Small jobs yesterday. The final filing of the new Argus and Prometheus, and the Crewe Heritage Wall designs. I've designed three initial designs for this, of course subject to modification and tweaks. Like all artists I abhor art by committee, but sometimes changes are necessary for various reasons. Even Beethoven changed Leonore.
Conflict of Progress:
The Signalman:
Industry to Ecology:
As I've said before, each has an approximate theme of the conflict between the machine age and ecology.
I then started to look at extant music. I've got lots of half-finished, or partially started notes and sequences. I have this in painting too. I try to avoid this; having either finished work, work in progress (moving towards finished), or just abandoned or simply destroy the rest, but sometimes it is good creatively to start things and see how they sound. This seems more common in music, which is more ethereal than art. With my art ideas, in my notebooks, I have a pretty good idea what it is like, so can then decide whether to take things further. With music, more notes seem to be needed to work this out, so I often have partial sequences, and may are used in part, if not totally.
It seems I have quite a lot of electro-pop songs, a left over from the work at the start of the year. These are not so bad, but electro-pop, or pop music in general is often poor. I will work on them. One rule for a good song is good words. The words need image, emotion, story. As words, they should be as powerful as any poem. If not, then the song will be second rate.
Much of yesterday was spent replacing, or trying to replace, the kitchen tap. Years of leaks had sealed the bolt in limestone, making it unmovable. A plumber was called. He said 'You should have just replaced the tap washer, mate' - Ah, that useful 'you should have ...' phrase. Of course, this only makes one despise the idiocy of the utterer. Do such people think this helps?
He used a backnut spanner (which I don't have) with a large bar to twist it. The bolt came out of the tap itself before the nut was loosened, so the nut was indeed welded by limestone. This was costly for the removal of one nut. The plumber put the new tap in, but so badly that it leaked huge quantities and I had to remove it again after he had gone. He spent more time ranting about the excessive taxes he pays as a high earner and how he can't earn a thing on his six properties, than doing the job. Still, we needed his expertise to loosen that nut.
Today, I framed Moon Over Shakespeare. The plastic glazing was as nightmarish as ever, but the painting looks good in its new frame.
This image, like most of the images of my paintings in frames, has had the painting imposed on it later. Without this, the painting would be obscured by reflections of me, see:
