The Safe Box, You Know How It Is

Painted yesterday, adding a tentative layer to The Safe Box. I came up with a new painting idea, You Know How It Is When You Remember A Friend, and worked on resolving this into a more refined vision while keeping the feeling. Too little time tonight for more commentary on this interesting and vital process.

Today, a happy visit. Crewe Council have announced a public art commission for a major work measuring 23 by 8.5 metres using perforated steel. I have immediately drafted a few ideas, studying many elements of Crewe's past, present, future. I've been reading about types of cubism, too. I have the idea for a Crewe symphony to accompany the work. I can just picture the performance.

Moon Over Shakespeare Glazing, Journey to the Centre of the Earth

A slow day yesterday, but reframed both new works, these are complete. Then, the slow turn back to painting for the first time since the start of the month. How I always miss it and how much more I can and want to paint! Today I completed Summer Holiday from the English Triptych, and started work on the glazing of Moon Over Shakespeare. The key is to attack the best and most urgent paintings first. These, after painting them, instantly lose their fear and sense of awe - that juice sucked from them by the next great idea, the next conception of masterpiece.

The sky was worked over, delicate smoothing and some modelling, and the cypress trees which flank my mock-Elsinore. See the contrast of the new sky and the underpaint of the rock.

The painting world is waking up. Many local artists, I glean from the literal waste-of-time which is social media, are taking part in exhibitions here and there. I have my few works in The Macc Lounge and have heard more on the prospective pop-up for this autumn which I'll take part in. I've also entered the Discerning Eye with my usual high hopes and aspirations. I'll aim to spend September, the last month of light, painting.

I listened to Rick Wakeman's Journey to the Centre of the Earth while painting. The album makes me laugh. At times it is so epic and fantastic in sound, but there is something so false and deliberately comic about it. Deep questions of life, death, and spirituality are asked and the answer is always a jazz-funk rock solo - the contrast is massively comical. The group find the long-dead body of a quaternary man, and a romantic song is sung about his mysterious life, then the group find a real-live pre-historic shepherd - but he's not worth singing about so is basically moved over. Hilarious. The album is effectively romantic; an exposition of skill and bombastic feeling over anything deeper, the choir and enormity of the sonic forces add to this. For this genre everything must be 'over the top'. The album is nothing deeper than this, and is a success for it; it's a triumph of performance not of music or narrative and even less-so of lyrics.

Frames Done, National Poetry Competition

Rather a slow day today. I had hoped to move onto the music recording but now I'll move the my focus back to painting./ The lighthouse beam of my mind will take a day or two to rotate. I started the day by launching the sale of my PC game Taskforce and releasing Outliner. I played short games of both.

I wrote a poem for the National Poetry Competition today and entered that. I've entered every year since 2009, and, though I don't expect to ever win, it does my poetry good to push myself, and it does poetry itself good to enter... some paid contests are like patronisation of the art, and this is one, so I enter this to support the art of poetry a little.

Then I tidied up my frames, brushed off the flakes of gold, and framed the two paintings. Sadly, the bright gold frame was too bright, it was like a glowing light that made the delicate painting look too dark, so I decided to revisit the other frame. I distressed and sanded its edge and added some brown to give it a sort of bone-like hue. That looks fine now; so two frames are done, and I have a spare very gold one... I think I'll dull some of it and perhaps dust some of it, but all later.

This evening I entered the Discerning Eye. I'm not sure if I really feel like moving back to painting immediately, but I must. Perhaps I could start with some new ideas or work on one of the glazings. Underpainting is always much more fun than glazing.

Frames, Van Gogh, SY-85

Gilded the inner edge of my frames in the morning.

It was probably the best gilding experience I've yet had with loose leaf. Transfer leaf is so much easier. There are many skills and tricks with gilding. First, you must never touch the gold (or anything that will) with fingers. I now use two knives (see picture) to manipulate these leaves like a veritable Edward Kniveshands. The key skill is perhaps that the oil size must be exactly the right dryness and very thin and even. If it is too wet it can 'squidge' through the gold and make a terrible mess. if too dry, the gold won't stick. In an early attempt, I used epoxy casting resin to gild with, and this actually solved this problem because epoxy sets internally, but this is perhaps overkill; epoxy is hard and goes yellow and (probably) brittle.

Well, my pad worked well enough and the gilding was done by 1pm.

I read about van Gogh again on Wikipedia. When I started painting, back in 2004, I read all of van Gogh's letters in order. All artists have an affinity with van Gogh. Again I feel I'm exactly like him, except that he was mad and I am sane. In one 70-day period he painted 80 paintings, how shamefully unproductive I feel! But I do spend a lot of time making frames, and presenting the work and doing all sorts of silly notations, and the work of exhibiting, and writing music. Perhaps he had the right idea.

His early works were dark and dour. Everyone loves his later prettier works because people like pretty things and pretty colours. Was he painting to please others? We all paint beauty, dark or light.

