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.
