Take This Rose

Spent half of yesterday recording the ArtSwarm event, and the rest working on a song for the Perfume episode of the YouTube show. It's an odd song, a sort gothic, drum-n-bass, or high speed rock track. It will be a challenge to finish as I'm away for three days from tomorrow, have to collect art on Friday, perform on Saturday and the deadline is Sunday at noon.

Take This Rose

Take this rose
to your bed
let it lie
asleep instead
of your troubled mind
your troubled mind

May its scent
manifest memories
of a lost love
of a stone's grit
in a forgotten place

Take this flower
of my soul
from this fog
from these shadows
from this vault of silent sigh
of winter's cry

Take this rose
to your bed
to die

Cirque du ArtSwarm: Fishing Report

I feel the usual ache of the day after a busy performance night, but last night was as good as ever, and everyone seems to really push themselves to try new things. What started as an open-mic poetry night is now truly and eclectic mix of music, poetry, film, short dramas, and interactive experiences. Here is a summary of the performances.

I opened the night with a piece called 'Here Little Fishy', where I sang a child-like song and, while dangling a mock fishing rod, passed a hook around the audience. Those with the hook could suggest things that have been caught and these were incorporated into the song. I tend to open the shows with something fun and a little interactive, to wake people up and help set a mood of excitement and engagement.

This time, in an experiment, the subsequent acts were chosen from a hat, the 'Hat of Destiny', with the performer's names written paper fish and drawn at random.

The next act was Helen Kay, reading two poems with an environmental theme; one written from the perspective of her chicken puppet character, Nigella Clawson.

Debbie Breeze and Claire Bassi performed a flash play about the phrase 'Plenty More Fish in the Sea', then Nick Ferenczy read a short story about his fishing experiences in front of a projected backdrop. Claire Bassi then performed 'Fish/Trash', which involved reading a poem about our environmental impact on the world, and asked the audience to select a random object from a net, either a fish or a piece of litter. I then sang a simple song called 'The Fish Are Singing', with an environmental theme.

Carol Finch then read a flash-fiction story with a horrific twist, originally inspired by a competition for a story that combined diving, a toothbrush and humour.

Newcomer Alice Smith then performed a poetic, acted piece with an approximate theme of coping with trauma and addiction. Alice left the stage to perform among the audience in a confrontational, but also very personal, style of performance that involved props and a range of moods.

Maggie Shaw was drawn next and sang two songs on the theme of fishing, and her husband Alan sang 'Pedro the Fisherman', a song from the 1946 film, 'Lisbon Story'.

Deborah Edgeley then read a blackout poem, a poem made from a mix of random lines from Moby Dick. Moragh Carter recounted her memories of her first fishing trip, and sang a gentle song, and finally Deborah Edgeley as mermaid Thalassa, and myself as Poseidon conducted as simple, television-style interview written by Deborah about our mythical lives.

Maggie Shaw guided us to sing 'When the Boat Comes In' at the end. I've ended the other shows with a song, and the music tends to stick in the mind as we leave, but I wondered if this makes the shows too frivolous and party-like rather than art-like, but last night felt that it did need an ending, perhaps that is the key, a positive melodic ending; even Beethoven might agree with that. The random nature of act selection made things more democratic, but in practical terms wasn't as efficient, as some acts needed tables or other props that could have remained on stage, and the flow of mood can be important too. That will always be difficult when I don't know what the acts are about, but control over the start and end is essential. I will use a pre-set order next time and develop an ending as carefully as the opening.

Simon Ross was billed as the special guest, having been asked to prepare a 20 minute performance 6 weeks earlier. He emailed me earlier in the day to request a 10 minute, non-special, slot instead, as his piece was a collaboration with Sabine Kussmaul and Sabine was unavailable due to a family emergency. In the end, Simon didn't turn up at all with no further message, which is unprofessional, but not untypical in arts performances or music shows. Reliability is the first ingredient for success at anything, but it's amazingly rare. I try not to ask or cajole people into to doing things for this reason, instead trying to make people feel welcome to do what they want; to feel free and inspired to try things themselves.

There were 18 attendees overall, including myself and Deb, enough to break even. The theme for the next show, set for November 23rd, was chosen on the night using the random function on my calculator, and it will be 'First Time'.

Burn of God and Bergman

Have largely planned for Saturday's performance evening.

Spent most of today working on Burn of God, a concept album I started last February but hit a wall with. It began off-step from the start. In 2018 I played a series of piano tunes, composed in my instant expression way, so each tune had a feeling build in, but a lack of musical structure as such, a little melody. These were experiments in themselves. I thought that perhaps I could unify them by giving them a theme and assembled an album of sorts.

Then I thought I could make the music about religion and belief, but trying to fit the musically unrelated tunes into some global idea proved really difficult. I added some words and wrote some new pieces with words, a few words, like the music in Shadows, and indeed this whole album is an experiment in the way that Shadows was. That album worked really well, but I can't trace why I think that did, but this album isn't. It is perhaps because I've started not with new music to fit the emotion, but by trying to squish and malform existing work into a new mould.

Not only this, the narrative kept changing and was originally inspired by a very surrealistic story, party based on Ingmar Bergman's film Through a Glass Darkly with elements of Cosmos by Andrzej Zulawski. This felt interesting, but perhaps it made the result more fragmented and less emotionally powerful or consistent or authentic.

Perhaps the problem is a lack of coherence. I keep darting from working carefully from start to finish, and wanting an overall structure, yet it's difficult to form an overall structure when then source musical material, which is largely written is musically diverse, if not emotionally diverse. Many of the moods are simply pleasant. It's similarly difficult to start from the beginning slowly for the same reasons.

Yet, the music I have is already probably enough for an album and sounds attractive enough to deserve to be heard.

Instinctively, I divide things into sections, usually three, like movements or acts. This is a start. The first begins with the silent cry to nobody and nothing at 4am; a good and authentic start. This is a time of screams. It is only when we are totally alone, grasping at anything and anyone that we seek a god at all.

I have a song about a priest who is an artist, and so has doubts. I have some whispered words about a woman giving birth. These things are pretty but don't fit anywhere. I must keep working. Each time I start something I feel it will be easy, and sometimes it is, but sometimes its very difficult and takes months and weeks and lots of energy and angst to wrestle out a drip of creation that, at the end, I'm generally unhappy with. I must work rationally; calculate problems and obstacles, and solutions.

Art Life, Projects End

An enjoyable preview at the Cheshire Art Fair. A warm evening, very busy, spoke to lots of people.

The Burning Circus is now complete but won't be published until March 2020 at the earliest. John Lindley has kindly agreed to write a foreword for it. The Modern Game CDs will arrive tomorrow and the book is complete too, it will be launched on October 24th. The Masculinity Two single video goes live tonight in an hour.

I've spent most of today working on a small music commission for a computer game, plus working on music and admin work for Saturday's ArtSwarm show. I will perform a new song about the sadness of fish in an ocean swarming with human detritus.

I've also written a song for the Perfume themed ArtSwarm YouTube show. All of these things, these performances. I wonder what relationship these have to art and an artistic oeuvre or message. I spoke to Sabine Kussmaul at the art fair, she is studying for a PhD in art. I've also read about the wandering art of Frank Zappa. The study of art academically seems strange and insular. It's good to think of what we're doing and why, but the curious thing about art is that everything can be relevant, and anything can be argued as correct, and often is.

I work constantly, every day. Art is my life and, even before art, work has always been my life and compulsion, every day since childhood. I didn't miss one single school day, as well as programming computers at home (school taught me nothing, it merely bored me, moving at the pace of the stupidest person in the class. With an I.Q. over 150, I left with no qualifications, only the desire to avoid the pointless life of academia). Perhaps my childhood anxiety has given me this energy to work, but art is my life because only in this way can I can strive to do my best and achieve a potential. No matter how few my resources, or limited my time, I, we, have some, and we can do the best job with what we have. The ideal person is pushing limits and learning new things, always. I live in an isolated bubble; I set my own targets and limits. Perhaps academics are similar, but their peers set the limits. They know no better, but use peers for reasons of self-discipline and self-confidence rather than expert guidance.

It is time to conceive new projects.

