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.
