More work on 'Beatle City' yesterday, recoding backing vocals and a new acoustic guitar part. The track is just about finished.
Kratos was largely drying. I added some shackles, and today photographed him/it for the painting.
I completed the underdrawing, prepared the panel, and traced the drawing over.
Woke at 6am, and decided to work on a new painting which features a character named 'Kratos God Of Emotions'. After transferring the idea, I realised that I needed more of a sculptural guide to the lighting and structure, so decided to make a permanent sculpture for a change, using DAS air-dried clay. I typically use transient (but pleasurable to use) plasticine. I don't like using air-dried clay, it's like working with acrylic paint. It dries too quickly, and in the wrong way. It can remain slimy on the outside and still hard to use in the middle, it slumps and shrinks, and doesn't stick to itself very well. I'd ideally want a drying oil based clay, like oil paint which dries over a few days, but I expect that nobody makes that stuff. Oil clays are non-drying, like plasticine. Perhaps linseed oil clays are not stable enough in the long term, based on my knowledge of picture frame restoration.
Anyway, limitations aside, the clay is usable.
I decided on a cardboard core. I love making sculptures with card and a glue gun. It's super fast and super expressive. All of my 'Four Lamps of the Apocalypse' were made in this way. It would be a waste of clay to use it to fill the bulk, so the first step was to model a throne.
Then start some basic forms, again, to fill space and save clay.
Then the clay. No intermediate photos, my hands were FAR too caked in clay to go near my camera. This didn't take too long, 45 mins:
One hard part is drying, as the clay sags. I used some wire to hold the neck up, but it's still not easy to stop slump. My solution was to dry it on its back; he is now sleeping in that pose. This model is primarily a functional lighting guide, but it will be a sculpture in its own right, too. I'll not work on the back much. It is worth buying more clay for that? I've never sold a scuplture.
I had to finish by 12:30, as John Lindley was due to visit to record the vocals for Beatle City. All went well there. We've increased the tempo to 150 beats-per-minute and made a few benefitical structural changes.
A surprise full day of programming! Something of a distraction, a break from the stress of art. I think I needed it. I've been feeling very weak recently and need a break.
I've programmed a tool to calculate picture frame sizes and wood lengths. I made a simple program called Triculator that did this a few years ago, but that was in Visual Basic 6 and so I'm unable to change it. That tool calculated angles for odd shaped paintings, but I wanted more. I wanted to know the internal and external sizes of a frame, to know how much wood I'd need, and where to mark the pieces for hand-cutting.
I do this all the time by hand every time I make a frame, but it can be a tiresome and exacting process, that is only easy when I use the same type of wood. This tool can calculate how much wood is needed, where to mark it, and calculate the angles for a triangle frame, or complex quadrilateral, as here:
I thought it might take me a few days, but it's taken about 12 satisfying hours. I'll use this to make a 'concrete' frame for the love-sick jigsaw painting.
I awoke late after another night of poor sleep. I read Wikipedia at random, a brief history of Aston Martin. I promoted the new SFXEngine Bolt-On Sale, any sales of which are yet to materialise, and submitted some art to a magazine. This took until 12:30.
After lunch, I decided to prime some of the 6mm MDF sheets I have in stock. This is a big and physically demanding task, I rarely prime large surfaces. Here it makes more sense to prime the big sheets, then cut to size, as it makes the final surfaces smoother. In addition to these two, I primed one 50x120cm sheet. The whole process was messy and frustrating, but the results as smooth as can be expected; good, actually.
After that, I cut them to some useful sizes. One will exactly fit an oddly size frame I have; 382x281mm. One 300x400, one 350x450, one 260x260.
So, the day has flown. I've realised that, in terms of subject, people care about the artist more than the art. This is a certain trend now; was it always so? In contemporary art, people see the subject, but in historical art, people consider the life of the artist at that time instead. So much art on television, the media, is about historical art, rarely ever contemporary. Contemporary art is only in galleries, never in the mainstream media, excepting the odd news story about a ridiculously high auction price.
Much of yesterday was a tedious update of my website, listing the sculptures by year. Perhaps I should list the watercolours by year too (and even the digital art, though that's more difficult, as 90% of it is album cover art which is prone to updates for reasons of commercial utility). My website used to list work year-by-year when I first became an artist circa 2004. One advantage is that it provides a global over-look of time. It also creates lots of 'empty shelves' for future or current work, so it operates as an incentive.