My next step: to try to get my SY-85 and OctaMED set up working. I can't recall how I recorded it before, but I had to at least mix the input from the computer and the synth; I almost certainly did this with a simple Y wire or splitter, rather than using a mixer. Now I will use a mixer. I tested it today and it seemed to work, and I noted that my Zoom H4 can record in 24-bit (and up to 96khz). I think 44100hz in 24-bit will be better than 48000hz in 16-bit. There's no point in wasting the hard drive size of extreme audio quality.

But, sigh, the USB floppy drive would not read or write the DS/DD discs, despite the description claiming to. In fact, I can't find any floppy drive for sale which will read DD discs (these are 720kb, as used by the Amiga, Atari ST, and other early machines like my SY-85. Later discs were HD, 1.44Mb). I think the new Sony drive I've fitted to the SY-85 will read HD discs, so I've ordered some floppies to test this.

It's really taken immense effort to record this music: buying and fitting a new floppy drive to the synth, and buying a new drive controller for it. Buying a floppy drive for the PC, some discs (both DD and HD), a MIDI cable, and a USB MIDI device, and getting OctaMED from the 90s working, and all for some ancient music which was never very good in the first place - but, it's better to keep it than lose it forever, and of course, quality is very subjective. To my teenage and 20s ears, it was the best music I had done.

We picture in our minds an ideal and strive towards it, so the present is always unsatisfactory and frustrating. If we pictured a worse life, we might be grateful for what we have in a 'Scrooge redeemed' way, but probably more fearful and downbeat. Not picturing or striving for anything would be stagnation, even if we felt happy in a Buddhist sort of way. Striving towards something an ideal and recognising the consequences of the struggle and the frustrations of perfectionism is, for me, the best option.

Hopefully these chains of the past can be cast off and I can work on new art. I have 11 PC games that are currently unavailable and need remastering: Arcangel, Roton, Martian Rover Patrol, Trax, Outliner, Breakout Velocity, Fallout, Bool, Firefly, Gunstorm, Gunstorm II. I have no time or incentive to do this for now. Perhaps I'm trapped too much in the past, although I know that art, like mining, is tunnelling and shoring up the tunnel. Everything, for me, is long term.

Frame Painting, On Skill, Exhibitions

Finalised my filing, and painted my frames today. I started by filling the little gaps with more gesso, then sanding. This worked rather well, better than I expected. Then, paint. Here are the results so far:

Unlike my tests, the grain was rather raised with these. It does look rather nice, actually, but was unexpected because it didn't happen before. Perhaps more vigorous sanding would stop this because to some extent it is 'faux grain' due to brush marks in the deep gesso. My mix may have been more paint-rich than my more watery test paints. A layer of sealer (I think a polyurethane 'yacht' varnish would be a good choice) might help. I could paint some areas and not others to control the grain effect.

The painting went ok, and these frames do look better, and with more ease, than the others which took me days of effort. I will add gold leaf to the inside edges.

So I'm making a flat pad to put and cut the gold on. Previously I've used a sponge with cloth lightly rested on, but the sponge is too soft and cutting is difficult.

Doing this made me think of 'skill' and 'talent'. I was sanding quickly, but well, and thinking about craft and skill. I'm always slightly offended when people say that I am 'talented', as though I possess some natural ability vs. years of hard work and endless practice and learning and trying every aspect of something. I don't believe in talent, but then what is a skill?

It made me think how some well-practiced skills and crafts might appear divine to the eyes of people from the pre-machine age. Now we can see machines making beautiful things. Would we call their acts skill? If so then skill is simply a list of rules, and perhaps programming, the first thing I learned, is a universal skill indeed. Programming teaches us that anything is possible by the application of logical rules, step-by-step, done without emotion. Any skill is this, so part of mastering a skill, such as oil painting, such as composing music, or playing the piano or guitar, is a matter of knowing these rules, and if needed, making them.

With each step of my framing job, just as with each step of every painting, I write up what I've done and try to break things into a list of rules like this. So, perhaps there is no skill, other than the skill of this knowledge; the skill to make rules and obey them like a machine would. One day, after years of doing this, someone might consider your actions a talent, but we will know that it would be wrong to call a computer 'talented' for its execution of a good chess program.

After gilding, and framing, my outstanding jobs are to record my 90s OctaMED music, which would free me up to sell the SY-85, then finish the paintings in progress (will I have time to paint more? I would love that), finalise the Nantwich Museum exhibition plans, and photograph the completed works with my new photo-rig.

The Macc Art Lounge is open again and has a token few of my paintings, kindly exhibited, curated, and vended by Ché. I don't have time, or transport confidence, for now, to man the shop and fully take part in activities there. At the moment it is the only outlet for my paintings. I may have a London exhibition opportunity soon, but art opportunities are limited to that and any competitions I enter from today. Things are just waking up from the needle-prick of Covid's enchanted sleep.

Blue Gesso

Completed draft 1 of my new files yesterday, so racing back to framing work. Feel tired and a little overwhelmed by my hamster-wheel existence, but there is no alternative. What is life but activity?

