A relatively slow day yesterday, but I always seem to think that. The key is to move on. I'm at times struck with a melancholy of transience, that the good times of now, however good they actually are, will one day go. We only have so much life, skill, energy, so must work when we can, as best we can. Sometimes I feel days away from calamity - this feeling is a good incentive.
Yesterday I finalised the production to Dreams Of You. It's an odd song and I'm growing to like it. The second half of this E.P. is so different from the first. The six planned tracks are now complete. I'm toying with a central 'interlude' type track and wrote some words last night that might work for it, a sonnet about being visited by demons. I also played a little synth, practising MIDI recording from the Reface, which I hadn't done before (I've played a few solos but always live takes).
Today I decided to paint and completed the painting of Oliver Cromwell that I started in 2019. It's an odd painting for me because of its simplicity, yet this matches the original vision; simply a shadowed and scary face looming from the mist. It's a very difficult portrait because the only real source image of Cromwell is the miniature by Samuel Cooper, and I wanted to paint it with totally different lighting from a Rembrandt painting, and with far more detail than the miniature had. I decided, at the very end, to paint the 'ghost' of King Charles I in the fog. I dislike and fear Cromwell and have always associated more with King Charles. Perhaps Cromwell represents my father, or madness, and this personal resonance struck me when working on it - but other viewers won't see that. There is always a political dimension to Cromwell the Puritan dictator.
Remember a few days ago when I said that the wooden frame I made was perhaps my finest? Well there was a tiny dark spot on it, so I got some acetone out to try to fix it and it utterly ruined the frame... how often have obsessive perfectionists done this! I'm now faced with totally refinishing and remaking the frame... I could sand it all down to nothing and start again, and indeed this might be the only viable option.
In other news, the Chinese translation of The Intangible Man was flawed so I've been resent a new manuscript and the day's work converting this into an epub file is wasted and I have to spend another day doing it all again. The Chinese version of 21st Century Surrealism has sold one copy on Smashwords despite its success in English. These translations might be worth it in the long term but might be worth less than even a day's work at the moment. We shall see.