I improvised some new music last night in the MODX, using some modified Yamaha DX7 sounds. Those FM sounds are wonderful, especially with audio effects like distortion, chorusing, reverb, as these can limit the harshness while retaining the expression.
Today has flown.
I've got so many painting ideas that I feel overwhelmed. I showed Deb my No. 3 Sketchbook and she remarked on this idea from about the second half of 2014:
So I decided to paint it today, as by chance I had a small square panel ready which was ideal. This is artwork code G1400, so is my 1400th catalogued artwork. You'll note how closely it matches the tiny idea sketch. Keeping the same feeling as that unconscious sketch is vital, so I try to duplicate it.
What next, what next.
A delivery of art to Bickerton yesterday, and a walk up the hills with beloved Deborah. Something of a rest day.
I hate rest days, but I'm increasingly wanting to rest. An artist must be working, charging forward, but I'm increasingly feeling exhausted, overworked and unrewarded. Do we deserve rewards from nature by performing our natural duty? I thought today that had Vincent van Gogh managed to continue working and living for another decade or two, that he would not have become as famous and renowned as he did. He may well, in art history, have ranked alongside Gauguin and Cezanne, but not have gone beyond those to attain his great fame. He may even have slipped into academic obscurity. His suicide was a crucial part of his art.
I updated my website yesterday, slight updates to the biographical notes in the painting galleries. This is a useful observation of the past, a reflection. I thought about what has changed in my outlook regarding art since my book 21st Century Surrealism. One aspect is a greater distance from surrealism, a label I've usually disliked but grudgingly become accustomed to as a short-cut explanation of the 'type of painting' I make. Perhaps I should stop using it entirely. Perhaps this label is not helpful because artists should be doing what is new, and I think I am and do. Another change is that the intellectual content of an artwork, the quantity of 'information', is less important to me now. Now, I want to create an overall feeling that can't be put into words.
I watched a sad BBC documentary about Picasso, sad because it was a poor and cheap programme from a broadcaster who used to be a paragon of British, if not western, culture. The BBCs best programmes are now on the radio.
The documentary made me think about cubism. There are many strange aspects about it. Firstly, that rather than represent an object or scene from multiple angles, cubist paintings often break up the scene into literal cubes, geometric shapes, harsh lines. The cubist offshoots, Orphism, Purism and the evolution into geometric abstraction continued that path, bypassing realism, detail, accurate depiction. Picasso himself avoided pure abstraction as 'decorative'; I agree, with the caveat that we can appreciate abstract art by seeing things in it - communications about the artist (abstract expressionism) or the world, by seeing things in the shapes (abstract... imagerism? pareidolia?).
In cubism, accurate depiction of a thing became increasingly ignored. Colours became brighter, surfaces flatter. In real life surfaces are not flat, and colours are realistic. Ultimately, cubism gradually became decorative, rather than representational. Picasso's unique mature style still represented things, but a lot of reality was removed. Crucially, I saw yesterday a new world of art that has not been touched, a whole branch of cubism which was bypassed and not explored.
Taking as a principle that a single perspective and viewpoint should be ignored, it seems quite possible to represent a scene without great abstraction of form or colour. Colours could always remain realistic, even shading. Shading and depicting depth in an image was quickly (if not instantly) removed from cubism, perhaps because the aim was to remove depth illusion, when it seems quite reasonable to include depth, and even perspective; merely not one. When we look at a painting, the very illusion of depth is attractive - it makes us believe in an image. The illusory impression of depth is appealing in a unique way.
So the lost cubism involves shading and the illusion of depth. It involves surface detail - another thing which was removed from cubist paintings without explanation. It also involves realistic colours, or at least colours which are not artificially gaudy or deliberately pretty. Yet it still represents a scene from multiple views at once, like a mental image of knowledge.
This, oddly, made me think of my Symphonic Paintings, and the Ekphrastic ones which played on a theme, like the Andy N paintings, like 'Twice As Hard' here, inspired by Caravaggio:
Here, Caravaggio's 2D image was the source, but it's still broken into parts, and retains the original shading and colouration; those things were not abstracted or enhanced.
I have a book '1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die'. It's wonderful in that it is ordered chronologically, and therefore offers an overview of all art. Until about 1800, paintings were as functional as passport photos, posters, propaganda. All of that art is irrelevant today except as cultural memory. 'Modern' art from 1850 to 1950 was experimental, but somewhat tedious, self questioning. Looking thorough the book, art only seemed to be interesting after about 1960.
I'm amazed by anyone who thinks that, in art, 'it has all be done'. The more I know, the more I can see how much I don't know, that my ignorance is vast. Blessed be my ignorance, for there lies the undiscovered country, the place of magic. Despite this I can see huge plains of types of art that are totally unexplored. Among them:
The Symphonic Painting which used visual themes, like Beethoven used musical themes. Monochrome painting which makes equal use of negative spaces; M.C. Escher and a few printers explore this sort of thing, very few painters. The form of realism-cubism explored here. So many hybrids! Abstraction fragmented with realism. Impressionism fragmented with realism. Social realism fragmented with fantasy...
There are so many virgin genres, new worlds in painting. The more you think you know, the more blind you become to the unknown. The role of the artist is to explore the unknown, in private and in public. One difference between art and science is that art does not necessarily have to, or perhaps even should not, conclude anything. Such conclusions are for observers, critics, aesthetes; the scientists of art.
A long sleep, from 10:30 to 08:00, filled with many dreams. In one, Sigourney Weaver cowered at the top of a large tower, thousands of feet above the landscape. The tower may have been the 'death' tower in the painting I painted yesterday. A small child was there too, perhaps Newt from Aliens, but she (or he) was barely visible, just a felt presence. The tower's summit was reached via a slide with many tiers, to make a wave-like slide. Death, the devil, or some evil figure appeared from the slide entrance, grabbed Sigourney by an arm and threw her down the slide quickly, she helplessly slid to her doom.
In another dream, myself and my brother were heading towards a huge shopping centre made in the shape of The Statue of Liberty, but with glass skin so that you could see the shoppers and shops which spiralled around its centre.
In the last dream of the night, BBC Radio presenter Steve Wright came to live at our house as gardener. The flowers in the back garden had recently been dug over by my mother. He enlarged this area and had decided to plant many plants there, in pots and wicker baskets, burying them to keep to nutrients there, notably recalcitrant to the way my mother would plant things. I helped him as we worked in the garage. After some work, we went inside for food, and some cream cakes were on offer which he enjoyed choosing from.
The day began slowly. I seem to feel tired and slow for some reason, though I've hardly exerted myself physically recently.
At 11:00, I started to paint the Transubstantiation painting, and it (the underpainting, at least) was complete by 14:30:
I rather enjoyed the process, made much easier by the colour studies. Looking at my work, at the themes, some are more common than others. First, the clash between emotions and rational thought, and secondly a critique of Christianity and Catholicism, although here the painting is more literal, even reverent. I'm reminded that my exposure to art and music as a child was in church, and that those images remain part of my visual landscape.
I learned that I've failed to get into the RWA exhibition this year, though one of my two works made it to the second round. This does not bother me; there is a lot of competition and judgements are prone to luck. Anything radical or interesting is more likely to fail than succeed; this is the way with all art critique, though it makes me sad that my work must remain unseen.
As I painted, I listened to a repeat of the first night of The Proms, and Clara Schumann's Piano Concerto. Clara remarked, upon visiting London: "It is the artists' own fault; they allow themselves to be treated as inferiors in English society, since nothing is too humiliating to be borne if only they make money." - how astute! Art in England is unique in its relationship to money. Artists have more respect in Europe and America, and can be rich or poor in either place (though, better to be rich in America). In England artists should only be poor, and never considered important. A rich artist is considered an unjust waste of money. This is an utterly backwards situation created by cultural memories of aristocratic hierarchy, where 'rich' and 'poor', that integer attached to our bank-accounts, are considered social classes. In England wealth is shameful, the pursuit of wealth is shameful, and hard work is shameful. Work is something worthy of servants and foreigners. This culture is why Britain is an unproductive country.
I remain tired and slow today. Perhaps this is a good week to work on John's music track, a pause and perhaps refresh from painting.
Completed the underpainting to the new scarecrow painting 'Nobody Cares About You, Really. Get Over It!'. I made a few changes in colour relative to the study, using more green and turquoise for the sky in particular.
I mixed too much paint for the sky, so improvised a new painting in those colours on a spare canvas board:
It was based on a sketch in my ideas-book, but done without any planning, a casual improvised copy of sorts, using the limited colours I had.
I've named it 'Palace For The King Of Forever'. I will glaze it in future to add more colour to those grey areas.
I love painting in this improvisational style, and perhaps it contains everything needed in a more efficient way than doing the meticulous planning of my current practice. One downside is that this very ad-hoc nature limits the paint quality, as painting over another colour will muddy it. The key to the best painting is the put the right colour in the right place first time, and this is impossible in a painting like this, although the muddiness can be mitigated during glazing.
