Wine, Women and Song, Prometheus v3.92

Day flown yesterday, dominated by the evening performance at the 'Wine, Women and Song' event at The Wonky Pear. Deb did a great performance of 'Harper Lee' by Suzanne Vega. My 'China in Your Hand' seemed to go down well but I think I could have done better.

Also did some chord notation for the Kyrie from Burn Of God. I updated Prometheus to v3.92. I added a feature to duplicate chord notes. If a chord, say CGE starts, then the G is later changed to A in the sequence, then we have an A-minor. It can sound prettier to 'glide' in the chord by only triggering the A, but it makes notation, seeing that as CAE, more difficult. The new feature would find that A and add the C and E in the track again, re-triggering the whole chord. This helps hugely when exporting to MIDI and viewing the chord.

I also added the inverse feature so that CGE then CAE would delete the latter C and E notes. In recent years I've started to trigger the whole chord every time, partly to make it easier to read and easier to transcribe, but with some sounds, like strings which flow and decay, it may sound better when single notes glide the sound from chord to chord. These options make it easy to switch between both.

Today, delivery of 'Punishment of the Sun' to Birmingham on the train. Only noticed at the last minute that white-painted mirror plates need to be fitted. It's nearly impossible to buy white-painted mirror plates. Fortunately, I have a small pack of some I've painted myself, although the paint work isn't brilliant. If I'm selected for the RBSA again I'll make new ones.

Lyric Book, China, and Other Jobs

Busy day yesterday. Managed to start the lyric book, made progress on the email problem. Visited the Crewe Create exhibition but spoke to nobody, a waste of my time, then some computer jobs for John. Practiced 'China in Your Hand', not too hard on the Microkorg, and printed and tried the chords on Deb's chosen song, 'Harper Lee' by Suzanne Vega. There's no music for it online but Google's AI suggested the chords, which appear correct.

I really need to make a 'Women and Wives' video. I've made a version of the song with a click track for more accurate lip-sync.

Now I have a bit of a raw throat, feels like the start of a cold. I hope not, this would be my first in years, and at the start of a busy few days; singing tomorrow, and the RBSA trip after that.

My to-do list is getting too small. Greater ambition needed.

Morecambe Poetry Festival 2026

Back, at last after a wonderful weekend and few days more at the Morecambe Poetry Festival 2026.

We left on Thursday at lunch time, arrived in Lancaster and took a taxi to Morecambe; a good way to travel by train as changing trains from Lancaster to Morecambe is a long wait and the place is only a few miles away. We arrived at The Kings Arms at 19:40 for our evening set, due at 22:30, but we already knew would be late... this is something of a theme for this fest, but the scheduled acts tend to run to time. Our pre-fest event was precluded by Janine Booth and Peter Buckley Hill, who had recently written a sonnet-a-day to match Shakespeare's count. We went on at 23:30 to a moderate but committed audience who remained at that late hour. Our set went to plan (and to plane, as our paper planes flew).

A casual open mic throughout the next morning led to the first official act of Robin Ince (and a packed out room), who we'd missed on previous years. Of all performers, Robin's interests and outlook were, are, perhaps closest to my own. He paid tribute to both Kenneth Williams and Elizabeth Sladen; something I'd also happily do. Perhaps Tom Baker's Dr Who runs deep as a cultural figure for those of my (our) generation. Even now he's in my dreams.

Well, I'll try cut a long story short, not let this blog-post become a boring holiday slide show. Let's think of highlights and unique moments...

Huge winds on the seafront causing ear-ache which lasted hours on Saturday, plus torrents of rain for a second year. Umbrellas useless, except for Deb's transparent dome, the only sort that works in a gale. My long leather coat and cagoule did a good job. Met many old friends, tenor and Newcastle giant Clark; Debra and her kin, Alan the metalworking stand-up in progress, Ryan the sound man. The 'word walk' was an organised event (by Anne of publisher Big White Shed, who was lovely; encouraging, an inspiration at our later meeting) that had different start times and placements in the programme to the website, but this error proved serendipitous as two groups met. We did our own word-free walk and met new friends in the process. It was nice to join Chris, who I met there, at a few events afterwards.

