Apocalypse Underpainting

Tricks are never as good when you know how they are done, but magic is always amazing.

The meteorite is painted. Next; the buildings in the foreground.

Apocalypse Underpainting

Day three. Things proceed slowly but on track.

Haunted Camera Dream

I dream of enrolling in a college course. Two friends were with me, one I haven't seen in 20 years who subsequently. We sat down at a round table in the busy student area across from three pretty giggly girls. I wasn't interested in any of them but felt more confident with them than my shy friends. A chubby girl sat next to me with a prescription energy drink. We started talking and got on well although I felt slightly guilty doing so knowing that I had a girlfriend. When she looked at me her face was brightly painted and the patterns swirled and moved.

I walked home along the college road and found it very difficult to walk at all, straining to recall how to walk. I managed to make progress by walking backwards. I had a camera and took photographs of a fantastic yellow storm through the fence that lined the left of the road, it was the storm from my painting "I'll Be Here For You". I thought this was hell. The camera spoke words with a voice like a small child when the shutter was pressed and when I played back the images I saw video of a theme park. I knew that the camera was haunted and that the child was a ghost. A passer by became interested and I wanted to show him that the camera was only haunted when I used it. I turned the corner and was inside a building. The storm still raged beyond the glass making a beautiful tunnel in the yellow dusty clouds. An ostrich with one eye like a cyclops was behind glass in one room, like an exhibit in a zoo. I photographed that and passed the camera to the man to try it.

Saturday

Day two of underpainting. The day started with a frustrating rendering of the large swallowtail. Most of the day was simple gradients and improvised textured surfaces such as the "gold" on the butterfly shown.

Friday

Today I painted with panache.

Calendar

I spent far too long today formatting and ordering a 2010 calendar with my paintings on. It's costing £20 but it is worth trying to see what it looks like. I like art calendars, but I also like my weeks to start on Sunday like American calendars because in my head Sunday has always felt like the first day of the week not the last. I seem unable to order a calendar that starts on Sunday! Anyway, that escapade took far too many hours that I should have spent drawing.

I also spent a long time looking for surrealists online with an eye to forming some sort of group or holding a joint exhibition. Sadly, most were either not really surrealists, not very good, and/or often totally bonkers, and each thought about art in different ways. It made me question the whole point and rationale behind a group! Re-recognising the art of Esther Albone was worthwhile though. Her paintings seem to be halfway between mine and Frida Kahlo's.

Achievements today then have been limited, but there have been some;
1. I have confirmed a second solo exhibition at the Lyceum Theatre for November 2010.
2. I have also confirmed the possibility of a joint exhibition in Nantwich Museum with my friend and artist Ray Perez. This is very much in the hands of the curator and is not decided in advance but we are hopeful that an exhibition around August of next year will take place.
3. I've had it confirmed that four paintings will go on display in Jobling Gowler Macclesfield from January to March 2010.

I also wrote three brilliant poems and bought a big chain for the Abandonment panting but the composition is causing me storms. The picture looks more dramatic as it is but the idea is conveyed better with a cloud on a broken chain. A cloud with a broken chain is the perfect metaphor for abandoning someone. I must resolve the storm with a deadline. It will be finished by October the 1st or be torn asunder!

Tomorrow I begin underpainting the final full version of The Apocalypse of Finance.

Machinosh, Giger and Hockney

I'm very tired today because I've done a lot of new things. I was more active than usual at Art Support, met a new member there and struggled but succeeded in recalling the names of many recent new artists! Exhausted when I got back I slumped down and sleepily watched a documentary about Charles Rennie Mackintosh which was interesting. I flicked through a book of H.R. Giger pictures at the same time and consequently drew the plan for a painting called Scales Of Justice as a joint homage to both artists. In my head the picture is about two metres wide by five or more high which is too big for me to paint. Mackintosh had more intelligence, skill and imagination than Giger. I went out and bought parts for a lamp and imagined making a limited number and selling them to all of the best people in Britain. Later I read part of a book by David Hockney, who has painted very few good pictures in my opinion, but he seems like a nice chap. I suspect he'd think that being a nice chap was more important than painting good pictures anyway.