A steady day of painting, a full day but I feel that I've done little. I started by adding glaze layers to the two Red Madonna paintings. These had an uneven finish, but after 6 weeks, the finish was less evident, only the colour difference. After 4 weeks, some areas had much more gloss, this indicates the importance of taking time with oils.
Today's work was necessarily gentle and slow. Only tiny amounts of paint were needed, so little that the amounts would be the sort of vague fragments wiped from a brush which has just been cleaned - mere particles. Those can still make a huge difference to the surface of a painting. After this, and about two hours of drying, I used a soft flat brush, new and dry with no paint, to massage the fringes of the paint.
I was reminded that no AI and robot could ever paint like Leonardo da Vinci. Even the very simple task of getting the right amount of paint on a brush is a skill which requires extreme dexterity; years of training. I may add more layers to this painting yet. The turquoise background is starting to look flat. I wonder if I should add a transparent later on top.
After that, three colour studies. Two for the 'transubstantiation' painting:
These studies are so useful. The difference here seems small but is huge in real life, there's no substitute for using the actual pigments. The flat grey on the left looks fine, but the brown-yellow, inspired by Hammershøi, added an instant and powerful feeling of reverence, if not awe. Again, this is not evident from the idiotic digital image.
After that, a study for the scarecrow painting. The final colours will be different, as I plan that the glaze will change things. This is an underpainting study, then.
Up at 08:30 today for a full day charging into the next batch of painting plans. First, preparing a panel and tracing over 'A Brief History Of Transubstantiation'. Here's the underdrawing:
This will be a modest 40x60cm work. The size made me consider frames, so my next job was to audit and measure the frames I have in stock. I have 25, and I measured the panel sizes and visible areas for each. This should permit me to, at least in theory, design paintings to fit existing frames. At the moment I'm in the state of painting a picture in any size I feel, skewing the choices towards those of the canvas panels I have. Those are easily cut to size (as I did for this painting) so this isn't much of an issue.
It's not too difficult for me to make a frame, but perhaps I could design some to fit the frames I have, to deplete them if nothing else, hence the audit.
This led to sizing and drawing a new painting called 'Nobody Cares About You, Really. Get Over It' which is a scarecrow crucifixion - a new genre I seem to be pioneering (today, I noted two things about this; that one of my first ever paintings 'The Last Tree' began it, and secondly that the Worzel Gummidge series circa 1980 is probably the root of the connection between Jesus and scarecrows, as Worzel's stand is a cruicifix). Here's 'The Last Tree' (2005):
I drew out 'Nobody Cares', prepared the surface, and transferred the drawing. Then I prepared the panels for the oil studies for both works, which I routinely paint now. I also prepared the study for the Rachel Hudson painting. Then I made some plastic stands for my gesso sauce bottles so that they can be stored upside down. That should keep the gesso fresh and make dispensing easier.
In between all of this, I did some initial work on a John Lindley song called 'Beatle City', a prospective production job. I can say nothing more on this, except that it would be the first song production work I've done for someone else apart from the remix of 'Where the Golden Cornfield Light Is Grown', made in 2016 for Jonathan Tarplee. That was different because, as a remix, I was given a few samples and free reign to do anything with them.
Much of today was spent tracing over the underdrawing to 'The Angels Musing Over All That Is Left Of Rachel Hudson'. This is ready to paint, but I need to paint a colour study first.
After that, work on a simple, spartan work directly inspired by a vision in a dream. It was four circles forming a man's torso, with white circles where the hands should be. I realised that these were 'hosts', the body of Christ. The image is simple enough but I'm unsure of the colours. I had in mind plain grey, similar to 'Don't Think I Can Feel Love Anymore', but then I thought I should make the lower 'sky' near black. There is some floating bread there. Should I make it dark brown or dark green? The upper sky could be any hue... but cold, green, yellow, or gold.
There are no right or wrong answers, just different moods and meanings. I've looked at some Rothko's. I'm reminded that he never seemed to slope his works, always stability for a form of religious reverence.
Second day of glazing Portents Of Desire. This is a strange painting that constantly baffles me. I worked on it even when drawing the idea sketch, adding bits here and there, then added or removed more when drawing it, then did the same at every stage of the painting. It's almost evolved from notions of balance, prettiness, emergent textures, rather than any other consideration.
This is unique for me. I like to at least have a plan; emotion, concept of some sort; or if not, just 'improvise', but this is a strange hybrid, like a snapshot of a sentence in a never-ending novel. Even now I keep thinking what I can change. Perhaps it's best left as it is.
