Failures and Victories, The Blood Of Winter and Kafka Frames

An awful day of drab failure yesterday. I'd hoped to use my router table to cut new channels in wood for the 'Punishment Of The Sun' frame, but at first my mother didn't want to help; no work on Sunday is her motto. The cutting was better than the disastrous first attempt, but still a failure, the wood rose up and was chewed. The machine was noisy and messy. The results would perhaps be improved with work and more modifications. I like making my own things, I like 'reinventing wheels', but my mother insisted that I stop, that she would pay for custom-cut wood from a local timber yard.

I updated my frame calculator software, but most of the day was wasted, a day of plans abandoned. There were also food problems. My breakfast was uncooked due to some sort of microwave failure, and the other meals failed too, in odd ways. In the evening, problems with my father's illness kept us awake and I barely slept. He spent the night in hospital.

Yet, today was a transformation. I ordered the wood and it was cheaper than I expected. We visited my father, who seemed to be doing ok. Perhaps this incident will lead to a revised care plan for him. I returned home to frame 'The Blood Of Winter', and the Kafka painting, both worked well. The hosting issues about my websites and domains seem to be resolving after nearly a week of waiting. I bought train tickets for the Stockport art collection, a mere £2.50 per trip, less than a bus ride. I ordered some Ethyl Alcohol to make wood stain, and this too was a bargain price (I expect the price of these chemicals will go up due to the issues around the Strait of Hormuz). And I worked out the dates and possible entries for several open competitions. A good day.

Deborah has been wonderful, too.

Surrealism and Magical Realism

I paint ideas and feelings. From the beginning, my paintings were compared to surrealism, and this term is familiar to the general public as a certain type of painting, a fantastical, dream-like and eccentric image. For the reason of succinct description I don’t object to my work being described as surrealist, but I don’t adhere to or care about the principles of that 1930s group. For me, I’m trying to represent the maximum gamut of feeling and concept.

Another related term is Magical Realism. The principle difference between the two is that surrealism is supposed to depict the unfiltered unconscious of the artist, although to many adherents of surrealism, including its founders, surrealism is not an art form but a tool of mental change which can be used to drive social change. Surrealism was almost a form of therapy, but initially a form of experimentation upon the mind without an external outcome, it was an internal examination.

Magical realism, on the other hand, is an art genre which includes imaginative elements. Surrealism is supposed to contain only unconsidered, unfiltered, unconscious output. To some extent, surrealism is designed to be unfathomable and enigmatic. Magical realism creates a realistic and possible world with elements which may be fantastical or beyond normal experience. Magical realism can be, perhaps should be, created consciously and understood by the viewer or reader, taken as normal. Its imaginative tools are used to create an emotional and intellectual effect; reality is pushed into the fantastic to enhance a narrative, to make a point. In this respect, perhaps all literature could be seen as a form magical realism with more or less magic, more or less fantasy, as all literature is an abstraction of actual reality. Actual reality, in all its wonder, can’t ever be portrayed in full by an artwork; the artist must abstract, parody, enhance and bend reality in ways subtle and otherwise to make a point, and light an emotion.

What makes magical realism magic is that it contains fantastical elements, so its reality tends to be bent substantially. H. G. Wells ‘The Invisible Man’ is not generally considered to be magical realism, although one could argue for its case, it’s more fantastical than a Charles Dickens work. A similar case can be made for fairytales or works of fantasy. For me, these labels may be useful for some form of genre categorisation, but there is another simpler metric, one from mundane reality, stretching to a strange reality of fantastical imagination, and that is all.

The unconscious is a problematical concept altogether which I explore in more depth in my book ‘21st Century Surrealism’. Setting that analysis aside we will consider the unconscious in the most commonly accepted way as a pile of ‘hidden thoughts’ which can impose themselves on our conscious minds. There is undoubtedly a constant dialogue between what is conscious and what is unconscious, and any creative act involves both of these factions of mind. We cannot say for certain that an idea is wholly conscious or wholly unconscious, a thought is a thought, and when a thought used to generate idea in a creative context, the origin of the idea becomes moot. It’s quite possible for a genuine and trained surrealist to output a stream of consciousness pile of words, and for a second magical realist artist to create the same words. The effect of a fantastical scene upon a viewer or reader would be the same whether the source was conscious or unconscious, or a mix of the two. This, more than any reasoning, explodes the boundary between art genres.

