A busy day yesterday, first completed the underpainting to All The World Will Be Your Enemy:
It's a somewhat old idea, that is, from last year rather than this, I have so many important art grounds to break and am filled with ideas and plans. This painting is a feeling, not so much paranoia as indefatigability in the face of a stormy world, silent and stoic defiance, holding on defensively. I listened to the soundtrack to Watership Down as I painted, and Mike Batt's choral translation of his song, as used in the Watership Down series, then Vaughan Williams, the essence of Englishness, for the fields. This, in tone, must be as English as Dali' deserts are Catalonian.
It is compositionally and thematically similar to The Taking of Excalibur in 2018, and the mood is perhaps similar, but perhaps this is more one of acceptance, a continuation, like frames of an animation. I wanted to represent the countryside here. The red/green colouring and the figure echo Half A Broken Heart, too. Ideally, I needed more time to paint today, this complex work was difficult to create in eight mere hours, but everyone has limitations and brackets to battle.
This is one of few paintings on smooth MDF panel. I love this surface, as I do most surfaces anyway, but the canvas boards I more commonly use now are just as good - they are also rigid, but those are bought in bulk, and a similar (low) cost to MDF.
My friend and piano student Peter arrived for a lesson in the afternoon.
In the evening Deborah, who is recovering and coughing a little less each day, and I worked on the plans for the Salome event. I think it would be a good idea to make some of the elaborate masks and costumes that I had originally envisaged. There will be too few visitors to this good event and historic occasion, but this is often the case with many performances - I'm recalling some of Cocteau's performances. Perhaps, even so, it's better that I make and preserve these costumes for a future world which will want and need them. Perhaps 'Empathy With Daisies' will be performed in great halls and capitals of the world, or at least some dark outdoor stages of Greece, where my masks will fit perfectly. We need more cast, but will do with what we have.