Now I'm so tired I feel only the dull thud of a damp grey mop periodically thumping the inside of my cranium in an eternal salute to a slowly liquifying snail in a polished chromium shell. Tomorrow I'll draw or do light work for on Friday I begin a painting at full speed again. Today's ideas gave me a sense of future greatness and the feeling is more tangible than ever.

Art Liberating Jewels

One other thing I did today was order a diamond (an artificial golden hued one but a diamond just the same) for the Moons And Keyholes painting which I have painted for the Sue Ryder Art Liberating Lives competition (snippet shown). I might as well go the whole hog and add jewels! The submission date is the 21st of October. Tick tick tick!

Mountains

I'm fascinated by the rocks in Leonardo's Virgin on the Rocks. It seemed that he had a formula for painting them as opposed to a mere image to copy from. I'm getting better at using that formula. The trick is no trick but a simple matter of observing enough rocks, building up a mental library of images so that when a random collection of light and dark patches is gazed upon the rocks appear there before the artist's eyes, just waiting for the highlights and shadows to be painted in.

In that way I painted my mountains for The First Grasp of Rebirth today. The underpainting in other parts is so well finished that I'm not sure if another layer is necessary. It would add more detail and depth and perhaps visual beauty, but the effect on the artistic message is negligible and a day's work is a day's work. I will ponder this on another day for tomorrow is Wednesday and my day of fun and relaxation at my art group!

The Sheeky Keypad

A New Keypad for Text Messaging

Current mobile phone designs set the keys in alphabetical order which is nonsensical and inefficient. It makes typing many English words slow and awkward and common letters like S and O need too many key presses. I decided to design a new keypad based on English letter frequency.

Factors

Some letters and letter combinations are more common in text messages than in written English, such as x and abbreviations like OMG and LOL. Letters commonly placed in succession should be on different keys. Letters placed in negative succession should also be placed on different keys because pressing a second letter then a first takes just as much time when writing a text. Common letters should appear near the top of the keypad because lower keys are harder to press with one thumb.

Development

I began with ETAOIN SHRDLU letter frequency. The first draft was ECP, TDV, AFY, OWB, IMG, NHK, SRXQ, ULTZ. Then I switched H and U because although U is a vowel it is much less common than H. Then I wanted to move R up the keypad because it's very commonly placed with E, and darting between those keys would be made easier if the keys were higher, however of the first letters already set R is most rarely placed near S so I needed to move S at the same time. These were switched with TD on key 3. Then I needed to move T, one of the most popular letters in English to move that away from the more awkward lower keys. Then I switched IM and NU because I is slightly more common and so easier to access for right handed users, also UK or MX would be slightly more common combinations than MK and UX, as many "uck" words are abbreviated to "uk" in text messages. Then Q was moved to a different key from the U, also preserving the symmetry of having four letters on the 7 and 9 keys.

The final layout is:

ECP, SRV, AFY, OWB, TDG, IMKQ, NUX, HLJZ

Now imagine writing a text message using the above keys. You'll notice that many fewer key presses are needed to type a message. "This is a test" for example needs only one press of each key.

This keypad layout can be used freely by any individual or company for any purpose providing that accreditation to the development is made to Mark Sheeky.

Monday

I'm working on several things at once today. The light is rather poor for painting but I'm working out the composition my largest painting to date and working on the design for a lamp. I need to arrange some exhibitions for 2010 too.

Success Machine

The night before last I dreamed I was on a desolate Welsh mountain digging up a grave and inside was a stone sarcophagus, a shape partly like a jigsaw puzzle, and partly a corpse made of dark grey stone with a gold clasp. The mood was solemn. It led to a low day yesterday. Last night I dreamed of singing Ode To Joy in a choir. There's no better dream! Today I'm recharged and full of energy. I've finished a song I started to write last week. One of my best in ages it's an upbeat rock song like Bryan Adams might do, a bit like the One And Only, that Chesney Hawks one.

Success Machine

>Well I was lonely
and I was lost,
and I was troubled
and counting costs,
and I was waiting for a message from the genius inside
but the answers were not there that night.

Well I was tired
but I had will,
and I kept trying
and trying still,
and I was slowly contemplating how to make it all go right,
when a switch inside my head flicked on

and now it's
Zap! Pow! Look at me now!
The world is at my command.
I hold it in my hand,
and everything I planned is going to be.

And see me
Flash! Bang! Look at me stand!
A master of my fate
and all that I create,
and everything is straight and perfect, clean.
I'm a success machine.

So when I'm tired
and finding blame,
I find inside me
a little flame,
and then I focus all my energy to make it all go right,
to make the switch inside my head flick on

and then it's
Zap! Pow! Look at me now!
The world is at my command.
I hold it in my hand,
and everything I planned is going to be.

And see me
Flash! Bang! Look at me stand!
A master of my fate
and all that I create,
and everything is straight and perfect, clean.
I'm a success machine.

(solo)

and now it's
Zap! Pow! Look at me now!
The world is at my command.
I hold it in my hand,
and everything I planned is going to be.

And see me
Flash! Bang! Look at me stand!
A master of my fate
and all that I create,
and everything is straight and perfect, clean.
I'm a success machine.

Moons and Facebook

The painting for Art Liberating Lives is pretty much finished now. I've got a few pictures to glaze before I begin underpainting The Apocalypse of Finance, then the other big one, Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane which needs a few compositional changes. I've updated my Facebook page and will be adding more paintings in progress to there. I'll continue to include other snippets on this blog too.

I'm tired and dull, like the day and the sky. The most important things for a good day's painting are good diet and a good nights sleep and I've not been tough enough with myself which has made me angry. Today I'll update my files a bit. I've at least a hundred songs that need the music notating correctly instead of leaving it as scribbles in my note books.

Moons and Keyholes

My Wednesdays are often a compressed and stressful social whir, and that makes a normal Thursday slow, lonely and melancholic, as was most of today, which perfectly matched the mood of the painting I painted; a picture of lighthouses, stone angels, moons, keyholes, and the destruction of those things and that mood with a green shoot of joy.

Due to that mood the glazing I did was a little laboured, very slow and lacking in confidence and flair, but the quality was no worse than normal. The painting of the light blue sky of joy transformed my mood. A blue sky would do that for any painter on this dull day of white autumn cloud. I painted the sky in cobalt blue to give it warmness. I prefer ultramarine as a blue though. Cobalt blue is more permanent but ultramarine looks better when glazed in layers and is more powerful so when mixed with white it is more opaque and easier to paint smoothly.

Gethsemane Study

Today I painted a rough colour study to Christ In The Garden Of Gethsemane, one of my two major paintings planned in 2008 for execution this year. As with all of my paintings almost every element has a source image to copy from, but there will be room for flair and fantasy. Snr. Dali said that fantasy was the enemy (meaning that every element in a painting should have a source image to copy from) but he was incorrect, stating that when already entrammelled by his "realism", disastrously sacrificed for truth; adding prettiness and ease at the expense of meaning. Fantasy is essential if the truth calls for it. Dreams are not photo realistic. Such vagueness can be planned however, and it is important that plans are plans. An idea can be overworked more easily than a painting. An inexperienced painter tends to overwork a painting while an experienced painter tends to overwork the concept. The latter is worse.

A4 Giclee Reproductions

I've just added the functionality for ordering A4 reproductions of my paintings to my website. I take scans of each picture so every painting is available, apart from Eventide 3800 which was sold in the days before I took scans. It was talking to another artist Jean Briers that convinced me that it would be worth it, as A4 prints are the most popular size. They are easy to frame and post.

I've got a Canon Pixma printer with archival ChromaLife100 inks and some Somerset rag paper for giclee prints, so the hard part was setting up the website so that each page had a unique PayPal button. I used a php script to send the name of the painting to the PayPal form, so prices and the general layout of the order buttons can be changed for all paintings easily.

Money Just Running Out

It is done! A glance at my documentation shows that this idea was concepted and first painted in 2007. It was refined over the course of two previous versions and one sky study. This might not be my best work in terms of feeling and meaning but it is certainly my most technically accomplished, being painted faster and more freely than any other picture and better for it. The picture included a few innovations such as gold paint and dry brush effects and overall marks the start of a new period in my painting techniques. I now know what I'm doing! Yes yes!

Now as September draws to a close I find myself filled with energy to paint which is in some ways annoying. I want to write some music in October, make some more sound effects for my website IndieSFX, and ideally write my Tumor novel too in November. Every piece of output is important.

Today my handwriting is full of élan and confidence so I will build on that. Olé!

