The Berlin Wall

Much of yesterday was a tedious update of my website, listing the sculptures by year. Perhaps I should list the watercolours by year too (and even the digital art, though that's more difficult, as 90% of it is album cover art which is prone to updates for reasons of commercial utility). My website used to list work year-by-year when I first became an artist circa 2004. One advantage is that it provides a global over-look of time. It also creates lots of 'empty shelves' for future or current work, so it operates as an incentive.

I improvised some new music last night in the MODX, using some modified Yamaha DX7 sounds. Those FM sounds are wonderful, especially with audio effects like distortion, chorusing, reverb, as these can limit the harshness while retaining the expression.

Today has flown.

I've got so many painting ideas that I feel overwhelmed. I showed Deb my No. 3 Sketchbook and she remarked on this idea from about the second half of 2014:

So I decided to paint it today, as by chance I had a small square panel ready which was ideal. This is artwork code G1400, so is my 1400th catalogued artwork. You'll note how closely it matches the tiny idea sketch. Keeping the same feeling as that unconscious sketch is vital, so I try to duplicate it.

What next, what next.

Bickerton, van Gogh's Suicide, Cubism

A delivery of art to Bickerton yesterday, and a walk up the hills with beloved Deborah. Something of a rest day.

I hate rest days, but I'm increasingly wanting to rest. An artist must be working, charging forward, but I'm increasingly feeling exhausted, overworked and unrewarded. Do we deserve rewards from nature by performing our natural duty? I thought today that had Vincent van Gogh managed to continue working and living for another decade or two, that he would not have become as famous and renowned as he did. He may well, in art history, have ranked alongside Gauguin and Cezanne, but not have gone beyond those to attain his great fame. He may even have slipped into academic obscurity. His suicide was a crucial part of his art.

I updated my website yesterday, slight updates to the biographical notes in the painting galleries. This is a useful observation of the past, a reflection. I thought about what has changed in my outlook regarding art since my book 21st Century Surrealism. One aspect is a greater distance from surrealism, a label I've usually disliked but grudgingly become accustomed to as a short-cut explanation of the 'type of painting' I make. Perhaps I should stop using it entirely. Perhaps this label is not helpful because artists should be doing what is new, and I think I am and do. Another change is that the intellectual content of an artwork, the quantity of 'information', is less important to me now. Now, I want to create an overall feeling that can't be put into words.

I watched a sad BBC documentary about Picasso, sad because it was a poor and cheap programme from a broadcaster who used to be a paragon of British, if not western, culture. The BBCs best programmes are now on the radio.

The documentary made me think about cubism. There are many strange aspects about it. Firstly, that rather than represent an object or scene from multiple angles, cubist paintings often break up the scene into literal cubes, geometric shapes, harsh lines. The cubist offshoots, Orphism, Purism and the evolution into geometric abstraction continued that path, bypassing realism, detail, accurate depiction. Picasso himself avoided pure abstraction as 'decorative'; I agree, with the caveat that we can appreciate abstract art by seeing things in it - communications about the artist (abstract expressionism) or the world, by seeing things in the shapes (abstract... imagerism? pareidolia?).

In cubism, accurate depiction of a thing became increasingly ignored. Colours became brighter, surfaces flatter. In real life surfaces are not flat, and colours are realistic. Ultimately, cubism gradually became decorative, rather than representational. Picasso's unique mature style still represented things, but a lot of reality was removed. Crucially, I saw yesterday a new world of art that has not been touched, a whole branch of cubism which was bypassed and not explored.

Taking as a principle that a single perspective and viewpoint should be ignored, it seems quite possible to represent a scene without great abstraction of form or colour. Colours could always remain realistic, even shading. Shading and depicting depth in an image was quickly (if not instantly) removed from cubism, perhaps because the aim was to remove depth illusion, when it seems quite reasonable to include depth, and even perspective; merely not one. When we look at a painting, the very illusion of depth is attractive - it makes us believe in an image. The illusory impression of depth is appealing in a unique way.

So the lost cubism involves shading and the illusion of depth. It involves surface detail - another thing which was removed from cubist paintings without explanation. It also involves realistic colours, or at least colours which are not artificially gaudy or deliberately pretty. Yet it still represents a scene from multiple views at once, like a mental image of knowledge.

This, oddly, made me think of my Symphonic Paintings, and the Ekphrastic ones which played on a theme, like the Andy N paintings, like 'Twice As Hard' here, inspired by Caravaggio:

Here, Caravaggio's 2D image was the source, but it's still broken into parts, and retains the original shading and colouration; those things were not abstracted or enhanced.