I made a couple of frames a few weeks ago and now I'm making two of the same size, for the same paintings, with a new (hopefully better) procedure. I started by gluing the top and back together to create a length with a 10mm rebate. Today, I measured these to a full length, then sanded the inner edge, to round it off a little, adding a smoother slope into the painting. Then I sanded the back with a power sander, far more efficient than doing this by hand. I had considered planing the back, but my tests showed that this gives a worse finish, and the back is very nearly flat anyway.

Then a coating of my home-made blue gesso. I used about 90ml of chalk, then liquid acrylic paint and water to make a paint of a syrup-like consistency. This was difficult to apply, it was rather thick, went sticky very quickly and had to be poured on, but this was a good way to apply it, lots of paint, poured and brushed. It made the process messy but relatively quick. There was time to texture it, and this worked really well. The pouring method was anticipated, and not much of a problem. Generally, in paint, several thin coats gives the smoothest finish, but this is a thick chalk layer that is very easily sanded.

After that, the two lengths looked like this:

The paint is dark at first but goes dramatically lighter when dried, this itself really helps see the exact texture of the surface which is really useful. White gesso is far less useful for this reason. The length on the left is sanded, it goes even lighter then. When wetted (with more paint, or varnish, or water) it becomes a fabulous dark blue. It's really quite miraculous.

The latter shows the texture.

After that, sawing and gluing. This was surprisingly inaccurate; most of the cuts were perfect, but the one I expected to work best seemed just wrong. Anyway, this isn't important. The frames are now gluing and when set, I aim to apply more gesso to fill in any gaps, thus, it should look like one smooth object.

The grain is raised by the water-based paint. I wonder if a coat of something solvent based (Paraloid B72? Polyurethane Varnish?) would seal it and allow super-smooth application of paint.

This is fun, my frames must look good and be part of my craft, but it doesn't feel like the best expression or use of my abilities. I must strive to create new paintings and music that are, again, better than I've done before, and I feel I can, but this is always difficult. I'm pulled regularly to tedious jobs to scrape for money, and the admin work; filing, records, though necessary, feels unproductive. The three paintings in progress might be my last of the year.

It's been a good painting year in craft terms but I feel I've only started, and want to create larger and more epic work. The 2021 clock has beaten me. I spend so much time improving or caring for older work, and soon I must work on a new cabinet for the Richard Dadd painting... a long-term aim. That was my first major woodworking project, and I've learned a lot in the 9 years since. This great painting deserves a masterpiece of a cabinet to match.

More Exhibition Filing

A long and slow day yesterday, filed just 2 years of competitions and exhibitions and events. The going was slow partly due to the need to merge things... Today I've completed the job by filing 6 years worth; but this is partly because this and last year have had almost no events.

How odd the whole 'open art' exhibition and competition scene is. Now that everything is in one file, all 615 competitions, exhibitions and events since 2007, I can see things a little more clearly. I had one painting selected for the Discerning Eye in 2016 and 2017, but not 2018, 2019, where I entered quite a lot weird and powerful work, or 2013 when I entered Song of Amorophobia. I think the complex/sculpted frames might put them off, but it's impossible to tell. I know how much luck is involved in judging art (alas, yes, luck).

Song of Amorophobia may have been counted as too large. It is a tiny painting, but has metal tubes dangling from it. It's still one of my greatest paintings and best artworks. I can't really change myself to try and get selected, and besides the judges are different every year. Yet, I have so many paintings to choose from that choosing what to submit is always a challenge. Well, I will try again this year.

Exhibition Filing

Two really full days. Rose at 7am yesterday and worked with hardly a break until 8:30pm, slowly converting my 15 years of art exhibitions, competition entries, applications, and copying them to one master file. It's an exhausting process which continues today.

I'm currently at event/exhibition/competition number 600 and about halfway through 2017 (my first year was 2007).

This is important for a few reasons. I'm not the sort or artist who makes commercial work and sells it in one place. This file isn't like a stock manifest or accounts in a shop (although that is part of it), in a way this list is part of the art itself. It does store what artwork was where and when, which is useful to know, but it also lists every competition or application I've tried and with what, as well as how it all went, and things like photos from the events, rehearsals (the list covers live performances, and festivals for example). This information was all recorded somewhere, but generally in separate files on a year-by-year basis, which makes it harder to track down things, like the fate of one particular artwork. When it's all in one file, the tree of fate for every painting, story, poem... can be tracked, right back to 2007 - well, in theory.

It's taking an inordinate amount of time because I want to neaten and somehow unify things. The delivery dates for example should be called "Dropoff Date:" but there are lots of different dates, previews, prize events, closing events, selected and unselected collections, judgement dates, varnishing days. For old exhibitions this isn't that useful (is it at all useful?) but I think, if it is there, it needs to be correctly and neatly recorded, somehow part of the process of art itself. It's an odd obsession, but I think it will make doing these things more efficient in future. It will make it faster to track things down and track progression (hopefully there is progression). It also gives something of an 'overview' of events and institutions. Some, the the RBSA in Birmingham, or the Three Counties Open in Keele, I've been taking part in for years and I can see how and why and what the results, if any, were.

It is interesting to see everything I've tried and done, from stalls here and there, to talks, to live shows, to poetry and story competitions. Reminded of my cat painting shown in New York, the exhibition in the crumbling Liverpool asylum of Newsham Park, the coffee art project bizarreness, and the periods of growth and stings over the years.

