Song Work

I've been working on music for the past few days, in particular the tracks for the long-awaited concept album The End and The Beginning. Some of my planned tracks will have to go by the wayside unfortunately because I can't get them to sound right and I'm fed up with working on this project which is about three years old! The latest song from this, Like a Ragdoll Falls, has been entered into the U.K. National Song Writing Contest. My entry form for this year's Royal Academy Summer Exhibition is now posted too, and I've already submitted a painting for the John Moore's prize too.

Painting Update

I'm currently working on two pictures. The daylight hours are taken up with a picture called The Art of Painting, a complex picture which includes a few different styles of painting including one of Raphael's seraphs, a cave painting and an abstract version of the same figure, and a cubist representation of The Procuress by Dirck van Baburen. I painted a version of this 18 months ago but I thought it deserved a new version because my abilities have changed considerably since then. The other picture I'm working on is in the planning stage and is a large figure painting depicting the beheading of Holofernes, a subject painted perhaps most famously by Caravaggio. My surrealist interpretation is less about Judith and perhaps more about another famous painter of this subject, Artemisia Gentileschi.

Informative Surrealism

Two new underpaintings done this week. One is a surreal construction that's a bit similar to the "Strawberry" painting. A desert in folds, a vine, an arrow and a rose feature. The second is less visually impressive and based on a simple idea about losing creative ability and features a distraught figure in the desert facing a dandelion that has just lost its seeds. I've decided to enter the John Moore's biannual competition in Liverpool, although it was a difficult choice because I'm developing at a good pace and will be in a much better position to produce world class art in two years time.

My newest idea on art theory is something without a name at the moment. Whereas surrealism is expressive, designed to express the subconscious of the painter, this instead tries to trick or insert ideas into the subconscious of the viewer, by the use of visual clues (shapes, words...) that the subconscious mind alone will notice. The Kate Bush as a Winter Tree painting was one of my first examples of this. It was not surreal, not from my dreams or subconscious, but designed to have enough of a likeness there for the viewer's subconscious to see, but not conscious mind.