Each performer was inspiring in their own way. Henry Normal ever cosy. Kate Fox and Staithe performed poetry with (folky, acoustic) music, the only act close to ours. Although much simpler than us in words and music, both certainly improved the other and made it all much more engaging than it would have been. Nice to meet Rowland Crowland, a performer and poet less famous than John Cooper Clark, yet just as good in every respect. Brian Bilston was excellent, as was Nick Helm; a powerhouse. Katherine Ratzko and Deborah are two of the best poets I know; I could easily have become sexist otherwise as most of the female poets on the main stage were egregious.

This is, in a normal year, the few days where I become enthused by poetry, and for every act I thought 'I can do that!' - and 'I want to do that!' which is the essence of the fairy-candy-floss called inspiration. For me, it was also nice to escape the routine here, and stay with Deborah for few precious days. Our time when not there is so very fragmented, so very comb-toothed. In an average week we seem to share only a few hours together. Whenever we go to Morecambe, we think 'let's move here', 'let's live here', 'let's at last break free'. I love Morecambe and its people, and it's nice to see it slightly off-season. I expect such towns are very different in winter than summer, perhaps too busy for me in summer, perhaps too quiet in winter. I'm not even sure if there's a supermarket other than one Aldi (surely there must be!) and the precious internet and phone connections are apparently rubbish (noooo!).

Matt said that we, and Janine, and Peter Buckley Hill, can have full slots next year. That would be nice.

Now, back to reality. I want to finish my music notation. I want to make a book of Fall in Green lyrics. Ideally I'd make a music video for 'Women and Wives', but as you may discern, I'm already not feeling like it. The PRS seem to have rejected two prior performance payments; this worried me and I want to know why. The emails to Fall in Green, and all of my newly-server'd websites haven't worked in weeks and I've only just discovered this. I have to visit the Crewe Create exhibition, do a computer service for John, deliver 'Punishment of the Sun' to the RBSA gallery on Friday, perform 'China in Your Hand' on Thursday (oh, and learn to play it, I don't even know the music), frame 'Love And Fragility In The Age Of Perfection'... ideally all of this in 7 days.

Onwards.

Social Intelligence

Humans, as a species, are basically the same genetically as they were 100,000 years ago, yet we have changed massively in intelligence. We changed 20,000 years ago when nomads formed the first cities, and have changed, and become ever more intelligent in the last 200 years, and more-so last 100 years. There are far more geniuses alive today than in the time of Leonardo da Vinci. Each of us has far more capability, and at a pace far too quickly to be due to genetic evoloution. Why?

I posit that this is because intelligence is not personal but social, and specifically a factor of language and inter-communication. Our brain cells alone are not intelligent, it is their network which makes us so, and our human social network works in the same way to make society, not us individuals, intelligent. Today's animals and plants too are more intelligent than those of the past for this reason; they are part of our society. We can see that horses, for example, are trained by known and documented methods in a way that was not possible in ancient times.

Can we say that plants are today more 'intelligent' than before. In a way cultivation makes them so, even if they lack volition or much power over their environment, they are manipulated by us, by farmers and gardeners, because they give us something in return. It may be a stretch to describe this symbiosis as intelligence, but it is 'in a way', perhaps more of an intelligence than wild plants, those of 50,000 years ago.

Our electronic social media makes all of society yet more intelligent, for intelligence can also be measured by speed. Anyone can build a spacecraft with enough time, designed with pencils and paper, but speed grants us special abilities. Our speed of change and reaction is an essential part of the definition of intelligence, even in common parlance; 'quick witted' for example.

That intelligence is a factor of society, not of the individual is the ultimate retort to Nazism and intellectual elites. A small group of elites would, in isolation, literally be less intelligent than a larger mass.

Linen Lolly

Started today by adding a redirect for the old Fall in Green URL, as Google has yet to update it to the proper address, then design of some German 1920s hyperinflation-era bank notes with a Fall in Green spin for our performance of 'Velvet Gelt'. This alone took an hour and for a lazy fragment of time I considered using AI, but no! I want to avoid any use of it for digital art or in any connection with music. It was fun to do anyway, even if I accidentally deleted the source file just before printing and had to painstakingly re-create the layers.

Folded 30 planes in the afternoon and packed most of what's needed for the trip. It's always a time where I want two sets of shaving things, toothbrushing things, night lights! Looked at what we did and who we met last year and made notes. I expect I'll not have time for more work until after the festival.

Sixth Rehearsal, Burn Of God Scores

Final, 6th, rehearsal for the Morecambe Poetry Festival. It seems we're on at 22:45, the headline slot.

All went fine. Most of the day spent with a little admin on the single release, which is now all set for 9th October 2026, and tedious sheet music work, which always annoys me by its pointlessness and the time it takes, yet it does have some point.

The score for Kyrie is rough, all lack things like string strokes and many polishing touches. It has 6 choral parts alone (3 male, 3 female), 6 string sections, a pipe organ and more. It feels as epic as the Missa Solemnis or Brian's Gothic Symphony, and that was the aim, but of course it's very short and musically simple compared to those. It's taken hours of work on this basic score that will almost certainly never be performed or gazed at by anyone, which is one reason I resent working on it, but history is full of scores unperformed for decades or centuries. A first step is to write it out. I do it also because nobody else could or would. Of course, I'd now love to re-record the album, as I could do far better today, but Burn Of God can wait a good few years yet.

I'd hoped to complete the sheet music for the album before we go to Morecambe but this seems unlikely. I'm stressed, overworked by it all, and not sleeping, but it will feel good to complete it.

I've completed 632 scores since I began this mammoth project of documenting my music in 2022. I'm past half way, and extrapolate a finishing date of 2029.

WAW Music Admin

Mostly admin work on Women And Wives today, including completing the Spotify Canvas animations. Still more to do on this. No work on the Burn Of God sheet music. Watching a documentary about Buddy Holly, an eternal inspiration.

BOG Scoring Day 2

Another tedious day of scoring. Got down the complex 'The Ethereal River' and 'Epilogue'. Will anyone, can anyone ever play them? They are useful references anyway. I hope one day to publish in print all of my scores, so this is a necessary start.

Also rehearsed our Morecambe show, our 5th rehearsal, the second with full props and intros.

Burn Of God Scores

Gosh what a hard day. On my to-do list for the year is to score Burn Of God. I want to score all of my albums, and do this now for new ones. I've done over half of the older ones, but not this. I last updated the music in 2022, but of course I can now do much better, primarily in the mixing, balancing, mastering area, and vocals of course, as my singing has continued to improve. I digress.

I thought I'd scored all of the most difficult albums, those with live piano or orchestral parts. This includes Music Of Poetic Objects, The Anatomy Of Emotions, Cycles, Tree Of Keys; but many of the Burn Of God tracks fit this. Some of the tracks use 'expressive' piano with little sense of timing, tracks like 'The Eternal Dogma' and 'The Dark Nightwatchman'. Today I'd record and sequence these differently... using the 'lined up' timing as mentioned in a recent blog post. This makes transcribing much easier. 'Smile to Fall' could simply be MIDI exported, despite its expressive timing, but not these, and the chords were often embedded into single instruments. This too makes transcribing very slow. I need to hand calculate each note being played.

Sigh, well, after an 8-hour day 'The Eternal Dogma' is done, and most of 'The Dark Nightwatchman'. These are some of the most difficult tracks.

I've spent days, weeks of my life making this sheet music. There's zero 'demand' for it. I offer basic sheet music for all of my music for free on itch, with a small fee for the 'complete' versions, but even most of the basic versions have has zero downloads; and yet I spent weeks, months of my life transcribing it. Sometimes these have been very useful, when needing to play something live, and of course, there's little demand for anything I do. Nobody pays me for anything, so if no master calls the tune, I'm free to do what I like. Life is about order and record keeping, so I'm ordering and keeping records. It will be a joy to get this one complete and out of the way.

Women And Wives Cover and Admin

A full day of work on the endless admin of releasing a piece of music. First photography for the cover, and an hour or two of cover artwork. I spent ages working on a complex draft that aimed to match the futuristic, electronic sound of the music; and added pink!

And yet, I kept a much simpler, early draft, and after hours of working on the above looked again at the early version and preferred it. My recent purchase of The Polydor Years by Peter Godwin, and its artwork, perhaps inspired the lighter look. Many of his covers were photos with text, little else.

Other work today includes finalising the 'Smile to Fall' sheet music, registering the track as a composition, finalising the text notes and storing the image as an artwork, and starting the Spotify Canvas animation work. Ideally I'll make a video... this may have to wait.

Nine Eleven, Smile To Fall Vocals

25 years ago today I was working on the font designs in Imagine for my epic game concept, 'The Heart of Aorkhan'. My father called me downstairs to the news of the World Trade Center attacks. The shape of those letters on the gridded background and specific colours will always remind me of 9/11. The only game of mine that had been published then was 'Burnout' on Amiga, a flop for the world, but a triumph for me. 'Blade' then 'Arcangel' existed, both failures. It was 2002, after the year-long trawl of trying to make Aorkhan that I decided to quit and make some small games, and publish and sell them myself. That marked the first time I'd ever sold games or got anything back from them after 10 years of making games in isolation and complete failure. As well as starting to sell my games, I set up Bytten, the game review website, and IndieSFX, my sound effects library. 2002 was my great year of transformation, rebirth.

In 2001 I'd not painted a thing. My music software Noise Station was in its infancy. My prior music attempts used keyboards, first an Ensoniq ESQ-1 I'd bought from the music shop on the corner of West Street, Crewe, long since gone. I recorded a few tunes to cassette, driven by MIDI and OctaMED software. After the ESQ-1 I bought a (new at the time) Yamaha SY-85. I used the SY-85 to record the music for Arcangel, and the first version of the album later named Synaesthesia. This was perhaps 2000 or 2001. After this I decided I needed better control, so I programmed 'Noise Station', and produced The Incredible Journey and the first Spiral Staircase album using it. Perhaps, though, again 2002 was the start of my longer music journey as this was the year I started to program Noise Station 2, later named 'Prometheus', the software I've updated 191 times since to use for all of my music today.

For me, everything has changed since September 2001. The fast majority of my life seems to have existed after then, but a few things have stayed the same, such as my friend Andrew Williams. The late 90s, 1997 or 1998 perhaps, marked my crisis year, the year the Amiga died and when I was forced to buy a PC, buy books on C++ programming and DirectX5, and start again, learn from scratch. I had less than £200 to my name, no friends, no job, no future. I decided to kill myself and made full preparations, but at the last moment reasoned that I may as well wait until the money ran out completely first, which was perhaps 2 weeks away. I extricated myself from Income Support, the government benefit, and vowed not to touch a government benefit again. By some magic, I started to gain some income, drop by drop. I can remind myself that every dark year can be a restart. I can only hope that the next 25 years will be as bright as the last 25.

I spent most of yesterday on the Women And Wives single, recording the vocals for the 'Smile to Fall' B-side, then mixing and finalising that song. The singing and mixing was easier than expected, perhaps I'm better at mixing this style of songs today. I also transcribed the music to sheet. All that's left now is the cover art. I won't need booklets or CD artwork as this will be a stream-only release.

After two busy days I'm tired and slow today. Listening to a Radio 4 programme about 9/11 where survivors recall that day has made me reminisce. Time is precious and life is short.

Rehearsals, Smile to Fall Recording

Another rehearsal yesterday for the Morecambe performance, this time with full props. I think this is a lot of work for a short show, but Deb has a lot to remember and do, this is primarily for her benefit. For many performances I'll read from the music at least a bit, but this time I'm doing it all from memory to save the need to carry a music stand.

Today, recorded a few tracks for a song of Mike's, all good practice at the key of A. I then learned and re-notated 'Kingfisher's Handcup', which was pretty easy to play for the album but difficult to match live.

Then recorded the piano for 'Smile to Fall'. Prometheus can do a few unusual things, one is help with the timing of tracks like this. Recording a MIDI piano to metronome of say 120 B.P.M. is fine, but most actual playing is expressive and deliberately doesn't stick to a fixed metronome (in fact this is a curse of modern music, even my march of 'Women and Wives' is not strictly regular). As a consequence a recording will load into a sequencer and not line up right, some verses will be slower/longer than others, some beats longer or shorter, but this is 'correct', it's not something that should be or can be quantized because this expression is the whole point - but it creates a few problems when trying to line up other instruments; and of course it can't match the actual structure visually. Prometheus can import a pile of notes and treat these as a tempo guide, slowing or speeding up the player so that all of the notes line up and match the visual structure, thus giving a regular looking arrangement when the music moves at a different pace. I can also quantise notes to this 'expressive' metronome, some ticks of which might be half or double a regular tempo (if we're playing really romantically).

This is a huge help. It does mean, however, that I must play a guide version of the tune with one note per quarter-beat, the left hand marking time. I'd always need some sort of metronome. I could (and have before) hit a note repeatedly like drum-beat for this purpose. Well, 'Smile to Fall' is now recorded like this (the music is easy to play), and I've added a fretless bass and some strings, which are pretty but perhaps overkill for this simple song. It's a very gentle piano song, like an early Kate Bush song, or 'Is This The World We Created...?' by Freddie Mercury.

So, a musical day. More to do.

H Beam Piper and Empty House Framing

A few busy days. First completed the mixing of 'Women and Wives', it's now ready but I'd like to record 'Smile to Fall' as a B-Side. Spent yesterday morning filing and sorting some of the MIDI sequences on the MODX, all notes and ideas.

Today, delivered the two paintings to the PLATFORM gallery for their open, a walk of a mile or so, each painting weighing about 5kg, so something of a workout. Almost all of today though, and half of yesterday was spent framing the H. Beam Piper painting and 'The Empty House'. I've spent more time than usual here. Carefully selecting the woods and sections. Sanding before staining. Distressing and staining (a little distressing of the pine really helps the stain absorb, the result looks much better). Staining, then planing of 'The Empty House' one, but planing the bevel first on the other.

H.P.B. had black then red on top, creating a rich dark red which it enhanced on the grain, as the water-based black and solvent-based red absorb differently. This was varnished twice, sanding between coats, then the inner edge masked and sprayed with a subtle gold, exactly what I was aiming for. T.E.H. used brown stain, then red-shade-blue which resulted in a black with a very subtle green tinge. After staining the bevel was planed, exposing the pine, then the lot stained blue again, notably making the inner bevel blue. I wasn't sure how this would look, but it suits this night scene brilliantly.

Then gluing the frames, stapling, glass cutting, the spacer, backing board, labels, mirror plates, string, and finally measuring and weighing. Oh, I also gilded part of Beam Piper; the top left corner had an annoying gap where gold should be.

A frantically busy day then, but satisfying. I still have to photograph both frames.

Women and Wives Production, Smile To Fall

Mostly working on my cover of 'Women and Wives' today. Yesterday I updated Prometheus to v3.91 with a new feature to change the instrument on a range of notes to any at random between two values, and added the inverse function: to change a range of instruments to a specific one. This was because this song uniquely uses many 'random' bass-drum sounds.

Recorded the vocals today. This was a little harder than expected as I first needed to match the actual vocal melody. For my live 'Wonky' performance I used my own melody because I was primarily focused playing the chords, I didn't listen to the actual melody much. Interestingly I matched it in a line or two anyway. Anyway, today started by notating that. I thought the vocal takes were instantly fine, but tonight when listening back they sound flat and bad so I'll have to try again.

The production ended with a piano sound, a D-minor chord stab and reverse piano at the start to drive this steam-train of a rhythm. The mixing has proven difficult. I had two basses, the buzzy synth bass and a fretless bass because the synth was too thin, but I couldn't quite get it right. In the end I removed the fretless bass and beefed up the synth bass more, so this is the only bass now. The chords use filter sweeps, which sound good and rich, but these can often cause mixing awkwardness and the mid-range richness competes with the vocals.

For the vocals I added a 2 second (4 beat) echo, and a fast Heartbreak-Hotel echo too, which worked well. These are switched off the for the dramatic 'Chasing Tomorrow' line, which drops to near silence.