Angels

Someone told me that when a feather falls down in front of you it means an angel is watching over you. This morning, as I was about to start painting, I found a feather on the dust cover in my room just there! There are certainly no birds in my room or even open windows. Evidence of angels should not be taken lightly. This is an excellent omen!

Money Just Running Out

Glazing Money Just Running Out today and a wonderful day of painting too! Two new developments. First I used a flat synthetic brush for glazing which I bought for underpainting but was too soft. It was brilliant and got the job done very quickly and ended the day in perfect condition. Secondly I painted more quickly and more loosely than ever, skipping areas instead of carefully glazing each part. That not only produced faster results but even more beautiful ones; my new clouds were much more free and better looking than many of my recent glazes. With luck I can complete the picture tomorrow which would leave one day for planning another new one!

Cheshire Open Studios

It's the first weekend of Cheshire Open Studios and I've been down to visit my friend Kath Laird at her new studio in Weston. Lots of artists are participating over a series of weekends so if you're in the area you might like to take a look.

Abandonment

A mixed bag of paintings yesterday. First I worked out the final bits on the Apocalypse study I painted the day before, then I glazed the picture seen, Two Parents Looking at a Very Isolated Child which is about autism. The arc is Liquid Leaf gold paint but it only half worked. It's beautiful stuff but dries very quickly. I cut it with some of my amber medium which worked but the fast dryingness of the pure stuff made some parts uneven. I'm not very happy with it but have analysed why and therefore become happy with it by virtue of that learning. After that, or was it before, I repainted the black moon with a roughly cut landscape proving that I can paint fast and loose. Lastly I painted some scrunched up paper. That took a few hours but I did it well and at the perfect pace.

There is a time when you have to say "Enough!" and think only of the next thing. Today is that day.

I'll begin planning for a giant but not complicated picture called Abandoning Someone Who Was A Friend When I Had None. It's a monolith like Penalties. I have a giant board ready for another painting and have several options. A painting about the acquisition of wealth, a painting of paranoid schizophrenia, or a portrait of Descartes that dissects his philosophy. Each is quite different.

Cobalt Violet

Cobalt violet is a light magenta pinky colour and is quite horrid. It's one of the few colours that should ideally fade, which won't happen because it's very permanent.

The Chromosurrealist Manifesto

The Chromosurrealist Manifesto

When it comes to colour there are two types of people: those who think primarily in colours and those who think in shades of grey. I'm a natural tonalist, like any classicist, but for every visual artist the mastery of colour is essential. More than just duplication of nature, control of colour is control over the psychological action of colour, both its feeling and its symbolic representation.

What is colour in a painting? Objects can be literally painted. What colour is the sky? Light blue in the day time, yellow at sunset, black at night. What colour is a tree? Brown and green. What colour is any object? It depends on the atmospheric and reflective conditions, the colour of the light shining upon it, the materials the object is composed of. Objects then can have a literal colour, assuming the light is white.

Problems begin when the imagination suggests alternatives. What if the sky was painted green? Or red? What if the skin here was blue? There are too many options, and that creates difficulty. Sometimes I have painted a picture and liked it only to grow to dislike it, and sometimes disliked a picture upon completion only to grow to like it. The "true" pictures were the ones that survived, ones that represented one idea with clarity. Transient feelings of what is attractive are not reliable. As ever, feelings must be rationalised.

Colours can also be symbolic. Pink and dark green represent a rose, and a rose love and other things. Light blue can symbolise the sky, freedom and heavenly calmness. Violet and black symbolise death. Thus; colour itself can be a surrealist object, capable of stimulating the mind. Baboons are driven mad by red. Green is calming. Pink, invigorating.

Irrespective of a specific hue or tone, colour contrast can determine mood. A clash of tones or opposites can represent panic and discomfort. Colours that match are calming. The mastery of colour is vital because a painting must be true, and the colouration must also be true and represent the same message that the symbols and feelings of the picture itself represents.

So what is to be done? Classical surrealism is the imagery of dreams, but the symbology of colours in dreams are more difficult to determine than the symbology of objects or situations. Mentally visualising colour is less easy than visualising shapes, perhaps because forms have a tactile component. Imagining colours comes with practice and experience, just like imagining the sound of a chord as opposed to a melody, it is something composers gradually learn.