Cheshire Art Fair and The Burning Circus

Up at 7am today, after an anxious and sleepless night of the usual stomach pain, to deliver a batch of paintings in the rain to Macclesfield, through heavy traffic to get there by 10am. The Cheshire Art Fair opens to the public on Thursday at the Town Hall. This is my biggest exhibition of the year and I'll have 12 works on show, including the spectacularly framed print number 11 of the Richard Dadd painting.

It's in a large white frame, about 80cm square, and is the only print framed in this way.

When I got back I added the Burning Circus illustrations to my book. I need to finalise the cover next and work on a few details. I've managed to put the book together at an amazing pace, and will need to do a lot of final proofing and checking. I've entered one of its poems into the National Poetry Competition. The odds of getting anywhere in that, no matter how outstanding my poem is, are minuscule, but it does mean that I can't publish my book until the results are out, just in case the fates and muses smile upon me. I can wait.

Here is the cover so far:

I've also started to add to the Marius Fate online presence and created an Apple Artist's Image. I saw that last week, Gunstorm had over 7000 plays on Spotify. Perhaps I can put this down to Tor's vocals and Stuart Ashens' video, and perhaps the new Mark Sheeky Music YouTube Channel has given my music a boost, but this is a pleasant sign, that after over 10 years, the song becomes popular (or gets a second wind, technically, it was also popular first time round). Anyway, I'm pleased that I've kept busy and kept working on music since then. I must keep trying to aim high in my wilderness.

My main plans are to finish this poetry book, and the order some Marius CDs in preparation for the album launch. I'm not very happy with the quality of the ink-jet printed replicated CDs but for any run under 1000 it seems to be the only option. I wondered about getting some sort of laser-etch machine to make my own designs but perhaps this is overkill.

Illustrations

Illustrations are largely complete for The Burning Circus. A good proportion of the work is filing and recording these; I haven't yet started to include them in the book. Each on needs scanning, recording with a code and the size, then cropped and converted into 300dpi good quality images for storage, plus 300dpi, and higher resolution clean images with white backgrounds to include in the book. These have taken up my codes 1136 to 1164; so that's 1164 artworks I've made since 2002 or so. Of course, sometimes one code is a painting or work that takes months, sometimes a sketch that takes a few minutes. Many works are not coded and almost always destroyed.

Here's one; a tiny sketch for the introduction for the book.

The second proof of the Marius Fate book has arrived and is fine, so all is set there. Once this book is complete I can move on to new art, a fantastic time. It's so rare to have clean space...

...but of course, this has a big illusory element. There are always jobs to do. Perhaps I should promote this existing work for a few months first. I find it amazing that artists can do that rather than get excited about the next, future, better work, but then; perhaps we do, which is why the best art is often obscure, unless an external agent is involved. A balance must be struck. The door of opportunity must remain open, but not at the expense of vital and incredible masterpieces that could help, could benefit, could transform the world!

Ink on Paper

Working on the illustrations for The Burning Circus today. About 20-30 drawn on card. My normal trusty nib was proving frustrating, the ink would just refuse to flow to the tip. I reasoned that the finish on the, very matt looking, nib had dulled somehow so I tried a new, clean replacement nib of identical type, and this worked just wonderfully. I wonder if I can refurbish or polish or clean the old nib, or whether I need to buy new nibs every so often? These are only a few pence, but I need to send away for them so this isn't as efficient as cleaning them. As they appear to be stainless steel there should be no need to replace them.

The Modern Game is done and set for digital launch. It already feels old fashioned and I have many new ideas to work on; three new great concept dramatic albums or symphonies, but just ideas, barely a narrative never mind a structure and no music. One album which I (unbelievably to me) last visited in February, currently called Burn of God, is a mix of musical and poetic ideas that barely fit together. It is good to look at this again afresh. The music is in the style of the Shadows music, long, largely improvised and unstructured musical pieces with great feeling, but I feel that more structure is needed. The narrative itself is strange and has evolved separately and after the music too. Everything needs work. I might have to develop a main musical theme to develop the drama. If I'm working musically, rather than dramatically, then the climax is a great tune. If drama, then the climax is great contrast, which can be a great tune too.

Chester and the Final Modern Game Draft

A sleepless night and trip to Chester today to collect art from the Grosvenor Museum. I've also finally mastered The Modern Game music, with a few tiny changes.

