So tired yesterday evening after four days of solid painting. My legs felt, as I walked with Deb, as though I were floating, and my eyes and brain concurred. We watched the last of the Muppet Shows, with Roger Moore, the end of a 5-year epic televisual journey. I slept deeply and awoke, still somewhat aching, at 8am ready for work.
I'm suddenly overwhelmed with jobs. The Steam Sale started yesterday, I must promote that, and I have an IndieSFX sale starting today, and the launch of the new Flatspace Golden Age Music pack at 6pm. This all needs promoting and working on in the next first hours.
And I need to dismantle and reconstruct my anglepoise lamp. I was out walking (floating) last night because I needed parts for it, but today I discovered that my existing bulb holder has a hollow plastic screw on the back which will be perfect for the lamp.
I sought a holder without a switch (the holder won't fit in the lamp with one, its metal tunnel is narrow) but the new switchless holder is too short and I can't use lower part in that because the screw thread in the base is a slightly different size (sigh!) so I'll keep the switch 'on' and saw off its prong.
First, today however, I had to make a slight change to the painting, a slight darkening of the leftmost eye. Yesterday, when the painting was wet and fresh it looked amazing and perfect, and today, in the cold light of a day, it looks blotchy, lumpy and crude! I must glaze some of it.
It's amazing how the tiniest strokes, the tiniest amount of micro-paint will transform a surface. Oil paints are truly magical, in contrast to the plastic ugliness of acrylics and the base and moronic idiocy of 'digital art'. Perhaps one day, a multi-spectrum display that uses more shades of light than ONE red ONE green ONE blue will exist, creating something which, in light terms (though not, even then, depth) match an oil painting. But not today. Today, digital displays are uniformly destructive to pictorial reality.
David commented that the painting is one of the best things I've done, which I felt a little stung by. I could paint at least this well for the last 10 years, but yet, perhaps, I simply haven't. Haven't the time, haven't the money, haven't the incentive. I could always paint well enough, but I know that I can paint better. My life is spent in a mad rush. I've never had the luxury of rest; a day doing 'nothing' is full of panic at the things I should be doing. Rest is time, life breath, stolen from work, from art, and industry, the hope of a stable income or stable future.
Now I must get to work. Tired I am, but frenetic the day must be. On we charge!