It is the job of an artist to communicate an idea, to communicate a meaning and feeling, and any and all tools are valid. A random act, like an ink-blot, an act by a machine, can do this; so the source of the information, the method of creation, is not important.

Reality, non-fiction, biography and autobiography, realistic fiction, crime fiction, fairytale, science fiction, fantasy, magical realism and surrealism. These labels may help a bookshop or critic, but it’s perhaps more rational to rate a work on a scale of tedious and ‘real’ to extraordinary, creative, different from the norm. It is the latter to which all artists aspire, but we can only go so far, or the result is randomness, nonsense. Science fiction uses tropes to build a structures which ground the educated reader in the mechanics of the world, and for more complex and creative works, these are needed as mental scaffolding to inform the reader, or viewer of art. The job of artist is communication, not mere expression. It is for this reason that fantasy is always, to some degree, grounded in reality. In nonsense, only those patterns of reality we see, become art; only a bad artist would consider those random encounters art. The task of the artist is to touch a known reality in new ways.

Woodwork, Routing

Woodwork today. Started by making up an extendable hole-part for my drying rack system. These have a 15mm wide bit of wood in the middle, so to fix this to the holey 'ends' I thought I'd try my router-table-guide-thing I made last year to cut out a 15mm slot. It had a few problems. Firstly the 120mm bolts in the guide were not long enough to set correctly. The results were not great, and for the second recess I sawed by hand. The final drying rack part looked messy, but it was accurate and straight, so good enough for a drying rack, and all made from recycled scraps.

Then I bought full wood lengths for the 'Punishment Of The Sun' frame, a proper test of the router table. Alas I had no wood of this size to test, I'd have to test it on the actual wood. First I fitted longer bolts, some spare I'd made for my defunct painting carrying racks. I needed to cut a 10mm recess so thought I'd use a 16mm bit, reasoning that using the 'edge' of this would make the cut cleaner somehow. I positioned the guide so that the router cuts 'away' rather than towards the wood as I feed it... I thought that it might split if cutting towards... but the results were disastrous!

The wood was pulled away, the bit acting like a roller to pull it through. It pulled so violently that it ripped some of the guide wheels off my table, these were only glued, but should have been screwed too! I re-fitted them and screwed them. Tomorrow I'll try again, this time I'll use a 12mm bit, and make it cut towards the push direction.

AI in Artificial Intelligence Discovering Perfect Pornography

Underpainting complete for 'Artificial Intelligence Discovering Perfect Pornography'. This painting follows a few weeks of my first experiments with AI to see if it can help with painting creation.

AI, at time of writing, is remarkably rubbish for any creative task, and I suspect it always will be because it aspires to produce an average. This might be good news for competitive and brilliant artists because so much art by rubbish artists (pretty flower painters! quirky landscape painters!) are this, and AI might out-compete them. Still, perhaps this can't be ignored, as the aesthetically ignorant majority like this sort of thing. Art elitism aside I'm concerned with utility and good art, being creative and expressing my unique personality and world, this is the goal of all artists rather than mere craftspeople, us composers rather than mere performers. AI is really powerful and it can have use as an artistic assistant.

I experimented with AI here partly because the painting is about AI, so I thought I'd share a walk though of the process. Here's the idea sketch from around 2014. It was then named 'Alchemist Discovering Perfect Pornography':

I thought the idea was amusing, but, as I've said elsewhere, it seemed to resonate today with the joke of AI 'becoming human'. My paintings always begin with such idea sketches; small, unconsciously sketched ideas which often jump into my head complete with title. These are notes of the image in my head at the time, so often come (in my head) complete with colours and textures. These sketches serve as a mnemonic of that vision. They're more than a seed, but a record of a finished idea which I can revisit when needed.

In the sketch, which I know from that memory but others perhaps can't see, the top 1/3rd of the image is bone, the wiggly blobs on the right are teeth, and the shield-hole above is a skull's nose. Below is a dawn sky over a rocky landscape. The flesh-like rock-like 'monolith' man emerges from it and gazes with fascination at the flower, a human egg, the 'discovery'. The arch in the sky is a reflection of the skull's nose, like a window in the sky, which had (at one point) a sun peeping inside. A falling tooth makes the window something of a mouth of a startled face. At one point (in 2014 when drawing it), I dripped pendulous tears from this window, but erased them.

