with them. They are the ones that are the most opened minded, the ones that show consummate intelligence in their ability to entertain every other notion, culture or belief without necessarily taken to any but tolerating all.

So these open lines represents the adhesive that glues cosmopolitanism together...they are not much because unlike the other shapes it's as if you can count them...
Very true and they don't need to be that much because in reality they are not that much especially when you compare them with the other types of individualities that are represented in a cosmopolitan culture. Like i said before they are what others are sub-consciously aspiring to be as they get more and more into the city life.

 Thank you.
You are welcome.

The Cosmopolitan Interview

Your art work for this week is rather interesting....i read your article and what i would like us to start with is why you chose the name cosmopolitan for this work.
I was inspired really and the name invokes an aspect of city life that i didn't really highlight in my other art work of the same title i.e. city life.
And what other aspect is that?
City Life talked about how i city struggles against staying alive especially as it grows and all the vices of growth begins to set it. It is more or less an artwork depicting a loosing battle with the dirt and all show casing gradual systemic failure. But Cosmopolitan looks at the vibrant side of city life as it has to do with the mixing of peoples and cultures and development causes more people to troop in, dis-entangling and dis-engaging themselves from where they were coming from and integrating and engaging with the new environment they have adopted.
So while one talks about death as it were the other talks about life...like opposites...right?
Exactly.
But why didn't you depict both on the same artwork?
Good question, i believe the themes of death and life are just too massive to use one canvass or artwork to deal with. Again, since the themes have to do with the city, i felt as cities are a product of expansion and contraction that different artworks for both aspects is justified.
You still stuck to your primary colors...
In more ways than one.
The shapes didn't follow the traditional....
True but it had some traditional...in fact more of the traditional squares and all but it then included oblong curvatures and this was 'deliberate' because Cities normally develop from single homogeneous to multi-ethnic and then mixed cultures as the go along the cosmopolitan path.

Cosmopolitan (article)

Defining the word cosmopolitan from the artistic point of view could be a handful. This is my own attempt.
We already know that the world is getting more cosmopolitan by the day especially as the reality of the term global village comes to bear on us.
Cities are striving to be more cosmopolitan as they add on in years and as they expand. Now not every city is cosmopolitan but as they expand and people keep on trooping in from the nooks and crannies....they move towards cosmopolitanism.
That is the underlying current that defines the cosmopolitan city i.e. people. And it is not just people but a melting pot of diverseness. The more diverse they are, the more cosmopolitan that city tends to be.

                                                       cosmopolitan
                                                    
And looking at the art-work, cosmopolitanism is an embedding of two "extensialisms". The first extension we are going to call dis-engagement and the second we are going to call engagement.
These two distinct functions has to take place before cosmopolitanism within a city can be achieved. This is simply because cities are made up of individual entities. But these entities usually have roots outside of the city. So they first of all have to dis-engage from those roots before they can now engage into the new environment and culture of city life. The greater the degree of dis-engagement, the greater the degree of engagement. The two must work in pari pasu (sorry i got carried away...hand in hand).
The inter-play of  dis-engagement and engagement and it building up till it reaches a critical mass that births cosmopolitan cities.
An interesting point of note here is that the more cosmopolitan  a city become the less xenophobic that city (i.e. as a single organism) becomes. This is why the art work is an interplay of colors representing a mixture of various individualities within the context of their native roots and them letting go of issues that ties them down to those roots as the move on to fully engage in true cosmopolitanism.

NB There is still much to be said about this...may be we might just extend to next week.

The interview continues

City-life


How long have you being into this art form?
for as long as have stayed in front of the computer willing myself to work. It was borne out of escapism really. But at some point it became a hobby and a rather enjoyable one i must say.

Do you do abstracts as well?
They are mostly absentminded gibbirish. Paint (the program) doesn't really hold up well as a pencil or brush....the mouse is not that steady and at times I've used my finger tips on the laptop. So it is mainly abstract.

How large is your collection now?
it is increasing by the week and as long as i have the drive for this blog I'll continue to publish them through it.

the interview might end here.