But there's more to do. I wrote a new song last night, a possible B-side for this release. I've adopted a few McCartney-isms. I'll repeat the first verse at the end, and mentally hummed the melody first to keep it simple and memorable. It starts in C-minor but plays with jumping from G to F in the pleasing chorus, before plunging back to C-minor for the key dramatic moment. Here are the words so far:

Smile To Fall

In the ballroom
Everyone is waiting for her
Black silk ravens
Everyone is waiting for her
Smile to fall
They're waiting for her
Smile to fall a-

Sleep on rainbows
Life is harder than your childhood
Sometimes fate can
Wave its wand and blow away a
Smile to fall
They're waiting for her
Smile to fall away

In the ballroom
Everyone is waiting for her
Black silk ravens
Everyone is waiting for her
Smile to fall
They're waiting for her
Smile to fall away

Other news. I've been notified that 'Punishement of the Sun' has been accepted into the RBSA Prize Exhibition, so my 4th juried exhibition this year. We, as Fall in Green, were mentioned along with the rest of the Morecambe Poetry Festival line-up by Matt on his Morecambe radio show, which was nice. At 2pm today, Deb came by for a third rehearsal of our set.

Onwards we march.

Good Vibrations, Women and Wives

Mike kindly gave me a lift to the Good Vibrations event yesterday. We normally attend every 4 weeks, the event takes place every 2, but Deb happened to be free which caused me to ask about attending; it was this which led to Deb's suggestion of a lift, so a somewhat unexpected participation. It was a nice event, as ever.

I've spent most of today working on a recording of 'Women and Wives', my cover of the Paul McCartney song in the form performed at the Wonky Pear, but I'm unsure if I'll bother releasing it. It seems, according to Emubands, I can do this relatively easily if I submit it to streaming-only services. My main reason for releasing it would be to test this exact mechanism.

My melody is a little bit different to the original, but I think close to be considered it the same song, 100% McCartney's, even if I added the solo that I think the second 'chorus' will benefit from. I wouldn't care at all at 'gifting' ownership of that, with the hope he wouldn't be offended at what I might do to his work.

Backups, Frame Photography, Gravestone Code

A routine busy day of monthly backups, then photography and weighing and measuring 5 paintings in frames. I have a scan or photograph of (just about) each painting I've made, but I also ideally want a photo of the work in its frame, plus all measurements and weights. I have much of these data and tend to take it when I need to exhibit a painting, so did a bit of this today, photographing 'Penalties', 'Punishment Of The Sun', 'The Lady With The Unicorn' (from 2006, which has been on my wall for 20 years but not on the website), the first Claire Luce portrait, and 'Home Life'.

I also updated my will and developed a new code which I'd like to put on my gravestone to tax any future cemeterians. The code is simple to decode, even mentally, when you know how the code works, but fiendishly difficult when you don't. I've not encountered a code quite like it, so I thought setting a puzzle would be fun. The message will indicate the location of a treasure, and I already have in mind what this will be and approximately where. Hopefully it will be a few decades before this is required.

All The Broken Hearted Complete

A night of worries, about the sudden crisis in my father's heath, the care costs and perhaps losing our home. His health is better today, perhaps he over exerted himself yesterday.

Of dreams, I recall a few things. At one point David Lawton was painting a miniature, showing me his process. Wearing magnifying glasses he used a single pubic hair for the finest of details, but seemed embarrassed at using a pubic hair, recommending only 'a single hair' and hiding away the one he used. I also dreamt that shares in a diamond mine which I owned shot up by £20,000, though this only enough to nearly break-even after years of being deep in the red. The feeling was one of neutrality, not joy of making money, not sad at losing; a shrugging of shoulders. Perhaps this is an indicator that worries can be baseless, that all will be, or can be, well.

I painted today but it was a chore and horrible. The first session was so very dark and rainy, and my mood low and anxious. I had to put the light on just to see, and at 10:30 had to run to the shops for house shopping as my mother is now too strained and too busy looking after my father for such things. I did so, one mile there and back in 30 minutes, and the sun appeared as I returned for the next session which was much better. The feathers were difficult enough without the darkness and anxiety.

Things, the light, my mood, gradually got better while painting and the result was adequate, thus the Heartbreak Trilogy is complete. Where to show it? Will it be seen at all, by anyone? I must at least prepare for it, so I must aim to make three frames.

