First day of the month, so regular backups today.
I'm full of enthusiasm and ideas for paintings, which I feel I can paint better than ever before. Slowly reawakening the slumbering visual mind. On the back of an order for paint last week, I spent £125 on paint and surfaces today. At some point I'll need to scan or photograph the paintings already complete of this year, but there is no rush.
Paints ordered include Manganese Violet, a very stable colour, the exact hue of potassium permanganate smoke, so it's a mauve-like pinky-purple. I also have Ultramarine Violet, which is the most delicate and gentle and most transparent colour, and perhaps the most beautiful colour of all for it, a delicate maiden. It seems to need an infinity of layers. It improves with each one, but the next day looks almost unpainted, wanting yet more and more. I love it but hardly use it.
I also have some Old Holland Dioxazine, which is, bizarrely, according to its label, a mix of three pigments. I do not believe this and think it's a printing error because the three pigments on the label could hardly make this intense and staining purple. I will order an alternative though, from Blockx, because this Old Holland tube, expensive though it is, has a problem in that it never seems to dry. I've had the paint remain sticky for over 4 weeks, and as this colour is at its most useful when used neat as a glaze, this is a serious problem. It's also so powerful that anything even slightly wet could easily leak into varnish and ruin a painting. It's about £30 for one tube but that will last me 10 years at least. It's powerful stuff, and violets like this are rarely used. I generally dislike these powerful organic pigments because I don't trust their permanence (this can easily be illusory due to power) and they stain brushes and everything else they touch. Ultramarine Violet is more beautiful in every way, but too weak to be practical most of the time.
The manganese I use all the time, in flesh glazes.
This evening I made another animation, a looping Spotify Canvas for 'I, Sisyphus', using Argus. I found a little memory infringement error in the program so fixed that too. I also signed the agreement for the Chinese translation of the William Blake book.
I want to paint a lot, I feel the dawn of a new renaissance. How awful my old paintings seem. It's frustrating at times to have ancient work, painted when I was merely starting to learn, seen widely, when I know I can paint far better now. The only answer is to paint more; but will, must, only really do so in good light and I've a lot to do things I want to do this month including updating The Many Beautiful Worlds of Death and updating some software (perhaps Outliner).
On we push our happy rock.