I have a book '1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die'. It's wonderful in that it is ordered chronologically, and therefore offers an overview of all art. Until about 1800, paintings were as functional as passport photos, posters, propaganda. All of that art is irrelevant today except as cultural memory. 'Modern' art from 1850 to 1950 was experimental, but somewhat tedious, self questioning. Looking thorough the book, art only seemed to be interesting after about 1960.

I'm amazed by anyone who thinks that, in art, 'it has all be done'. The more I know, the more I can see how much I don't know, that my ignorance is vast. Blessed be my ignorance, for there lies the undiscovered country, the place of magic. Despite this I can see huge plains of types of art that are totally unexplored. Among them:

The Symphonic Painting which used visual themes, like Beethoven used musical themes. Monochrome painting which makes equal use of negative spaces; M.C. Escher and a few printers explore this sort of thing, very few painters. The form of realism-cubism explored here. So many hybrids! Abstraction fragmented with realism. Impressionism fragmented with realism. Social realism fragmented with fantasy...

There are so many virgin genres, new worlds in painting. The more you think you know, the more blind you become to the unknown. The role of the artist is to explore the unknown, in private and in public. One difference between art and science is that art does not necessarily have to, or perhaps even should not, conclude anything. Such conclusions are for observers, critics, aesthetes; the scientists of art.

Beatle City

A day of production work and recording for Beatle City.

Three Dreams, Transubstantiation Underpainting

A long sleep, from 10:30 to 08:00, filled with many dreams. In one, Sigourney Weaver cowered at the top of a large tower, thousands of feet above the landscape. The tower may have been the 'death' tower in the painting I painted yesterday. A small child was there too, perhaps Newt from Aliens, but she (or he) was barely visible, just a felt presence. The tower's summit was reached via a slide with many tiers, to make a wave-like slide. Death, the devil, or some evil figure appeared from the slide entrance, grabbed Sigourney by an arm and threw her down the slide quickly, she helplessly slid to her doom.

In another dream, myself and my brother were heading towards a huge shopping centre made in the shape of The Statue of Liberty, but with glass skin so that you could see the shoppers and shops which spiralled around its centre.

In the last dream of the night, BBC Radio presenter Steve Wright came to live at our house as gardener. The flowers in the back garden had recently been dug over by my mother. He enlarged this area and had decided to plant many plants there, in pots and wicker baskets, burying them to keep to nutrients there, notably recalcitrant to the way my mother would plant things. I helped him as we worked in the garage. After some work, we went inside for food, and some cream cakes were on offer which he enjoyed choosing from.

The day began slowly. I seem to feel tired and slow for some reason, though I've hardly exerted myself physically recently.

At 11:00, I started to paint the Transubstantiation painting, and it (the underpainting, at least) was complete by 14:30:

I rather enjoyed the process, made much easier by the colour studies. Looking at my work, at the themes, some are more common than others. First, the clash between emotions and rational thought, and secondly a critique of Christianity and Catholicism, although here the painting is more literal, even reverent. I'm reminded that my exposure to art and music as a child was in church, and that those images remain part of my visual landscape.

I learned that I've failed to get into the RWA exhibition this year, though one of my two works made it to the second round. This does not bother me; there is a lot of competition and judgements are prone to luck. Anything radical or interesting is more likely to fail than succeed; this is the way with all art critique, though it makes me sad that my work must remain unseen.

As I painted, I listened to a repeat of the first night of The Proms, and Clara Schumann's Piano Concerto. Clara remarked, upon visiting London: "It is the artists' own fault; they allow themselves to be treated as inferiors in English society, since nothing is too humiliating to be borne if only they make money." - how astute! Art in England is unique in its relationship to money. Artists have more respect in Europe and America, and can be rich or poor in either place (though, better to be rich in America). In England artists should only be poor, and never considered important. A rich artist is considered an unjust waste of money. This is an utterly backwards situation created by cultural memories of aristocratic hierarchy, where 'rich' and 'poor', that integer attached to our bank-accounts, are considered social classes. In England wealth is shameful, the pursuit of wealth is shameful, and hard work is shameful. Work is something worthy of servants and foreigners. This culture is why Britain is an unproductive country.

I remain tired and slow today. Perhaps this is a good week to work on John's music track, a pause and perhaps refresh from painting.

Scarecrow Underpainting, Palace For The King Of Forever

Completed the underpainting to the new scarecrow painting 'Nobody Cares About You, Really. Get Over It!'. I made a few changes in colour relative to the study, using more green and turquoise for the sky in particular.

I mixed too much paint for the sky, so improvised a new painting in those colours on a spare canvas board:

It was based on a sketch in my ideas-book, but done without any planning, a casual improvised copy of sorts, using the limited colours I had.

