A remarkably busy day for one at the time of artistic change. I'm normally slow and lacklustre at such times, but not today. The jobs of music and software, which have dominated my 2024, are coming to an end and I'm ready to move into painting. I did a few administraion tasks in the morning. Promotion work on Argus and the new album will continue over the summer as I paint.
A few hours of the day were spent working on a song called 'What Has Happened To My Dreams'. Musically it has an remote and epic feeling, like the old 'Snow' tune from Flatspace. Here are the words:
What Has Happened To My Dreams
I'd like to fly, but in my dreams I'm falling
I'd like to float, but in my dreams I drown
I'd like to love, but in my dreams there's no-one around
What has happened to my dreams?
My laughter is now screams.
All the beauty, all the cares
have become nightmares
And I don't know why.
I make a wish upon a star, and it says
it's just the way things are.
The music work revealed a little anomaly in Prometheus, so I fixed that. It's now on version 3.37. After this, I started to look at the paintings I have in progress, those in stasis since last summer. I spent a few weeks (over months!) of 2023 making studio lights to photograph these better, but I never fully tested the lights. Today I decided to do so, so set everything up for art photography.
They worked well, with much better results than before. They didn't need a diffuser, the plain bulbs (6x 810lm daylight bulbs) gave a good light. The stands were very unstable though. Everything is very flimsy and delicate, but this is partly because it was all made efficiently, from scraps and light materials, and with the knowledge that all prototypes are to be modified as needed. After the photographs (which I've not yet stitched together) I spent a couple of hours updating the stands. I've added wooden pieces to hold the legs vertical. The legs are bolted on, but they can slide sideways in trapezoid fashion. The stands can also fall backwards, so I've added a small heel-like piece of wood to them to attenuate this.
Setting these up added an extra 30 or 60 mins to the process. Like many of my complex processes, this one follows a written step-by-step protocol, and the complex one for this photography always reminds me of the bomb activation scenes in Dr Strangelove. This way of working means I can update the procedure as I learn; and stops me needing to remember how to do it all. I have many such procedures.
There are two ways to improve a process. A 'mechanical' way like this, which is a series of logical steps that any fool can follow. These are the most valuable lessons, because, fools as we are, it's something that we can't forget or that needs special training. The key with these skills is to write them down. These skills need a step-by-step list of instructions. I make many of these for various art procedures. Every scientist must experiment and test, but the results must be noted securely to be worth anything.
The other type of skill involves practice, training. This is a physical skill, like learning to play a musical instrument, which can't be rationalised so easily. These must be worked at constantly, but are that much harder to learn and master as a result. I'm always doing both, but keenest to find those mechanical tricks as they are easiest to enact and to retain.
