Slow day today, woke late after a night of disturbing dreams and interrupted sleep, these long days. Cut a frame and worked today on the Cromwell painting but I'm unhappy with it. Sometimes creative ideas work instantly, sometimes they take days or weeks. In the long term it's hard to tell the difference between either, but the initial design is crucial. I rarely change anything when a painting is started. I've painted pictures twice, or three times sometimes, but never corrected. Perhaps a time limit will finish this idea. Taking months or years on one idea is never a good thing because the whole thing will be out of date.
Perhaps I need to refocus on one or two central themes; at least the cross. What essence does Cromwell have? Walnuts! Leather! Tannin! The opposite of ice cream, meringue... coconut flesh. Coconut flesh, perhaps this is the antithesis of Oliver Cromwell! If he should bite one coconut, he would explode, as I'm sure you can now see. Charles I, by comparison is very fruit based, apricotian and of peaches especially. This explains the English civil war in terms of delicate fruits alone and is worthy of an entire book on the subject, but how might this affect my painting?
The R.B.S.A. opening last night was broadly uninspiring. I felt that the work was all well done, but few items made me think that this was cutting edge art (this made me wonder: is visual art dead? Of course never! Any more than literature or drama died when the dictionary was codified). There were exceptions, but I saw few messages and a minority of emotions. It also seemed that the art that did have a concept had to be badly painted to emphasise that it was conceptual. Pretty and meaningless is fine, but if it's ugly, it must be meaningful, mustn't it? If even ugly and meaningless art is good enough then we might as well abandon judges and show everything and call all artists equally good (ironically Duchamp's famous urinal was in an exhibition with exactly those terms, but his work was still the only one that was 'rejected'!). Of course, such ideas are ridiculous because, at very least, everyone likes different things to different degrees. Call art what you like, but there will always be good and bad, and so out of context it doesn't count as art at all.
I've always liked art with a meaning, but these seem to be in a tiny minority compared to pretty paintings or art that experiments with techniques. An old idea (or no idea) with a new technique feels like a haughty cleverness, like playing J. S. Bach on a Moog Synthesizer for the first time. Artistically awful. Every innovation in technique demands an innovative message for it.
Enough rambles. I must decide whether to continue working on painting next week or switch to music. The light and weather is perfect for painting, but the music is timely and will age unless it is done. Tick tick goes the clock of life, dripping into liquid infinity.
First, a night of communal video gaming.
