A night of spontaneous twitches and inflammatory skin itches. My dreams were nightmarish and involved, at one point, huge spider-like black crabs which had escaped from a fish tank, and were crawling around the large public room, which was bedecked with tropical plants and other animal enclosures.
My emotions in the morning were of despair and misery. This was partly dissatisfaction at the parrot painting from a few days ago, and dissatisfaction at the Kratos painting (setting aside poverty, futility etc.). I didn't feel like doing anything but I never obey my feelings; those simian tricksters!
My aim for the day was to paint, but I decided to do something practical and intellectual and performed a photographic study of spheres and water droplets. The results were spectacularly beautiful on all counts.
After that, I got to work on the second Kratos painting, on panel as before. This time, I wanted more of a fleshy colour, and to set the scene in a cavern. The results were far better than before, and I again loved, or at least appreciated, a smooth panel surface (even if I prefer Belle Arti canvas panels). I listened to Berlioz as I painted, the emotions of the music helped guide the crucial content of this painting. I thought how every stroke of brush was affected by so many variables. My stoic mood really helped the painting, as did the Fantastic Symphony; no machine could oil paint to the same degree without all of this input.
I'm still inclined to repaint the parrot picture on a canvas panel, and perhaps experiment with a rougher, more impressionistic style of painting. Surrealism is never impressionistic or rough in texture. All surrealist paintings are highly detailed works, ultra-smooth, like photographs, because they are designed to depict mental images, which are stronger when clear, explicit, detailed, and brightly coloured. Blurs are foggy memories, uncertain.
I'm aiming for an overall emotional effect, so can use any technique to achieve it.
I'm defining whole new classes of painting. Consider Beethoven's works: string quartets, piano sonatas, symphonies, concertos, violin and piano works, etc. Each a different class, worked on and mastered over time. Although art has genres (impressionism, cubism, abstract etc.) those are more painting styles; effects, not classes in this definition; those types of painting are more like the 'instruments' in the musical analogy. My classes include: 1. Spontaneous ideas from a tiny 'unconscious' sketch expanded into a detailed work. 2. Improvisations in the wet (and similar in ink, my book illustrations use this technique). 3. Groups around a visual theme (eg. the ekphrastic group which used The Death of Chatterton).
Rather than my work being haphazard, I've been exploring and moving towards mastery of these classes of work ever since I started painting. Now I can fully define these, and perhaps define other classes with rules, just like the rules for sonata-form, rondo, string quartet, and so on. So much in visual art is new, not done, unexplored. I feel I'm right at the beginning of several centuries of evolution and growth.