Well, this will take me a few days, far longer than I had hoped. By the end, I may have 1000 new folders for information. Then I can start on the frames for the Discerning Eye paintings, the deadline is looming.

Amiga Games Part II

Spent yesterday finalising and preparing the last of my Amiga games, so now, all 20 games plus SCM4 will be available. My colour-cycle editor, Cyced, is missing and probably lost forever (though Derek Hall may, just possibly, have a copy). I'll release them one per day or so. The virtual hard drive installation of Blade and Burnout took a while to work out. Also, some of my games were listed by Mark Sheeky, some by Scorpius, so I've set them all to both, and generally tested each for the best compatibility with Amiga Forever, keeping the disc drive sounds as these add an important loading indicator.

After that, we headed out almost immediately to Macclesfield and the launch of Joy Winkler's book Morgan in a venue called The Button Warehouse. The room was bare and cold, with hard metal seats, wood tables, and eternal incense smoke - myrrh. Myrrh: the scent of pain and misery. The place was so church-like that I felt instantly cold and bloodless and transported unhappily to my youth. No tea. The drinks were iced, which added to the austerity. Scented smoke, to most people, is perhaps a pleasant background addition, but to me it burns like a gas attack. Burning smoke indoors is essentially artificial pollution, and probably carcinogenic. My childhood was spent in rooms so thick with tobacco smoke that I can't breathe even a hint of smoke without discomfort. We arrived almost an hour early.

The evening became progressively better, however and discomforts were forgotten when Joy started to speak. Everyone there was lovely, and Joy is always a pleasure to hear. Her book, Morgan, was 15 years in the writing.

I arrived home late and slept badly. I dreamt of a pile of Victorians keen to kill King Kong with some sort of train of cars, in particular two iron-clad tank-like vehicles with slow firing projectiles like giant iron pencils. The shots didn't kill Kong, but angered him. He tried to bite the tank-like vehicle at the front (they werer shaped more like train carriages). It's slow firing gun was pointed right into his mouth and it confidently prepared to fire and blast Kong's brains all over the place, but the shots hit the ape's teeth, causing him pain and angering him further. The general assured us that the 'tank' at the back could still kill him, but I wasn't so sure. I awoke in great stomach pain.

My Amiga years, 1992 to 2002 were my least happy. I don't like to revisit them. Reminiscence and nostalgia are evil traps. I am keen to complete my archiving and create new things.

Itch Amiga

A busy day. Started by finalising the Nantwich Exhibition plans. I decided to include the English Triptych, so ending with my latest work, and include some illustrations and 3D models, too. Things can stay in this state for the time being.

Then adding the Knutsford event to my website, and a new page for 2021 events. I think there will be more to come.

Then started work on the Amiga games. I have 20 and each needed testing. Hideous was rather buggy with different configurations, but I found one that worked.

I mainly needed to grab screenshots of each game, and type up lots of information about each.

Hopefully, this will be the last time I'll need to do this. 11 games completed so far, including the complex Blade which, with 3 floppy discs, needed to be virtually installed on an Amiga hard drive to run. So much of creativity isn't creativity, but the filing of it.

Nobody ever bought Blade or Hideous, and of all of my 'shareware' games I didn't receive a single registration, but I gained a few friends from the Taskforce coverdisk; including one of my oldest and closest friends, Andrew Williams. All of the hours and years of meticulous work I put into those Amiga games, over a decade of my life, and all for next to nothing. I was a different person then. A silent and friendless one. A naïve one. An exploited one. I can't remember a thing about assembler programming, but those days perhaps showed me that one can still care about and love things that nobody else does. Many of my early games were rubbish, but each one was a slight improvement on the former.

I'll complete those tomorrow I think and hope, then off to Macclesfield for the launch event of Joy Winkler's new book. After that I'll start on the 'master event file', then the framing of these new works. I'd like to do the file first because the new works are for the Discerning Eye, and I'd like to note this in the new file rather than use the current system.

Then I can work on the (also old) music, and only then be creative with new things. The central panel of the English triptych still needs a second layer, as does Shakespeare.

On we march.

Neorenaissance Plans

Two full days. A short morning working on the 3D layout of Nantwich Museum yesterday. The original measurements didn't add up, but these were confirmed to be correct, so I bent the angles of the plan to fit. Most of yesterday was shopping, the first long day of this in months.

Lots of small jobs today, starting with the launch of a sale of Radioactive, and another sound effect release on itch. The main job was the layout for Neorenaissance.

I have so much I could show that the choices were a little overwhelming, I'd like to say yes to everything. I've had past exhibitions at The Cubby Hole which were strongly themed. How I loved those and how I miss that great venue. The Seventh Circle, where the venue was divided into heaven and hell in opposite rooms, was great fun and we dressed up as gods or devils or saints.

This time the theme is generally the eclectic, and it is basically a mix of all of my artwork: old, new, simple sketches, complex masterpieces, 2D work, 3D work, and lots of different media by myself and invited artists. So I've had to avoid showing a lot and there is never enough room for everything. The general plan is clockwise in chronological order. There will be some 3D work in glass cabinets, and I'll show my sketchbook for the first time, with ideas visible and the finished paintings.