It's amazing how many new things you can hear when listening for a new 'first time', which is vital. The vocals and such things are secondary now to the overall structure and I needed to tweak a few blends and volume levels. One thing that struck me is how close this is to my very first album, Synaesthesia. It has elements of space and Earth colliding, a groovy track, a piano piece; Notes From Space could almost be the modern update of Waltz Of The Ghosts. There are crashes in Beginnings and the track segue as though telling a story.

I feel the themes will age quickly; such is the problem with music that makes some comment on the times. I must move on quickly to new pastures.

My main job yesterday was to work on the cover to The Burning Circus. Many options quickly emerged. Here are two early drafts. Next job; preparing The Modern Game audio release, filing that, the inner artwork for The Burning Circus, plans for Cirque du ArtSwarm: Fishing, and a piece for ArtSwarm the video show. I want all of this done in a few days. Then, artistically, two new albums, two books and as many computer games updated as I can manage, which is probably too few, as these take a lot of work.

Rainbow Arts Evening Performance

Great performance night at the inaugural Rainbow Arts Evening in Queen's Park last night. I anticipated a bland open-mic poetry night in the (somewhat ironically named) Creative Crewe style, but it was much more, with each of the 8 acts being very different, and the atmosphere was warm, welcoming, inspiring, encouraging.

The Modern Game Final Tweaks

I listened to The Modern Game master last night and played with the bass and treble levels, perhaps a bit foolish because it can lead to an 'is THIS better?' conundrum that seemingly goes on forever, but, ultimately if you can't really tell if one is better or not, then either is fine. I prefer never to adjust my music in mastering, or at least only very minimally and mainly the final volume. A well produced and composed track naturally sounds good from the outset.

I spent a good hour or more tweaking and re-listening to the music, comparing it with others, but in the end, I reverted back to how it was originally, with a touch more warmness on the initial Beginnings (and also Endings) track. The book proof arrived at 12pm or so and looked amazing. I'd already decided on a few changes; the timing of one track had changed to at least that needed changing, plus a few text and punctuation changes and a minor correction to the colophon. I had also decided to widen and fade the spine slightly differently. The proof needed a few tweaks, but not many. The text on the back needed emboldening, as this was rather thin, and one image needed a little colour tweak. I also stuck in a CD paper to simulate a finished book. This fitted well but it made that page look rather empty, so my last creative change was to add some colour to that page too.

Overall, the book looks amazing, and even if the music was as bad as The Pentateuch of the Cosmogony (which it in no way is) the book would be an artwork to treasure.

One or two more listens perhaps, but when the book proof arrives, assuming it looks acceptable, I will order the CDs and we will be ready. I'm now keen to work on The Burning Circus and get that finished as soon as possible, ideally before the end of September. Time is short. Life is short.

Poetry and Trips

Very busy couple of days, trips to Shrewsbury and to the Williamson Art Gallery to collect art.

Used the travel time to work out the structure to my circus poetry book. The framing of the book is so important, I want more than a mere pile of poems. The structure itself much be attractive. I first thought about making something about a fractured psyche, which leads into the circus characters. I have a few poems that are circus related but aren't about circus characters, which will be the mainstay of the book, and it felt wrong to mix these in with the character poems. I also had a sort of relationship poem that caused the fracture, but this felt a bit stark and unforgiving for an opening poem, and this seemed odd to precurse a second poem, which is more of a stream-of-consciousness prose poem, that welcomes the circus.

My current idea is to use single poems like overtures, as section headings, which allows things to be spread around a little. There are a few good-enough poems that I've had to exclude to fit this structure, but overall, it works. I prefer perfectly structured work of the right size rather than having too much (or too little).

So; main tasks. To finish the Marius album (the proofs of the book will come soon), order the Marius CDs, set up sales on the website so that people are at least able to order the album from me, complete the poetry selection, work on the poetry illustrations, and the cover and rear artwork. I also have a (short and unpaid) Fall in Green performance tomorrow evening, which needs a bit if rehearsal, plus organising the ArtSwarm live event for the 28th, and making a video for the next ArtSwarm show. There are many other jobs too, such as making more music videos, but those can wait until these other priorities are out of the way I think.

Digital Art and Album Covers

I've had a hectic couple of days, first collecting work from the Discerning Eye in London on Saturday; it appears that many good artist friends have failed to get in this year.

Yesterday I noticed that my album covers and digital art on my website no longer links to print sales on Society6, where I theoretically had prints on sale. I've never sold a thing on there and their website was always a nightmare to navigate and use. Even the basics of uploading an image often failed, trapped forever in an endless wait. So, I decided to delete everything there and list my work on RedBubble instead, where I've had a small number of sales of my strange tee-shirt designs, under the name Oomazing. The most popular design is a simple, single yellow star on a blue background in the European Union colours. I feel more European than English, so the design and the feeling appealed to me.

Anyway, I have 34 or so album covers to date, and all recent ones are in 600dpi, so over 2500 pixels square, which is a good size for a print. I also have over 30 digital art images from around 2002, many of which I've printed at poster size in the past and these look really impressive, so I've spent two frenetic days uploading, naming and tagging all of these. Linking to them from my website was the final task. For this I created a spreadsheet with my artwork codes in one column, and the RedBubble codes in another, then used the CONCATENATE function to create an SQL stream, so I can instantly update my database with the correct links.

The range of products is good and some of these look amazing.

Not all images are available in all products. Some of the 300dpi album covers, like most of the older ones, are available only as stickers or greetings cards. For the rest I've picked a mix of what looks best.

There have been a few tweaks to The Modern Game music, again, too, but I'm near the end here. Time to move to the Circus poetry collection. I wrote two poems for it last night, very simple framing devices for the collection. I want to get this completed before the end of the month. My current preferred title is The Burning Circus.

Meteor Defence Systems

There have been a few near misses of large meteors passing the Earth recently. I wondered about the best way to avoid a collision should one be predicted.

It's a common misconception that nuclear weapons fired from the Earth could be used to destroy meteors. Nuclear weapons, though powerful on Earth, are powerful partly because they heat the air, dust, and other objects around their detonation. In the vacuum of space, their blast would radiate mere light and a few particles of their fissile material. Not enough to deflect or do much at all to meteor or comet which might be the size of a city. A detonation on the surface of a meteor or planet will generate some repulsive force due to the dust and other particles pushed away from the surface of the rock, but this wouldn't be a strong force, merely proportional to the speed and mass of the dust thrown up. Dreams of blasting or smashing a space rock to pieces are unrealistic. In the deadly radioactive void of space, our nuclear weapons are small-fry.

Two good options spring to mind. The first is time, that a slight deflection early on can change the course of a impactor such that it would miss the Earth. A small explosion might deflect the meteor, but ideally some sort of engine would be flown to it, which would attach to the surface of the rock and push it, or pull it like a tug-boat, to a new course. The engine would require fuel itself, but there are many forms of space propulsion. A huge solar-sail could be deployed, and lasers from the Earth used to push the meteor to a new course, or an ion engine powered by the sun or radioactive elements, if there were sufficient time.

Such an endeavour would probably take years to work however, as the forces involved with our engines might be tiny; especially in the case of ion engines or solar sails. Larger rocket engines would require huge amounts of fuel, and a vast amounts of energy to just launch and construct these.

Energy is the key factor. A city-sized meteor would have an enormous amount of energy, and counteracting this is not easy.

Perhaps the best option is to use a similar-but-opposite heavy object to deflect it. A vast spacecraft, something like a cube of iron a kilometre, or several kilometres, across would make a good "space fist" with which to strike a meteor. An array of such giant cubes, each with engines and fuel to direct them, could orbit the Earth to form a defence perimeter, ready to target a meteor if needed.

The cost and energy required to launch such an object would be huge, even if accumulated over a long time. A more efficient alternative is to use existing mass in the solar system, saving the vast energy cost of launching such heavy objects, as well as the planetary resources; that's a lot of iron to mine and throw away. Asteroids or other rocks from the solar system could be harvested.

A giant engine, with a sort of clamp, and fuel reserves, could be launched. These would seek out an asteroid or other space object of a good size, grab it a fly it back to Earth, pointing it outwards to orbit our planet as part of the defence shield. The engines that grip these huge rocks could be refuelled and serviced by Earth vessels. These rocks might be so large that bases with people, telescopes or radar stations themselves could be stationed on the surface. Very massive rocks could be selected, each a single shot to bash away any meteor that might be set on colliding with the Earth.