In the afternoon, I enhanced and re-uploaded two of the forthcoming music videos. I added some pretty expanding rings to An Autumn Tale (before these were simply star-shaped lights), and added a racing road to the drag-race section of Cat Parasites.
A long and slow day of painting. Was simply titled 'Portents Of Desire', now renamed 'Thomas Hardy: Portents Of Desire' to give this enigmatic and strange painting a clue to its origins. I'm unsure what to do with it, to improve it Today, 6 hours or so work glazing the lower right half.
I feel like van Gogh today, a prisoner of my own art. I need a place to show and sell my art. In the meantime I will keep working, creating, improving.
An awful day of weakness and agonising stomach pain yesterday. My worst such day in months or years, I could do little, but I managed some drawing of a new painting in the evening.
Today, a full day painting the underpainting to 'Oliver Cromwell Not Dying Twice', a painting that could easily become a masterpiece due to its strangeness and imagination.
I associate with Charles I, therefore dislike Oliver Cromwell. Here, Oliver Cromwell is part vegetable, in a very English way.
I finished work at 7pm. Onwards!
I've been considering more conclusions of free will being an aspect of expectation and prediction. Will falls away when anticipation becomes memory, what we know as experiencing the present.
Free will is a property of false perception of possibility. Consider a 6-sided dice. We may think that the odds of rolling a particular number is 1 in 6, but in truth the odds are 100% for the actual number rolled and zero for the other five. Before the roll, our feeling that other outcomes are possible is what we think of as free will. If we were to slow down a film of the rolling dice, there would probably be a time when we can see which numbers are more likely than others, and ultimately we could determine which number will actually be rolled before the dice settles. This analogy shows that the 'present' is variable and fuzzy.
There are many implications of this.
First, that will of this sort can be observed in non-humans. Rutting stags, for example, must use their judgement to predict if they would win a contest against another male. If they knew the outcome for certain, they would not need to battle. With this argument we can show that stags have free will as we know it. With a similar argument we can show that any universal actor which makes a predictive judgement can be shown to have freewill. What a predictive judgement is, is a different question.
A second implication is the definitive end of ideas of an infinite (or any) number of possible universes which contain all outcomes from each event. There is only one universe; this one. Any beliefs of more than one universe, more than one outcome to any event, stem from false beliefs in other impossible outcomes. Like the dice prediction, these beliefs are a property of will (a delusion, a fantasy, a false prediction), rather than a reflection of the actual universe.
Will here implies control over the future. Control over our memories or the transmission of information could also be considered part of free will; and with that we can extend will over the past. Consider that we exist at the end of the universe and ask which universes may be 'possible'? We are at the end, so we could clearly say that this is/was the only one, but we have limited knowledge of what is there (we can never know all of the universe, we would need a brain as big as the universe for that). The limited knowledge creates gaps which can be filled with guesses, predictions, fantasy; and thus false beliefs, a 'will' over past events, would emerge. As with predictive will, the inaccuracy of these predictions would increase with distance.
When time is relative, we actors have different pasts, and our perception of the present is personal. If we revisit Schrödinger's cat, we can split the present. If one person sees the alive/dead status of the cat in the box, but doesn't tell his colleague, then the cat is in the 'past' for the observer, but in the uncertain future for the unknowing colleague.
It is the personal relatively of time which grants us individuality because the flow of time gives us information. Information determines belief, and allows prediction; and prediction, imagination emerges as will.
Underpainting today for the new 'circuit board' painting. The work is about one quarter or one fifth scale from the original. I wondered if it's easier to copy a painting larger or smaller than the original? I think it's probably no more difficult or easy either way. Here it is so far:
The details of the girl's face are complicated because I didn't have a brush with a tiny enough point. Things should be easier in the glaze.
With a miniature, everything is scaled down. One uses softer, smaller brushes to simulate shrunken normal brushes, and less paint - though still enough to blend.
My colours are a little grey. I perhaps need more blue and more hue generally. Vermeer is one artist who has a similar love of grey to myself. Observing his work today, I don't think he was patient. I know that some types of brushwork can look quick and spontaneous while actually taking a long time, but sometimes I felt that his work was rushed due to impatience rather than a desire for flair. I rush myself at times; one can't take too long, but also can't be too quick either. Everything, in the performance art that is painting an oil painting, is balance.
I've been thinking again about absolute determinism and how this can be compatible with freewill. This morning the answer became obvious.