Stockport is more like an art gallery than a museum, but Nantwich Museum is more like a museum, a learning environment, which makes me consider things like message and education more, but my art isn't academic and I don't like the pretentions of that art world. Academic art, art colleges, exist to train artisans to create work to a specific brief and budget for public bodies and corporate clients, a profession like architects. This 'art' is not ever the culture it aspires to be. At the same time, I've got so much work that I think I should display as much of its range as possible in this popular space, and an exhibition that is general, broad, wide in range, will match my creative output, at least a little, so this exhibition will be something, however small, of a retrospective. This is perhaps also appropriate for my local museum.

Doing this made me realise that my filing system might need updating. All of my exhibitions, and everything I show or enter into a competition, has been recorded in a file each year. In 2018 I decided to create a second master index of 'events' and performances. Now I think I need to merge the two, so one file lists every exhibition and competition and everything that happened at or in it. This will be weeks of work but will save time in the long run.

This came to light when I lost my Jabberwocky drawings. I drew a triptych of work some time ago, and last showed these at the 'Relics' exhibition in Chester. I can't remember seeing these since, but have a vague memory of seeing them framed. Storing and keeping track of every artwork is so difficult. Memory is inadequate; everything must be carefully recorded and stored in a logical system.

So, my jobs are to update this filing system, then add the 20-or-so Amiga games to itch, plan the Neorenaissance layout and artists and events involved, master a live CD of our Wonderland show, record the 40-50 SY-85 tracks from the 90s onto a new album, list all 50 or so of the IndieSFX sound effect sets on itch, and make the new frames for the two paintings for The Discerning Eye. It will be a busy two weeks.

OctaMED and Amiga Games

Well, against what I thought were all odds, I managed to get the Amiga Forever emulator to run OctaMED with working MIDI. Effectively, a virtual MIDI interface can be virtually inserted into the emulated serial port, which then runs through the normal PC MIDI system, in my case a new USB MIDI adaptor. This managed to get some of the music playing, but only some. About half of the MED files would not load into OctaMED SoundStudio v1.03c, which was the last and best Amiga version. I wondered if an older version of MED would help, but it didn't.

I started the day by sorting the MED files that worked from those that didn't. A couple were compressed (a glance at the hex file via Irfanview showed this) but OctaMED didn't seem to recognise these at all. Then I realised that I must have been using the PC version of OctaMED, because Arcangel, Martian Rover Patrol, and Roton were all PC games, so I don't think I even had my Amiga back then. A quick search took me, via Facebook, to a free copy of OctaMED for PC, which was only recently (2017) given away by the original publisher, Ray Burt-Frost.

This program, MED Soundstudio v2.1, seems to load all of the files. I've not tested it with MIDI yet, but I'm confident it will work so I've ordered a USB floppy drive to transfer the data to the SY-85. Then I can re-record all 40 or so tunes from the 1990s. Of course, the Arcangel music, Roton and Overlander (the Martian Rover Patrol theme) are already recorded in pretty good quality anyway, and the original Synaesthesia music, but that's all. A lot is missing.

I'll create a new album of this music, but won't release it all publicly. There is little point in re-releasing Arcangel (I could theoretically release a 'remaster' but it would be nigh on identical to the original, which was fine). The Synaesthesia 1999 music too doesn't need an outing, and I can't release the Mission Impossible Theme remix, but a few tunes, like Overlander, Metropolis, Opiad etc. are worthy of being 'out there'.

I wondered whether to record them dry, without any audio effects; the SY-85 imposes its effects across the whole sequence rather than per-track. You can adjust the send levels per track, so turn down the reverb, say, on some, but not have different effects per-track. I think this is overkill. To have one copy of the music as intended is enough. This is infinitely better than losing it forever; preservation is my main goal.

The OctaMED quest made me think about the ephemeral nature of the internet. Work from just 20 years ago is so hard to locate. If Ray Burt-Frost hadn't made OctaMED free, and if I hadn't managed to repair the SY-85's ancient drive, lots of my music would have been lost forever. 20 years is a blip in the life of humanity, yet it was already difficult to get things working. So much from that time is in danger of being lost. I found a post on a contemporary Amiga forum asking for Hilt and Hilt II, my old games, so I decided to put these on itch.io, a good and stable platform for downloading. If OctaMED was on itch, I could have found it in a flash. Will itch be around in 20 years?

In other work, I spent a lot of time filing the Wonderland event. Mike Drew took a video which indicated how dark we were, I'll investigate lighting options. For every show, like every painting, or anything else, the next one will be better. I also found time to glue some wood for the future hand/bird and Aspartame frames, too.

Wonderland, Photography Rig, Amiga Tunes

A busy few days. Wonderland went ahead to plan on Thursday, a really nice performance and reception. We arrived at 16:00, which was just a comfortable time, setting up took over an hour. Our most complex show yet, and with 4 amps (and a spare), 3 keyboards, guitar, mix, projector, it's almost the largest show we can do. I can't imagine needing to use more than 3 keyboards. An extra mic possibly, an extra guitar possibly, but I think this is probably our equipment limit.