One warning though, as the film Starship Troopers shows, is that such rocks and such technology would create powerful weapons in themselves. If these defensive rocks were to be crashed into the Earth they would cause far more damage the to Earth than nuclear weapons, perhaps exterminating all life, as could any normal large meteor impact.

Perhaps this fact proves that the best defence from the natural doomsday phenomena of meteors is a similar device itself.

Marius Proof

The Marius book is now complete, my plan is that it will cost £8 without the CD, £8 for a plain CD (the same price as a download), and £20 for the book and CD combined when ordered from me.

The final job is to finalise the music and I've re-recorded the Life Beyond Mars vocals today, these are much better than before. There are many pitch inaccuracies and cringe-worthy parts in the vocals, but monitoring this can be seen as a sign of progress. It is the emotional expression that matters. I've recorded a few takes of the vocals for Two Kinds of Animals but the first take with its gentle, story-telling tone still sounds best of all. I must avoid Sibeliusness and move on rather than waste so much time on trifles.

I feel ill with my usual stomach pain and the stress of endless jobs, the joyous desire to do so much yet not having enough time or space. Now I must try to master the music and order the discs. If this format works artistically I will probably make more albums like it. I already have two ideas in mind and already in progress.

The next job of the month must be to start on my clown/circus poetry book.

London tomorrow to collect work from the Mall Galleries. I will put on a suit and visit to the Science Museum afterwards to wow visitors with my art.

Stockport and Discerning Eye

Back from collecting So, How Have You Been? from Stockport. Notified that none of my four entries for the Discerning Eye were selected. Disappointed, but I know I won't be alone, that there were many entries and that there are large elements of chance in any competition. Here is Home Life, one of the entries.

For me, more emotional and detailed than the Napoleon painting which was chosen in a past year. I have slowed down substantially in painting in recent years, yet I feel more able, a better painter and more filled with new ideas than ever. This year I've painted the Ekphrastic Triptych and a commission in the 'symphonic' style, that's all. Perhaps painting holds less appeal when I have so much existent work around me.

It's odd how different and imperfect this old work looks to me. I really need to paint endlessly, overtake the old work with startling and staggeringly better work, but I need more time and space for this, and perhaps a greater incentive than to merely up the average quality of my back catalogue.

Music Progress and Old CDs

Lots of little jobs yesterday, finalising the images and layout of the book. Here's one of the last images I created, taken in the daylight and manipulated:

The final stages seem to take forever and there's often an emotional lull as a project nears completion. What usually fills this vacuum is the excitement of future things and I'm already feeling inspired with new ideas. There's so much music itself I could do, or other book work, or paintings. One of the problems with art can be its freedom.

One other of yesterday's jobs was to modify my website to allow several products on sale per page. For example, each album or painting has an option to buy, but this project might have the normal jewel cased CD for sale, plus a plain CD without any packaging, plus the book with CD included, so that's three things. My paintings sometimes have separate prints, so there's already some functionality for more than one item per thing, but it's a bit clunky. A database that covers paintings, music, and books will always have some degrees of overlap. The key is to make it as neat and flexible as possible without making it too difficult to understand.

I made those changes yesterday, and also listed a few old CD albums for sale on there. I have one or two copies left of these old albums. I can't exactly remember selling any, but I seem to have got through them. I noticed that The End and The Beginning is selling for £25 or so on Discogs. This album was/is a limited print run of 20, like most of my pre-Love-Symphony releases, so these CD-R albums are rarities. The newer, commercially replicated, albums are better in quality. The earliest albums; The Arcangel Soundtrack, Synaesthesia, The Incredible Journey, The Spiral Staircase (2002), Animalia and Flatspace, had a single-sided A4 sheet as insert, so had only one and a half pages to its 'booklet'. After that, I printed the tray and 4-page booklet commercially but used a CD-R for the music: The Spiral Staircase (2008), Stupid Computer Music, The End And The Beginning, The Twelve Seasons, The Infinite Forest. Pi and Flatspace II have never had CD versions (like a few other albums to date, like Tree of Keys). After The Love Symphony, all of the albums are professionally replicated and printed. This year's Music of Poetic Objects is the first with an 8-page booklet and I'll probably use those from now on because, as I've always done, I want the best quality I can, and to include as much artistic content as possible.