I define chromosurrealism as the pure representation of unconscious colour. I am not a classical surrealist however. Automatism, and access to personal symbology and mind states, are of vital importance, but those tools alone are of little use, and to be truly representational it is important to know and rationalise a subject. As such, colouration must be subjected to the same rigorous calculative rationalisation of emotion that imagery is. This is not to belittle any composition as a flight of fancy or fantasy! The opposite is true. As in all things, the ideal of representation is the dream of a mind that lives the idea.

An infinity of options is necessary to transliterate an infinity of ideas, and an infinity of colour choices is also necessary. The task of the artist is to finitise infinity.

A painting dictates mood, and areas of a painting can dictate mood. The first rule is that vivid colours convey a message loudly, and grey and ashen tones are delicate whispers.

The second rule is that hues can be pleasant and synergistic, or dangerous and acidic and that areas of hue contrast are used for this purpose, to create calmness or panic. Areas of tonal contrast (that is light and dark) similarly create a stab of interest and drama, but tonal contrasts have a different visual impact to a change of hue. Perhaps tonal contrast has the impact of the past, and a hue contrast the impact of the future; Neurolinguistic Programming indicates that images seen in vivid colour are readily accepted by the brain, and images seen in black and white, or fuzzily, are rejected. Hues grab our attention compared to greys. As evidence of this refer to advertisements.

The third rule is the rule of symbology. As with object symbols, colour symbols can be local, colloquial, known only to a small number of people, or global, or anywhere in between. Almost all humans recognise red as the most passionate and alerting colour. Linguistic research indicates that the colour red is the first word for a colour that evolved, beyond words for black and white. Red in the context of a bull fight might indicate antagonism, even if it's not true that red excites a bull, the mythology makes red a valid symbol in that context for those who understand the myth. Light blue represents a calm clear sky to all humans, although a danger to any bacteria-based art aficionados! The ultra-violet components of sunlight make blue a deadly hue to many simple life forms, it is for this reason that blue light, particularly at night, alerts us. Nature imparts many colour symbols in its sunsets and plant and animal forms.

The colour of one object can impart its symbology onto another; a sky blue car would give the car qualities of the sky. I associate green with sadness (greens! The curse of many artists) so used this to represent Charlie Chaplin's unhappiness in my unusually hued portrait.

Chromosurrealism

Last night I dreamed of a violin with three strings. The strings were frayed and thin and falling apart, as was the bow. I took it to an expert who ran it through a machine and the strings pulled, moving along the length of the instrument like a conveyor belt. Soon the violin had three wide strings, wide like masking tape, and I had a new bow too. I couldn't wait to play this brand new perfect violin.

I spent yesterday painting colour studies for my Apocalypse painting and today painted the third version. The dream was about colour, the resolution of my recent worries about it, and with that resolution comes a new way of working with it, and a new word; chromosurrealism, which is expression of subconscious symbology using colour. Just as objects can be symbols, so can colours, and a chromosurrealist painting uses colour to match the idea and feeling of a painting conveyed by the objects within. The Apocalypse Of Finance, the painting I worked on today will be the first painting to use this idea, the rationalisation of hue. I will further define this in a manifesto. Every new art idea demands a manifesto, and everyone is free to use it!

Colours

Busy over the past two days. Yesterday I painted a picture of a plant reaching for a black moon but I didn't like the colours. In fact I couldn't bear to think of the painting. In the evening I went to a small reception at Jobling Gowler in Macclesfield where The Silkworm is on display. The firm will mount an exhibition of other artworks by the prize winners early next year so I'll have the chance to show some other paintings. The day's painting still bothered me though. This morning I erased it.

Today I painted a small study for The Apocalypse of Finance but made little progress. I'm frustrated at my lack of progress in art this year, but that is because I am experimenting more than ever and such things take time.

Tick tick tick!

Collection Days

These few days are workmanlike. Yesterday I collected three paintings from the Down To A Fine Art gallery and today collected the Necroamoria painting from M.O.M.A. Wales in Machynlleth. I drew two painting ideas on the train today, with the knowledge that each would take a month to implement at my current rate. I need a way to increase my speed of painting without reducing the quality. I must analyse steps and how to cut things out, and maximise the efficiency of painting days so that my energy levels remain adequate. Perhaps activities like framing and panel preparation could be planned or deferred so that they take up less time, having standard sizes for example would help there. It is frustrating to feel creative and then spend days preparing a panel for painting instead of being creative.