There were about 14 people there from the max of 30, which is not bad. Nobody from the Knutsford Music Festival were present unless the library staff count. We were assured that we were by far the most artistic element of the, from what I gather, is a rather traditional folk event, whatever that might mean. One nice part of the show was that the great actor, now in his 80s, Christopher Gilmore, wrote a spontaneous poem for us which we improvised and performed as an encore.

Home at 11pm or so, and carefully unpacking the many kilos of equipment. Yesterday was largely a day of recovery, but Deb and I managed lots of practical trips out. I managed to find some clip-frames for the glass, and some 21x46mm wood for the new frames, and a trip to Nantwich Museum to measure the venue.

One other thing done on Thursday was using wire wool to smooth and polish the 15mm aluminium tubes for my painting photography rig. This worked really well and now the little cradle does slide smoothly like a proverbial (and actual) trombone. It sticks a little in the inside edges. I realised that this is because the (identical) grippers on the ends are tightened, so, obviously, the cradle will want to be tight too. I'll have to put something in the ends to keep the tubes 'central'.

I've ordered a USB to MIDI cable and this works on PC. I've also managed to run an ancient version of Octamed Soundstudio v1.00, and for the first time in 20+ years, play an old tune called Addagio using the fantastic Amiga Forever emulator. That used synth sounds built into MED. Most of my MED music was MIDI only.

I've forgotten almost everything about the Amiga and MED. The Amiga didn't easily support MIDI, you had to connect an interface to a serial port. The PC also doesn't support MIDI, it's almost too old compared to USB. The odds that these will work together are very slim, even if they are technically possible. If someone can program the emulator to support emulated MIDI, probably a very specialist addition, it would have to connect to Windows' MIDI capabilities, which are also complex. This, while I have my Yamaha SY-85, represent the current only hope of re-playing the music I wrote back then. I have the SY-85 preset files, these were copied over the from keyboard's floppy disc, but even now in mere 2021, floppy drives for PC are rare, so I can't save them to a floppy to then re-load into the SY-85. I would have to use MIDI to send the data over if I can.

Of course, I'll keep the MED files and settings. One day, maybe the Amiga and a Yamaha SY-85 will be software synthesized, and these tunes can all be replayed. This is a somewhat distant hope. Now, buying an old Amiga 1200 might be easier, but hardly worth it. I have 90% of the music recorded somewhere, but much of it is on MiniDisc. I wonder if those discs deteriorate? If I know the tune, I can re-sequence them by ear relatively easily.

For the record, here are all of the MED tunes I composed in the 90s on Amiga:

I ache to create (and store) more. Art is like mining: we dig a tunnel; we shore up the tunnel. My main goal for the month is finalise the art and layout for Nantwich. It's also increasingly likely I'll have work to show in London this year. I will probably have to put up painting prices at that point.

Wonderland

A busy day yesterday, the final full Wonderland rehearsal. One problem was the projector videos. These appear in an annoyingly unpredictable order and the viewing order cannot be changed. They seem to appear in the order that the files are saved to the USB (nothing to do with filename or any other attribute) so I'm using Irfanview's Batch option to save out each file automatically in the right order, but yesterday this still didn't work. I'll have to hand check this today and keep trying until the order is correct. Perhaps I need to format the USB every time.

Also bought 10x lengths of wood for future framing, but not all of the wood I need was there, so I can't work on this further.

The 15mm aluminium tubing for the art photography arrived and this works well enough (much better than the steel) bit it is a little stiff and juddery. I had imagined, perhaps optimistically, that it might slide smoothly like a trombone, but the tube will never be completely straight. Perhaps I could sand out/enlarge the holes a little, although this would make things less accurate. Sanding the tube would be easier but that might decrease accuracy - but by how much? Is 1mm tolerance acceptable for a camera pointing down 1M away from the painting surface?

I need to plan the Nantwich Exhibition and work out which art goes where for a possible pop-up art shop. I keep putting this off but need to plan this as soon as possible and start to think about possible events and invite other artists to take part, if they would like.

Another thing going through my head is the rip-roarding theme to Overlander, which I've not recorded in the modern era. It exists as an OctaMED MIDI sequence for driving the SY-85 - I'm reminded that now, while I still have the synth, is the only time I could record these tracks in good quality, and some might be lost forever if I don't. They only exist in A: The Arcangel Sountrack (I can't remmeber how that was recorded, I guess via my old Soundblaster AWE-32 card) and B: Minidisc recordings, for most of them, plus C: The Roton theme and Overlander as wav files. All were recorded in onw shot without any balancing. I don't know if I can even run an OctaMED sequence nowadays.

Frame Textures

Day 3 of more frame texture experiments. One definite lesson is worth 100 maybes. I've learned a few things, but starting to ghet impatient now. I can imagine that it's easy to become so obsessed with research and the fun of experimentation than one loses sight of the practical aspect. These exeriments are only for making my actual frames with, so have started work on some options for the two paintings that need these frames.