On freewill, assume that every actor in the universe can control some aspect of their destiny, from atom to bee to human. The end result of this would create some reality which, one could say, was always destined. It's impossible to know if an alternative could have happened.
If time is a dimension then the past and future are laid out, the universe must be one multi-dimensional sculpture. Knowledge of this is the root of determinism; but such reality is not incompatible with freewill. The key element is predictability, knowledge of the future. The future can be laid out, and freewill can exist, providing the future is not predictable. This is clearly the case.
The key comparison is with the past. We assume that we know the past, that the past is fully predictable. It is perhaps this knowledge that frustrates us when trying to predict the future, this plus the human ability to make predictions, and the ability of science to do so; but the past is not fully known. Information about past events degrades over time and distance. More recent events are more certain, but more distant events are more obscure. This degradation applies to the past and future equally. Elements of the near past are much more certain than elements of the far past, and elements of the near future are much easier to predict than elements of the far future.
There is a difference between past and future, a 'flip' of types of knowledge; from predicted outcomes, to knowledge of the outcome. This flip defines the present, and the flip is dependent on our knowledge. We actors have knowledge, and this knowledge gives us a sense of 'now', when the present moment is.
The universe is timeless. The people and other actors across the universal domain always consider their time 'now'. From our perspective we determine the present moment by the flip from prediction of events to knowledge of events. This has an interesting implication: Because we can predict some things better than others, and know some things better than others, our sense of when 'now' is can vary compared to that of others. We can literally live a little in the future or a little in the past. If, for example, we don't know the result of last week's football game, then the football part of us is living in last week. Indeed, the phrase 'living in the past' applies to people with less interest in and knowledge of current affairs; the phrase is accurate.
Information decays over time, this is a universal law of thermodynamics. Time is ours, relative to each actor. I've outlined here that the present moment is relative too. Information can only decay when we know what the time is and with knowledge of that past, so this decay is a personal decay, not a universal one. If time is relative, entropy is too; but knowledge of the future decays with distance too, so information also decays forwards in time. The most certain moment is the present moment.
Knowledge-power is unique to each actor, so the strength of entropy is relative to each actor. Perhaps a new value of this knowledge-power could be assigned. It seems that there is a relation between actors with accurate knowledge of the past, and ability to accurately predict the future. Computers are high in this regard, humans too, and animals less-so.
Spent much of yesterday rendering, converting, and proofing the A Drive Through The Town videos, making a few small changes as needed. Each video has taken about an hour each, with about another hour each for the conversion, rendering, proofing, uploading, filing; those time consuming steps.
There have been a few improvements and innovations, a few pretty moments. I rather liked the skewed camera in 'What Has Happened To My Dreams', as used in parts of 'Incomplete Version Of The Writer', too.
Ready to move on, to return to visual art. After three completely full days I'll rest a little today, and complete the tidying and filing process.
The videos will premiere every Friday at 7pm, starting this week, 12 July 2024, with the videos for the two recent single tracks; then one week's gap, and one video per-week to correspond with the release of the album.
In a strategic move, I've taken all of my music down from Spotify apart from the latest two albums (which I will take down in future). The royalties are too poor, and their whole philosophy of making money of the backs of the thousands of small artists and giving their royalties to the bigger artists, is completely wrong. I'm unlikely to ever return, they would need to hugely change that philosophy.
Another long and epic day making music videos. These take a lot of work, but I have a feeling that nobody in the world can make 14 videos like these in two days. I'm loaded with creative energy. If I had time to make full videos for these songs, with camera work etc. then I'd do things differently, I'd add more. All art is about limitations, and trying ones best within them.
Today involved work on the more complex songs. Excessive Consumption was a surprise in how good it looks, considering its not much more than an electric cube which pulses to the beat. Several videos track an instrument, and there are minimal intellectual links to the songs; that is images that match the lyrical content. That would be ideal, but these videos are primarily there to provide something better than nothing, a simple animation related to the album artwork.
'Mister Moan' features some Victorian looking doors, and a graveyard for the second chorus. The epic 'Incomplete Version Of The Writer' doesn't have much, but features an image of Agatha Christie, some typewriters, and excerpts from the lyrics, all to far better effect than no video. 'Cat Parasites' is little more than fog and other elements from the album art, but some instruments are echoed in dancing lights; and 'An Autumn Tale' has falling leaves and some distant trees.