I'm also organising the next ArtSwarm Live event, for September 28th. There have already been a few cancellations due to various factors. I hope that I can find the required 20 people to pay for the room, but if not this will be the last such event. So much has been learned from this, and the regular setting up of a big sound system, control of stage lighting, the skills of performing and of putting on a show; these are really useful.

A lot of this month is delivering or collecting art, as the summer exhibition season draws to a close. I really need some sort of regular place to show my paintings, something which, in 15 years of painting, I've rarely had; just 18 months or so with my work in a small Chester gallery called Silver Star. My paintings did well enough there. Today, collecting from the Stockport Open.

I'm eager to finish this book and music. I'm thinking of calling the result a 'folio album'. There needs to be some new name for it I think, rather than just 'book'. I've also made a start on my circus/clown poems.

Onward.

The Games Played As Children

The words to the Marius Fate B-Side, a poem.

The games played as children that bend the pipes of our minds into strange contortions of curious agony, setting the maze of knots for our mice to run, searching for comfort.

More Book Work

A good day in London delivering work to the Discerning Eye on Friday. Spent yesterday working on the Marius Fate book, developing lots of new graphics for it. Most of the tracks have an image, so I've needed to make up lots of new images. Here is the image for Beginnings.

Have also recorded more vocals for Looking For A Lover, which I'm happier with. The key element is to tell a story. Here, the voice is like a shady character in an alley or something, at first, then explodes into something more impassioned.

Have spent most of today filming a video for Corridors of Nothing Menopause from Cycles & Shadows. I had the idea of a simple black and white video in a smoky room, with me playing piano. It didn't quite work out that way as the piano is very complex and unpredictable on that track. It's also very difficult to get the lighting right without a camera person.

The other main job today was preparing ArtSwarm. Filming for that will take place tomorrow. Seven videos are in this Children's Games episode. I'm pleased with my contributions here and will aim to make my best work for the remaining three episodes.

Slow Day

A slow and low day, feels like a tired retreat from summer, not helped by the turmoil in the country caused by the politicians. We are intelligent beings at the mercy of idiots. Only the Lords seem to exhibit any sense. Their eternal heredity should be restored at once, with the odd reform.

Have started the Marius Fate book but I feel I need more content, more artistic content. I'll at least include some imagery. I've been investigating the best way to include a CD. Most of today was spent on little admin duties: a few words about a book for a forthcoming publication by Oxford University Press, some new game graphics now required by Steam, train ticket collection.

I'm unhappy with the music and must keep working on the vocals. Looking For a Lover varies from my favourite to least favourite track. I must keep trying. Nothing is perfect, and our own judgement isn't either. Future work will always tend to get better. I must remember Sibelius; his 20 years of working on his 8th symphony only to burn it (it was probably fine). Do my best and push on.

I invented a cocktail the other day: one part Chambord, one part Rose's lime cordial, three parts soda water, and ice. It's called an ice pop because it tastes exactly like one.

Tonight I had an idea for a new version of A Christmas Carol and the idea excites me.

Off to London tomorrow to deliver paintings for judgement at the Discerning Eye. The marvelous Tim Rice is apparently a judge this year.

Music and Poetry, and Art Attack

Onwards I must charge! I'm feeling that this music is completed, but I know that no matter how good I think it is, or how happy or unhappy I am with it, it is the world I must convince to give it a try, which is always the hard part. First; here is the final cover. I needed to change the Marius Fate text so I signed his name in ink and converted it to a spline form using Inkscape.

I feel I'm getting to the end of this long project, and this means a withdrawal and sadness. The hard work is over, and I'm starting to think "what is this all for?" but then, isn't that the case with all art? I love art because it is the ultimate challenge: social, technical, mental, spiritual, physical. Artist is the ultimate profession because it is you alone and your abilities, however great, however small, doing your best at any subject you choose, and normally doing something rejected by the rest of society. It is the very abstract nature, the very freedom, of it that gives us the chance to prove and do something extraordinary, something that nobody has thought of doing, or that nobody would ever consider doing. The best of art is what others consider mad, strange, obscure, pointless, and it is this very factor that makes it magical, because we have chosen to excel at something unique.