Fairy Felling

Today I added another layer to my painting for the Sue Ryder exhibition. The underpainting was mostly plain grey and a little rough so I added a layer of very very thin opaque paint which improved the quality enormously.

I also stained and varnished four frames. I've said before that every painter should make frames. It teaches the importance of patience and care for materials. Colour staining provides useful knowledge, and framing generally is part of the creative process. Two frames, while fitting the panel to millimetre perfection, encroached on the artwork too much so will be used for alternative pictures. I hand sawed and primed a small panel just for one of the frames and will plan a picture tonight.

While painting I listened to "Queen 2", perhaps the best Queen album. The song "The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke" is about a painting, and I read about that masterpiece and its brilliant but mad creator. I've drawn up a painting idea all about it which I'd love to paint on a giant canvas.

Hawaii and Japanese Chess Dreams

Today I discovered that St. Isidore is the patron saint of computer programmers.

I had two distinct dreams last night. The first was about Hawaii. I heard of some women living there and drew a map of their locations based on a telephone description. I placed them on the wrong island, discovering later that Hawaii was several large islands like Japan. I went there, though the journey by plane was long and I feared crashing into the ocean. I was drawing on tracing paper in a room like that of my old primary school with the three women. There were complimentary one and wanted my autograph. One sweet attractive woman said that she was a virgin and madly in love with her fiancee, a pilot who was soon to arrive. I began to talk to her about myself but stopped as the others were listening. I awoke with positive feelings.

In the second dream I wanted to play chess with an old Japanese man but we had no pieces, just a board. We used pasta and other things as pieces but my ranks were short. I suggested he should remove his pieces that matched the gaps in mine. He didn't speak English well though, complicating things. I decided I didn't feel like playing. I suggested Shogi; after some confusion he said "Ah - Shoji!". He procured a set which had American instructions but I still struggled with setting the game up because of the new larger board of a variant I had not played. The dream ended around there.

The Lightning of Creation

Today I added a second glaze layer to The Lightning of Creation. The original colour plans called for violet sky but later I chose green. The results on the grey underpainting were rather subtle, but smooth and lovely. Later I decided that the picture was too grey and so today I decided to add more colour. The green sky is now rather wondrous and strange.

I'll Be Here For You

A full day yesterday. I completed a painting called I'll Be Here For You which is about the emptiness of those words if they are just words. I painted it in the company of my dear darling ferret which was highly beneficial. I did some framing here and there and had a tracing done of a study of the Apocalypse in return.

I'm beginning to see and understand the manipulation of colours better than before. Just as when you accumulate knowledge of objects by drawing such that you can see a scribble and see the objects inside them, it is likewise possible to see an image and identify the ideal colours inside it too. Not all colours match according to a fixed theory because humans see some colours more vividly, and some have psychological and biological significance. The mystique of colours is a subject for another day but it is one I am now penetrating.

September Dawns

A day of trumpets goals glories doors and new beginnings! August was rather slow and tired as I adjusted my new life. Already September is filled with joy and promise. This morning I awoke with a new work time schedule based on ninety minutes work with twenty minutes rest, a schema which applies throughout the day including meal times. I need exercise and more energy in the long run, as long painting days are proving to be problematically both mentally and physically.

The morning emails were delightful and included a manifesto. I cut six frames. A butterfly clattered it's wings against the window trying to escape the garage. I was powerless to help though I tried to point the way out. I added two newly scanned paintings to my website, "Depression Caused..." and "The Bombing of Dresden". In the afternoon I cut batons for attaching mirror plates to frames and then transferred at great effort the Apocalypse drawing to the panel I prepared yesterday. Soon I will try a new transference method for the study.

At each moment I wanted to paint but felt thwarted. Next week is full of appointments, and the dentist on Thursday is a slight but annoying disruption to this week making work on any big picture troublesome. That said I have lots of smaller and partly finished pictures to complete! But Oh! The painting season is nearly ended as my fading light informs me and I'm full of ideas that are not painted.

Now I must pause this ramble. My important work awaits!