My goal when realising a painting is to stick to this idea. Sometimes I want to keep the exact shape, and sometimes the shapes are notes for me to find an image (like a rough sketch of a figure that I'd need to locate in an exact pose; I prefer photo-realism, not illustration or cartoon figures). The key goal is to match the feeling. In recent years (well, um ten or so) I've started to blow up the tiny idea sketch (4cm) to full size using tracing paper to closely match the idea's outlines. This is step 1. Then I'll tidy up any rough areas, re-draw and fix up things to look more realistic if needed, like the teeth and skull parts here. I wanted to keep the exact look and shape of the figure here, his expression and pose is vital.

After that, the painting sketch in final size looked like this:

At this point I'd normally locate source materials for the different parts, some skulls, a landscape, a sky. I can invent those things from my mind, like Bob Ross did all of the time, but if I did this my 'happy little' paintings would all look the same and would be based on my same collection of mental images; this would stagnate my art.

One thing I can do is make a lighting model, often from plasticine, and most useful when there are objects which can cast shadows or have complex lighting. I've used computer models before, but they look worse AND take a lot longer than a plasticine model. This, I thought, is an ideal job for AI. It could also help with those textures, saving me trawling free image sites, or the need to photograph real world objects (like myself for the figure, I don't have many skulls hanging around).

I sent the outline drawing to Gemini and described the scene and its textures. To help it, I sent it two images of the texture of bone from my personal image library of texture references. The result wasn't too bad...

...but obviously flawed. The best bit is that bone texture because I gave it some bones, and it placed them well. It didn't get the skull part right, but there's enough there for me to use. Why it added a second head and a second 'flower' I don't know, it absolutely would not stick to my lines. I decided that this didn't matter so much, I'm not using this image for anything except approximate shading.

I wanted things more lit from the 'flower', so I asked it for a sunrise, and to remove the second head and second flower.

Better, more useful (it added a weird hand!). This will do, it's on par with a model lighting guide, with the bonus of more realistic textures and colours. The sky isn't what I had in mind, it's too dark, too cloudy, but I decided to ignore that. It'll never be perfect but I don't want it to be too refined in case it interferes with everything I add as I paint. In this case the actual mistakes and lack of quality help, they leave spaces for me to fill.

The arch window is missing... this was intentional. I decided that, rather than the 'sun of discovery' there, I'd add a couple about to kiss; a robot and a beautiful woman, thus re-inforcing the theme of the painting, so that anyone who had no clue about the title would understand it. I found an appropriate pose from a silent film, and took some images of the robot in Metropolis. These I fed to Gemini and asked it to create the couple.

This worked brilliantly. When supplied with material it's brilliant at extrapolation and transformation, it can change lighting and poses in ways far beyond 2D image editing. Here's the underpainted window:

And the finished underpainting as a whole:

You can see how much of the guide it was or wasn't in the end. It was certainly useful; I've used the bits I wanted, not what I didn't.

I wouldn't consider this an AI artwork at all, but it is AI assisted, particularly the kissing couple. Without the AI I'd use the silent film couple (as I did earlier this year in 'Love And Fragility In The Age Of Perfection') and make the male robotic, but I think this painting is better for that robot. When painting the rest I was constantly aware of not wanting to use the AI imagery, aware that this may dilute my vision, yet some of its suggestions, like the placement of the shadow on the 'wire' were great; this is the sort of thing I'd look to a guide for.

I'd never use AI for writing because no-one could convey what I want to say better than me - that's just obvious. There's no 'better' or 'worse' or 'right' or 'wrong' in that, the best is how we actually write; our personality. This is why I love performing without a script and love improvising on piano; everything we say or do is what our unconscious intended and this is correct, the 'wrong notes' are correct as far as our unconscious creative mind is concerned, correct in an unknown but true way. I've no desire at all to use AI to create music because I love making music with my own tools and I absolutely hate the sound of modern pop (and the idea of pitch correction and the awful sound of auto-tuned vocals!). I've not done any experiments here, maybe it could create a unique sound effect (a Boeing 747 crashing into a junk yard of bedsprings?) or sample that might be useful, or for cleaning up audio, like The Beatles did with 'Now and Then'.

When painting I remained constantly aware of the threat of dilution of the concept by its 'personality'. Perhaps my plasticine lighting guide can also dilute the freedom and impact of that idea sketch. These creative problems are even worse for a film director who has so many competing forces which battle his or her vision. It's a key goal of an artist to weigh up each creative choice and target that intial core vision, that 'orb' of image and emotion which sparked the idea. Perhaps we never succeed, but we can at least be aware of potential pitfalls as we walk that tightrope to our vision, the final artwork.