I'll buy the wood tomorrow and start work on Wednesday, I'd like to get these done, but am aware that it takes days or weeks for one frame. Also tomorrow, another full rehearsal for Thursday's Wonderland.

There is so much equipment to bring for this. I feel tired out from a lot of physical running and framing work, there is a lot of wood work involved and moving up and down the stairs a lot. Perhaps I should rest more before this important show. Oh for more time, life, money.

FIG Admin, More Experiments

Only two hours sleep, my mind racing with gesso options and layers.

Started with some Fall in Green admin, sent out a newsletter and made sure the event was on my website and the Cornutopia Music Site.

Then cut some more wood samples and made two V-shaped chunks of wood which will hold a length of wood edge upwards. This might be useful for shaving or trimming an edge, or holding a 2.4M length of wood so that the front and sides can dry, or be painted comfortably.

Then a few more finish experiments. I've tried a few combinations. Like oil painting, the top layer is dominant due to reflection but the transmission also affects the hue. One nice thing about these coloured gessoes is less of a plastic look and finish. I made a new gesso mix with Dioxazine, a pigment which, like the phthalocyanine blues and greens, I dislike. I wondered if it would make a better 'black' with a brown top. It does look darker but the violet dominates.

I wanted to experiment with textures and thought of applying tin foil to the wet gesso layer.

You can see just how very intense the violet is, this is far darker than any of the gesso experiments so far. The texturing didn't really work very well. I'm unsure if it will ever dry correctly beneath foil.

I tried some surface effects, rolling brown crackles with a roller covered in foil. This works okay, a bit like animal print. I'm unsure if I will use it.

Broadly speaking I'm too exhausted to move or think clearly. I need, at least, to finalise the frame designs for the work I want to enter into the Discerning Eye. I don't want to enter without a frame (this might be a requirement, of course the entry and judgement is online only this year - another blow against the oil painters and for the rubbishy acrylic and 'digital' painters).

Frame Finish Experiments

A happy day of art experiments. For years, so far, I've made and decorated frames as I needed for each painting, learning finishes as I went, comparing new ideas with past ones, but this is a slow process. Now I've decided to systematically analyse each component of the different surfaces, and experiment wildly to generate new and spectacular effects. So I started today by cutting lots of 200mm sections from 10x36mm pine and trying different combinations. For the first time I'm making my own gesso designed for wood which I can colour.

Sometimes, the grain is pretty and useful. The most basic design is simply staining the wood, but I haven't made samples of those simple things. I know that, for stain, solvent based is best as water based stains raise the grain and are generally very weak. The new Ronseal Colron stains are awful compared to their old ones. I use Morrells solvent based stain now, though generally I use Golden Fluid Acrylics (GFA) for decoration. GFA Carbon Black and water is the best black stain, better than any solvent based black I've used.

The layers of a frame: wood, filler (for big gaps), 3D decorations or applied mouldings, gesso (which can be viscous or thin, most commercial acrylic gessos are thin), paint layers, gold leaf (which can be over paint or over gesso, generally it's better to have a coloured base behind gold), then some spattering, (many frame designs I see have cracking or spotting), physical distressing (sanding, wire brush, wire wool rubbing, bashing), powder or dust, varnish. Any of these are optional and the colour of any layer can vary, and most of these steps can be repeated to make an infinity of choices.

So today I've started some systematic experiments which I can keep and refer to. This is already useful. I've never used green gesso for example, or any sort of green chalk base, but I can already see how nicely it works.

In other news, I announced a Flatspace sale, the first of several game sales this month.

Wonderland, Trips

Such a busy day yesterday. First packing new paintings for a possible future display at the Macc Art Lounge, then a complete Wonderland rehearsal. I re-edited two of the videos, there are 57 including the necessary gaps and stills.

Today, the trip to deliver art and a happy meeting with Ché Finch and Gordon Scott, two of the nicest artists I know. A lot of being an artist is packing and unpacking and carrying. Now I keep paintings packed and wrapped, rather than doing this each time. Before wrapping, I inspect and repair any knocks. A bit of white to repair here:

One thing about acrylic paint is that it is very soluble in solvents, so easy to erase and completely replace.

After the Macc swap, a happy trip to Knutsford Library to inspect our performance space and meet Mike Drew, a true treasure of Cheshire, such a good organiser of events and supporter of artists. We've sold 6 tickets of 30 and need to sell more. Meeting these three people constitutes the most social I've been since the start of the pandemic in March 2020.

On we march.

Summer Holiday, Repairs

Completion of the Summer Holiday underpainting yesterday:

The other paintings in this triptych were painted with lots of detail with an optional glaze, as I was not sure if any refinement would be needed. Songs of Saint George, I imagined, might benefit from a glaze to the green hand, but now it looks fine, and touching it with the dangerously powerful Azo Yellow might be a mistake. This time though, I will nee da glaze because the tiny fly will need some hairs and some metallic green, which requires a transparent layer.

