I dream of being kidnapped at a large building like an asylum or museum. I had a fancy meal there around a very large table but the administrators and staff were trying to drug me. I ran from them, chased by their mob, but was dragged down to a basement. I managed to escape, but discovered that I was part copper, part machine, a bit like the character Tik Tok from the film Return to Oz. transformed against my will. My home was a large mansion, and my android butler (and a second character, perhaps connected to Elton John) moved in fixed patterns around the place at high speed, I just caught glimpses of him in the distances, at the end of hallways. My 'brother' arrived to help me, but was look horrific, covered in mud-like growths and at first I tried to attack him with a knife, thinking him one of the enemies, before I realised who he was and that he wanted to help.
It was a highly visual dream, no doubt inspired by the wonderful Jan Svankmajer's 'Alice', which we watched recently, and The Muppet Show.
In the day, I noticed a tiny 'click' in one of the Nightfood tracks and wanted to fix it. I discovered that it wasn't a faulty recording but a bug in Prometheus, the click appeared when two tracks were active, but not if either one was, and even if one of the tracks was set to zero volume. It turned out to be a bug in the automatic shutting-off part of the program. Tracks which are silent for a fixed time (one second by default) will shut off to avoid processing silence. This speeds up the program hugely. Here, the silencing of tracks caused the blip because they were silenced in the very loop that generated the audio, and switching them off knocked everything out of sequence.
This was only a problem since v2.69, 2nd April, while I was working on Nightfood, so only applies to three of the Nightfood tracks - I've made no music since. I spent all morning finding this bug. With luck, it is now fixed.
In the afternoon I met Deb and her clients in the park on this first warm day of the year. We threw my boomerang, a gift that was last thrown on the weekend before lockdown in March 2020.
I then finalised the first draft of the second edition of The Many Beautiful Worlds of Death. I will release this fairly soon (almost certainly to zero applause or note by the world, but to me, this is one of my best artworks, some of the images here, as in my other story in Deep Dark Light, I will remember forever).
Tonight, I've been thinking about an old work called Love is Dead... a nice miniature first made in 2013, and revisited in 2019. Here is the 2013 version:
Here is the 2019 version:
I'm not happy with either portrait. I always planned to make a second work, Love is Alive, so I aim to do this. Painting the miniatures will be easy now; my concern is fixing up the frame...
The black wood backing helps a lot for hanging in exhibitions (that was my motivation for making it) but it does harm the spirit of the work. The resin frame is stuck onto a 6mm MDF backing. This itself causes problems as the wood is soft and can crack, as well as being rather shallow. The vines are made from Polymorph, a very strong plastic, but it has very poor adhesion both to paint and to anything it is laid upon. The natural thorns break off all of the time and have been reattached a lot.
Now, I would use epoxy clay for everything; it's great for modelling and strong, but I didn't then. I keep toying with the idea of throwing it out and starting afresh, but I can't, and that seems to be a little over the top. I have a second identical frame too, all ready for Love is Alive, and that has some Polymorph vines.
So, I've removed the paintings and will carefully sculpt, carve and repaint this frame, and make a duplicate for Love is Alive at the same time. It will be a difficult task. The resin of the main frame is very strong, almost as hard as ceramic. It must smoothly and beautifully blend with the other parts. I don't know what to do yet about the wood backing...