In Argus, I've used modulator attachment a lot this time, more than before where I'd typically create a new actor. This seems to work better (it reduces the quantity of actors for certain), although there's not much difference. The point of Argus is that it can do the same thing in many different ways.
Many of these videos are very simple, such as 'Go To Bed And Miss Me', which is a delightful flight through a summer sky; but even the really simple ones have a surprisingly nice feeling. The 'Anyone Can Fall In Love' video is little more than a pulsing, glowing heart which falls away, but it seems to match the song well. I haven't done anything for 'What Has Happened To My Dreams' yet. I have a clear idea for a more in-depth video for it, but may just use Argus.
For two days work, a lot has been done. I expect it will all take at least one more day.
A full day of work on some simple videos for the tracks on A Drive Through The Town. As with We Robot, the idea is a YouTube version of a 'Spotify Canvas', initially a simple loop. In practice these are much more sophisticated, and match the music and its changes more closely even if the content is reduced compared to a full filmed video.
I've managed a good start on all of the 13 songs so far. I needed the feature to 'kick' a cube in scale every time the bass drum hit in Style Guru, but doing this with a Start command would reset the spinning angles too. I could get around it by setting the Start values to match the exact values at that time, but when I need to import a lot of (up to 100) frame values for the drum, this is difficult. The best solution would be to use Set Modulator events, so the size modulator is reset on each beat while retaining all other parameters in progress, but there was no way to import and create (or even convert) Set Modulator events, so I added this feature today, and thus upgraded Argus to v1.42.
It's been a very full and busy day, and I'm perhaps not halfway through this huge job.
In other news, I completed the Vermeer frame last night, it works to plan. I'm now ready to proceed on that painting. I'll complete these videos first. The low number of views/listens of the new single has reminded me of the importance of these videos.
Have worked a full day yet feels like I've done little. Spent the morning updating my Artist's Statement and Bio to reflect my 2024 outlook, and the huge list of exhibitions and publications.
Then, work on the new 'Vermeer' frame. The circuit board on panel protrudes by 6 to 9mm, so I needed to fit a 6mm border around 80% of the painting, letting the circuit board take up the rest. I needed some 6x6mm wood, so bought that, then cut it to size with a blade rather than a saw (a Japanese pull saw would be useful for jobs like this). It needs to fit very exactly in the frame recess, there's only about 6.5mm there. I cut some mount board to fit closely, then stuck the wood pieces to that while it was in the frame:
When I remove the card bits, it should be the right size. I'll paint it black as this will be partly visible, then all will be ready for the painting.
After that job, I added a couple more works to the Saatchi Art site. Before October I'll have to increase my art prices to reflect new gallery commission rates. I can already imagine a time when my art on Saatchi will be ten times these prices, or perhaps taken down completely. Important moves in my art are coming. Fate will see.
Time is short. If I had a wand, what would I do instantly? I have many ideas. I really need to complete music videos for all of A Drive Through The Town. Simple videos will take 2 or 3 days. I'll perhaps put some painting studies on sale on eBay too. I had thought of making a video show this year, as readers will remember, but with each iteration of thought it becomes more complex. I need some clear idea of what sort of video series to create and why.
Awake almost all night with awful stomach pain, in contrast to much of the country whom were awake listening to (or watching) the election results. I've spent today updating the text for the 800-or-so oil paintings on my website. Though a useful job, and a tedious one that has taken all day, I've done it mainly because I'm not quite well enough to face doing more serious work.
A nice visit to the recently opened and very good Drift Gallery in Nantwich today.
Most of the day was working on the new panel painting, the underdrawing and the marking of the holes. My conundrum: If you flip the circuit board below over, how do you ensure the holes you'll mark and drill in the panel are in the exact place of those three nuts?
There are many options. The unevenness of the circuit board complicates some of them, such as laying over tracing paper. In the end I rolled out a layer of plasticine and pressed the board into it, then used that as a template to mark a paper template. It worked perfectly, the holes are in exactly the right place.
Next step it to test how it will all fit in the frame. Only then can I start painting.
Two very busy days. First yesterday, first listing two more works for sale on the Saatchi website, and backing up some new painting images with frames, new since July 1st!
At 11am, I started painting 'Inspection At Theresienstadt (after Fritta)'. The colours largely matched the study, but I decided to use a colour called French Yellow Ochre. This is a gritty pigment, almost like painting with wet sand. It was as frustrating as painting with wet sand too; I had to pile on the paint to get any to stick. This act was poor training, as it meant that the other parts of the painting done later in the day used too much paint, and I wasted paint by preparing too much of those colours, too.