I've named it 'Palace For The King Of Forever'. I will glaze it in future to add more colour to those grey areas.

I love painting in this improvisational style, and perhaps it contains everything needed in a more efficient way than doing the meticulous planning of my current practice. One downside is that this very ad-hoc nature limits the paint quality, as painting over another colour will muddy it. The key to the best painting is the put the right colour in the right place first time, and this is impossible in a painting like this, although the muddiness can be mitigated during glazing.

Red Madonna Layer, Three Studies

A steady day of painting, a full day but I feel that I've done little. I started by adding glaze layers to the two Red Madonna paintings. These had an uneven finish, but after 6 weeks, the finish was less evident, only the colour difference. After 4 weeks, some areas had much more gloss, this indicates the importance of taking time with oils.

Today's work was necessarily gentle and slow. Only tiny amounts of paint were needed, so little that the amounts would be the sort of vague fragments wiped from a brush which has just been cleaned - mere particles. Those can still make a huge difference to the surface of a painting. After this, and about two hours of drying, I used a soft flat brush, new and dry with no paint, to massage the fringes of the paint.

I was reminded that no AI and robot could ever paint like Leonardo da Vinci. Even the very simple task of getting the right amount of paint on a brush is a skill which requires extreme dexterity; years of training. I may add more layers to this painting yet. The turquoise background is starting to look flat. I wonder if I should add a transparent later on top.

After that, three colour studies. Two for the 'transubstantiation' painting:

These studies are so useful. The difference here seems small but is huge in real life, there's no substitute for using the actual pigments. The flat grey on the left looks fine, but the brown-yellow, inspired by Hammershøi, added an instant and powerful feeling of reverence, if not awe. Again, this is not evident from the idiotic digital image.

After that, a study for the scarecrow painting. The final colours will be different, as I plan that the glaze will change things. This is an underpainting study, then.

Painting Planning, Beatle City

Up at 08:30 today for a full day charging into the next batch of painting plans. First, preparing a panel and tracing over 'A Brief History Of Transubstantiation'. Here's the underdrawing:

This will be a modest 40x60cm work. The size made me consider frames, so my next job was to audit and measure the frames I have in stock. I have 25, and I measured the panel sizes and visible areas for each. This should permit me to, at least in theory, design paintings to fit existing frames. At the moment I'm in the state of painting a picture in any size I feel, skewing the choices towards those of the canvas panels I have. Those are easily cut to size (as I did for this painting) so this isn't much of an issue.

It's not too difficult for me to make a frame, but perhaps I could design some to fit the frames I have, to deplete them if nothing else, hence the audit.

This led to sizing and drawing a new painting called 'Nobody Cares About You, Really. Get Over It' which is a scarecrow crucifixion - a new genre I seem to be pioneering (today, I noted two things about this; that one of my first ever paintings 'The Last Tree' began it, and secondly that the Worzel Gummidge series circa 1980 is probably the root of the connection between Jesus and scarecrows, as Worzel's stand is a cruicifix). Here's 'The Last Tree' (2005):

I drew out 'Nobody Cares', prepared the surface, and transferred the drawing. Then I prepared the panels for the oil studies for both works, which I routinely paint now. I also prepared the study for the Rachel Hudson painting. Then I made some plastic stands for my gesso sauce bottles so that they can be stored upside down. That should keep the gesso fresh and make dispensing easier.

In between all of this, I did some initial work on a John Lindley song called 'Beatle City', a prospective production job. I can say nothing more on this, except that it would be the first song production work I've done for someone else apart from the remix of 'Where the Golden Cornfield Light Is Grown', made in 2016 for Jonathan Tarplee. That was different because, as a remix, I was given a few samples and free reign to do anything with them.

Painting Plans

Much of today was spent tracing over the underdrawing to 'The Angels Musing Over All That Is Left Of Rachel Hudson'. This is ready to paint, but I need to paint a colour study first.

After that, work on a simple, spartan work directly inspired by a vision in a dream. It was four circles forming a man's torso, with white circles where the hands should be. I realised that these were 'hosts', the body of Christ. The image is simple enough but I'm unsure of the colours. I had in mind plain grey, similar to 'Don't Think I Can Feel Love Anymore', but then I thought I should make the lower 'sky' near black. There is some floating bread there. Should I make it dark brown or dark green? The upper sky could be any hue... but cold, green, yellow, or gold.

There are no right or wrong answers, just different moods and meanings. I've looked at some Rothko's. I'm reminded that he never seemed to slope his works, always stability for a form of religious reverence.