Art is the ideal training of mind, soul, body, and will, because all of these things are needed. To be creative we must be alone, because creativity is necessarily individual. We must have discipline and conviction; enough humility to improve ourselves, but enough empathy to do something that others will see truth in. Truth, yes, it is our truth in our work, and this personal honesty that is the vital ingredient. The only morality is honesty, and this is the target of every artist: to prove this honesty, and in craft this is done by putting in a seemingly ridiculous amount of time, effort and care into something. It is perhaps for this reason that art is like prayer, a meditation on being and the fundamental purpose of life itself. Like a quest for a supreme god; art is a quest for an abstract perfection.

The Modern Game is nearly complete, and now I'm working on a book for it. In this digital world it is physical things that are special. It's also time I put together my circus themed poetry collection. Poetry is truly the hardest art form. All poets seems to think that they are the truest of all artists, being a poet is almost an egomaniacal disease, but perhaps this is because poetry appears to be so easy when it is this very accessibility that makes it the hardest of all art forms. The best poets I know don't rate their work, the poets that talk the most are the worst. I want my poetry collection to push some boundaries, but won't spend too much life essence on it. Greater masterpieces are at hand.

My art seems to be a clutter of old work; old, poor things that I need to clear out to move on. I know I can do so much better now, in all fields, than ever before. I must, and will do this, carefully and with due focus.

The Trees and Modern Game Music

A few busy days. First, listed Masculinity Two on my website and Cornutopia Music, and updated the main pages to highlight these, then sent the music plus a short bio to Manchester-based Tariff Street Radio, submitted the track to BBC Introducing, created a listing for the single on Musicbrainz, then registered the track with the PPL database. All of this is part of the necessary paperwork for music registration.

Then, more work on some of the remaining music on the album. I've not listened to it in weeks, and the break was really useful in pulling the 'bandages of false' hearing off, allowing me to hear the music afresh again. A few more changes were needed. First I decided to try some new vocoder sections to Lookin' For A Lover which gives the track a wonderful 70s disco feeling. I really love this track now. It was always one of my favourite tracks, and a good candidate for a second single, or video highlight.

The track that needed and needs the most work was The Trees. It was always a strange track, with a mood of fear, something very rare in music. It follows a structure of four parts; a slow glowing in chords that cycle through complex fifths, yet the drone-like lead vocals fixate on G, making everything sound strange and discordant, angular like a lost child stuck in the Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. This builds up to a climax and a powerful chorus in G-major. This was originally the finale, but this dis off to a quiet piano solo, as though we fall asleep to drift among the trees, lost in some comforting dream. After a minute or so, the solo fades away to repeat the climactic part again, but the music now overwhelms the screaming vocals, suffocating them with many melodies like a tangle of branches. The song ends with a second climax, a dead stop inspired by Sheer Heart Attack by Queen.

The Trees is the most complex track on the album, and one of the least like pop music, perhaps because it is the least overtly pleasant. Other tracks like the minimalist The Stars or Notes From Space are also rather unconventional, but still rather pleasant and the sound fits with the rest of the album more neatly than The Trees.

The Trees has been a challenge to put together, taking many months and many revisions, all because of the strange combination of changing, naturalistic mood and tempo; a lead melody that doesn't match any tempo or backing melody at all, and all sorts of reasons. I'm not really sure if this track is finished yet. This is the one track that persuaded me to pull the original recording of the album and re-record it. At some point, I'll have to say 'enough!' and move on. It is now the last bit of music left to do.

One other thing I've done over the weekend is convert and upload two new videos to the Mark Sheeky Music channel, converting Sabine Kussmaul's videos for The Anatomy of Emotions to accompany some music from that album. The track I liked most from the original performance was called The Stars (named Starscape on the album), but I've chosen the two opening tracks for videos; Passages of Movement (which has been combined with Tim Watson's vocals) and Memory. Both will premiere on the channel over coming weeks. All premieres take place at 8pm on Thursdays.