Drying Racks Changes, AIDPP Underpainting

An unplanned slow start to today, I'd hoped to charge into painting but felt tired and listless. Instead I found myself making some new drying rack parts, as the new painting, 'Artificial Intelligence Discovering Perfect Pornography', needed a drying space and I'd run out of racks. This is partly because I'm painting larger this year, I had enough smaller racks. Here is my rack design. I made them in 2009 or 2010:

I have 4 of the small 8-hole middle parts, but too many, as I tend to paint large now, and small panels are easy to rest somewhere. So, I cut a 7-hole and 8-hole section up to create a new 10-hole piece, which is much more useful. This means I have the spare end pieces. I could do with a very long one, and I thought that I could use some spare wood to make a telescopic mid-section which would make it fairly easy to store yet allow a very long length if needed.

My biggest hole-section is 18 holes, 88cm, and that's now in use under the Telepathic Daisy painting. I've never needed larger than this. I used to have 2x 18-hole pieces, but one was bent so always wobbled, so I recycled it this year. Perhaps though, it might be useful to have one that can be as large as I'll ever need... not much bigger than 88cm I think... but one never knows. So I'll make plans for an extendable middle-part.

I felt so hungry at 11:30 that I ate lunch then. I can't remember ever doing this before, it might be the first day in 30 or 40 years that I've eaten early when at home (I may be forced to adjust if I'm out). I did this specifically to give me time after eating to paint, so I did so and painted part of the AI painting.

Them And Us Framing, YouTube Updates, Art Writing

Framed 'Them And Us' yesterday, and updated my Artist's Statement.

Today, edited all 300 or so videos on my Music Channel to permit comments, and updated the tags for consistency. Then entered the RBSA Prize Exhibition, I'll need to frame 'Punishment of the Sun' if required. Later wrote a essay on Surrealism and Magic Realism, and related works of fantasy. For me, there's no difference. I'd like to write more essays on art, and ideally video these.

It's the last of a few hot days. I hope it remains sunny as tomorrow I'd like to paint again. My instincts are calling for music again, new work, more unified with my painting and new philosophy on 2026. The new is always so much more appealing than the now.

Bickerton Collection, Art Photography

A very full and busy day. Started with some computer admin, then quickly off to Bickerton to collect my work from the exhibition. I sold 'The Time For Love Has Nearly Flown', one of my favourite 2007 paintings which I exhibited in the Lyceum Theatre at my first exhibition, and clearly remember showing at The Cubby Hole at my first 'Surrealist Art Exhibition' there in 2010. It was even exhibited in the RBSA in Birmingham later that year, and many times since. It was reframed a few years ago, and I think this Bickerton showing was the first in its new frame. This is my first Bickerton sale since 2021, but all sales since 2020 (and Covid) have been scant as I've barely exhibited. My focus since 2019... until this year... has been music.

Then, lots of art photography with the new rig I've built this summer. It was a lot easier, but still hard work. The job involves assembling the lights, the flatbed, the towers, the steel tracks, the camera and it's shoe, taking the photos section by section, digital stitching (by hand at the moment, I need software for this ideally), then taking everything apart and re-packing away. Everything is in small parts for storage, so it normally takes a day for a session. Today's work was complete by 19:00, but I still have some filing to do.

The photography was done for the sake of 'Punishment of the Sun', so here is the finished painting. The face is good enough but suffers a little due to the heavy texture of the canvas. I'm not really used to fine details on works of this scale.

Backups, Platform, McCartney Songs, The Impossible Hopes Of Sisyphus

Backups yesterday, then the final proposal for an exhibition in Crewe's PLATFORM gallery. A slow day today, lacking in focus and still somewhat tired. Why? Am I still recovering physically from the Punishment of the Sun?

I've put my name down for the next John Lindley tribute night, Paul McCartney this time. I never like performing well known songs, seems boring and pointless to me. I prefer writing something new, but I searched through a few of his solo albums and picked one new to me called 'Women and Wives'; middle of the road lyrics but a great dark feeling, echoes of 'House of the Rising Sun'. It would sound much better on piano, needs percussion really, but I'll have just my weedy Microkorg and its 4-note polyphony. My first instinct was to play 'Temporary Secretary', let down by the fact that it's perhaps McCartney's worst song and one of the worst songs by anyone. A plus side is that I could improve it!

Of next paintings, I want to paint 'The Impossible Hopes Of Sisyphus' in large format, larger than I normally paint. I think it would help to draw out a small version first, so have marked the paper for a 1:3 scale version.