I'm in a positive mood as the things that have broken recently: my watch, shaver, SY-85 synthesizer, MDS-JB980 MiniDisc player, and now Marantz CD5005 CD player, have now been replaced or repaired or refurbished. The CD player developed a fault only having moved it a few days ago to fix the MiniDisc player. I opened it and cleaned the lens, no effect. I noted that the whole assembly was on springs and hovering like a proverbial Princess with her Pea, and the lens assembly nervously hovering separately on springs, so I pushed everything gently to spring it back into place. I tried again and it was magically fixed. The unit is 3 years old and has, so far, played everything flawlessly, so it was odd that it should break. The drawer mechanism is belt based so I'll probably have to replace that one day (well, will unless something else breaks first), although unlike the MiniDisc deck there are no YouTube guides. Oddly, the Marantz unit had handwriting in permanent marker on the circuit boards, so perhaps it is hand assembled. To break so easily did not impress me.

My artistic focus now is on frames and the technical aspects of this, I want these to be the best, so will start to document procedures. All skills are mastered by writing, recording, documenting. I'm still full of painting ideas but have limited time. One of my main goals for the month is to revisit my IndieSFX sound effects, which are not on sale anywhere and doing nothing. There is a lot of software I could list on itch or Steam too, and these might give me some needed income. Ideally, everything should be out there in some form. I've put so much work into things which are unseen, unheard, unknown.

Today we will rehearse for the Wonderland performance in Knutsford Library which will take place next Thursday. How I'd love a new synthesizer, too. Time marches on. I'm already looking to the October, the end of the painting season and the start of the music season.

The Scientific Rationale of Psychiatry

A doctor considering, scientifically, whether someone is sane or insane, mentally well or mentally ill, is no different than a priest determining whether a person is good or bad. At least the priest, these days, doesn't pretend that his method is scientific.

Sound Effects, Summer Holiday

Two very busy days. Spent most of yesterday updating and reviewing my IndieSFX sound effects, almost 50x sets of (normally) 100 sound effects. Many have a graphical icon for each one, but many only have a generic one. Some have a sound list with descriptions, but only about 8. Yesterday I made a spreadsheet sound list for every set, a tedious mechanical process. I would like to refurbish and fix up the full library.

Painting today, the third of the English Triptych called Summer Holiday. Here it is so far:

It's generally used cobalt turquoise colours for the blues, and light red and the faux-Naples yellow for the flesh. My 'default' flesh mix uses mars violet but here I wanted something warmer which might suffice for one layer.

Windows keeps wanting to update my graphics drivers to faulty ones. The drivers that came with it work fine, also over time, a lot of what is added is actually negative or useless anyway, such as general spy-like additions or 'custom' setups for lots of different games, which are nothing special. The whole concept of continual updates is inefficient, of course there is an analogue in medicine, with a population where most people are on a long term prescription.

August

A backup day, the first of the month. I'm short of money but looking back now I've had a busy and productive July, and will always push to the limit and invest everything in my art.

Today I've fixed the top tier of the Adam Hall keyboard stand. It's very solid metal, but has a few design flaws. It grips the inside of the tubular steel with an oddly shaped hex-bolt, which means a poor metal-metal friction grip which easily slips. I addressed this a few weeks back, but I noticed that the slope of the two bars are not aligned so the top keyboard always wobbles, by 5mm or so, quite a big gap. I could just use foam to level up but I investigated options of fixing the stand and clamped the pair into a vice to measure the error. The tubular steel is not suitable to bend into shape (even though its only about 1 degree or less out). The silver teeth-like gripper could be filed down to change the angle. Really they should have had the option to manually fine-adjust the slope because, unless they carefully check the slope (which they obviously haven't), these will be out of line. I filed the metal a little, but I thought that a less destructive solution is to loosen the grip on the bar that is too high, so did that. It wobbles, but gravity will keep it level.

I've fixed a few new features to Argus; to expand (double and interpolate) and contract (half size) modulators. It is important that the start and end samples are unchanged, so for odd lengths, the halving takes every other sample: AaBbC to ABC. For even lengths, the middle values are averaged: AaBbCc would be 3 samples long: A((a+B)/2)((b+C)/2)c. I've also changed the lengths of a few Fall in Green videos to fit the performance.

Frustratingly and amusingly, the new fancy frame I've been working on for weeks in black, gold leaf etc. is 10mm too small on one edge for the painting. So I have an unused frame for a 350x240 painting, a size I'm unlikely to ever paint. I rarely make measuring mistakes, each one is too painful, yet on these I've made two! Well, I've always considered these two frames tests and neither was as finely finished as I think I could make, although still among the best frames I've made. I aim to make frames better than any framer. One should always be training to master a new skill.

In the night I listened to The Myth of Sisyphus and the CD Player kept jumping and rejected the disc, the first time this fancy Marantz player has ever had problems with any disc. I tried a David Bowie disc and it too struggled. My NVidia graphics card continues to crash with the latest driver so I'm trying a variety of older ones. The older one I thought I had a week ago refuses to install. I wish Windows had a long of driver versions.

I feel a little cursed over these past few days, but I remind myself that things breaking or going wrong are an inevitable part of the universe. Patience and fortitude over the long term must note changes to make in future to limit errors, and things must be fixed, tidied.