I chose the colour because I knew it was gritty; the painting was of a sandy, muddy, concentration camp so I wanted sandy paint, and the 'French' name was an inspiration too. The overall effect is good, the transparency allows the green imprimatura to show though; but the process was unpleasant and I'll happily throw this paint away when this work is complete.
A delivery of more newsprint (blank paper I use as desk protection when painting, each painting day uses one sheet), and some cardboard L shapes, arrived in the day.
Today, I completed the underpainting. It's based on an ink drawing so I needed to add far more detail, and try to capture or keep some of the raw emotion of the original; but of course, I'm adding my own emotions (and details) here. You can see here the challenges and choices I faced:
The underpainting was complete by 15:00. I then cut some of the L-shaped lengths into cardboard corners, using hot-melt glue to make some, experimentally. It worked well.
Then, art photography. Of my Old Lazy Candle painting, and some new (better colour balanced) images of 'The Wheel Of Attraction And Repulsion'. There's quite a colour difference in the (very blue!) old vs new, the new one is an excellent match.
Plus framing that work:
It is election day tomorrow, so I will vote. The polls (which are always wrong) indicate a Labour landslide, despite their policies being the same as those of the Conservative government. The country is in a dire state due to the Conservatives. Rishi Sunak seems like an honourable and reliable politician, much like John Major was; but like Mr Major he was unwilling or unable to change direction or take radical action; he was a steadying hand after difficult times, nothing more. The country was definitively ruined by the instability and stupidity of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Brexit has substantially harmed the economy - though the arguments against unchecked immigration remain valid and still cause problems within the European Union itself.
I expect that every left-winger believes that Kier Starmer is lying to gain votes, and that his government will be more left wing than his stated policies (and the current government). It's hard to know what will happen. I expect that the Conservatives will lurch to the right, as they did when Tony Blair was in power, and that they will remain out of power until they regain the centre ground; though this is a less certain prediction, as much of Western World is lurching to extreme right, nationalist, governments - in panic over diminishing resources, and the tide of immigrants this can cause. Each hungry country is preparing for fight for the remaining sandwiches; this is not good (or sensible, or sustainable).
Kier Starmer's jobs are so huge that it's very likely that he will fail; not be able to grow the economy, fix the badly damaged health and social services, stop the tide of illegal immigration, or clean the polluted rivers. All of these things will require extreme measures.
Those problems are due to Brexit and its punishing cost to trade and knowledge, and, far more-so, climate change (that is specifically the historical use of more resources than is sustainable; the good times are certainly behind us but the populace remain philosophically addicted to them - welfare standards are too high for those who do not contribute to society, and too low for those that do, including nature). There is no sign that those two key things can be or will be reversed, or directly addressed. So my final prediction is that the government will fail to fix these problems, and that the high point for popularity in a new government's term will be day one.
Of course, everything will be fixed eventually, but one hopes this will happen quickly and relatively peacefully, rather than over the course of a century after a few wars and revolutions.
Another thing done today is that I made sure I'd catalogued, signed, and photographed all of these studies:
A new idea yesterday. Part of it uses an old hard drive circuit board which I'd had hanging around for art use. I developed an idea with it in 2007 featuring a white mouse, but never haven't got round to realising it, and this idea is better. It required sawing the board with a jeweller's saw, which was not easy. There was one particular very hard component that I had to grind off with the bench grinder.
This will float over the painting panel. Rather than have it fixed to the frame I've decided to bolt it to the panel. So, I need to drill holes in the panel at exactly the right place, and attach nuts to the circuit board, as you can see above. The offcut on the right was a test for the glue, it seems to be strong, but I've added holt-melt glue around the edges too. These nuts will be hidden, this is the back. Their stainless steel will be the only part of the board to touch the painting panel. The painting will involve Vermeer.
Most of today was spent on my quarterly backups, but I also did a bit more sawing with the coping saw, cutting a new panel for a possible new 'Love is Dead' central portrait. All of the three extant versions (I can't find the first version!) look lovely in real life, but when I see the images online or digitally, they don't. I've now painted this portrait three times, but it's still not quite right. I may keep painting it forever, regularly, and make whole set of them.
A last used of the saw involved cutting the circular backing board for 'The Wheel Of Attraction And Repulsion', which has a circular resin frame from an old mirror. Last time I worked on this was May 2023 when I injured my hand badly, so working on this revives that memory. It won't have glass (I can't easily cut a glass circle) but the other parts of the frame are now complete.