Back to Painting, All The Broken Hearted

Gamer night last night. I've been lacklustre and distracted in August regarding painting compared to July, for a few reasons. The weather has turned duller and cooler, and I've had a few performance dates; the Macca Night, and rehearsals for Morecambe. Plus, I felt that the painting season was coming to an end, a grass-is-greener gaze towards music, but perhaps also a tiredness and general lack of drive for painting after many constant months of it.

Seeing my friends reminded me of how important art and painting is. I found myself in the night hours comparing my life with that of artists past at my age, Vermeer and van Gogh; Rembrandt and Beethoven. Life is short. Their lives a struggle in various ways, as is mine, yet art has a great power over time, over death. I suddenly became enthused with painting again, and decided to work on the paintings in progress today, starting with 'All The Broken Hearted', so for a rare time began a glazing day with enthusiasm.

The colours were simple, mostly burnt sienna and ultramarine grey-blues and browns, with yellow ochre light (a superlative colour by Winsor and Newton which I've used in almost every painting), and a few minor others like reds and greens for small areas.

My father's illness is difficult to manage and he fell twice today. Mum talked about care concerns, selling the house and other terrors, but these worries are I think excessive for now. An assessment of his needs is due.

Macca Night, Stockport, Exhibition Entries

A ram-packed Paul McCartney tribute night on Thursday. A great night of great music. My rendition of 'Women & Wives' went well. I'm inspired to record it as a cover, as my version is sufficiently different. This project has filed my mind but there are challenges. I'd like to play lots live, but I only have so much space for huge recordings, one track per song really. It's not so much a memory issue as ultimate storage space, I don't want to store massive songs because I have a large quantity of output, it's not efficient. The backing is quite repetitive so it makes more sense to sequence it. I've already created a few sounds on the MODX, I may sample those or re-create them again in Prometheus. I played it live with a heavy saw-synth bass on the Microkorg and it was a challenge to duplicate (well, a close copy) on the MODX.

I prepared an equally ambitious synth version of 'Live and Let Die', but there was no time on the night. A pity, as all songs bar one were Beatles songs, only mine and one other was a McCartney solo song, and there were no Wings songs. I hope to play 'Live and Let Die' at a future Good Vibrations event. Here's a photo by Deb of the 'Hey Jude' finale:

Slow days between. I feel lacklustre and not in a visual art mood. I've updated my websites today, and the IndieSFX licence, to explicitly exclude the use of sounds for AI training. The old licence (and all of the sounds) pre-date generative AI. I'm spending time each day tinkering with the MODX, making new sounds here and there, but this is often time wasted. When writing a new song it's best to think of the sound needed, then make it, rather than make a sound and then write a song with it.

Half of yesterday was spent going to Stockport to collect the 'Song of Innocence' painting. I've heard that two paintings have been accepted into the first Crewe Create Open Exhibition. Also, the biggest tribute website to H. Beam Piper, zarthani.net, has added my new portrait to it today. This has inspired me to contact a few other Beam Piper enthusiasts.

Telepathic Day 2, Rehearsals

A second half day of glazing the Telepathic Daisy painting yesterday, then treated the oak Blood of Winter frame for woodworm. There's no indication of woodworm apart from a few ancient holes, this is a preventative measure for the hardwood frame after advice from Zoe from the Oil Art Advisory.

Today, a second Fall in Green rehearsal for the Morecambe Poetry Festival set, and for the Paul McCartney night tonight. I decided at the last minute to have 'Live and Let Die' in reserve, so quickly looked and played/sang that through. I noted that in this and 'Women and Wives', the song ended with the first verse and chorus repeated, and Hey Jude too for the most part (the coda replacing the chorus repeat).

I'm also helping a lot with my father's name change. Everyone calls him Damien, buth this is his middle name and he's decided to make to removal of his unused first name official as he got really annoyed at its use during his recent hospital visit. This is causing me and my mother lots of work and stress for what we consider to be a trivial matter. Not a huge job, but lots of little jobs that take up and break up each day over several weeks.

Telepathic Daisy Glazing

A slow and difficult day. Glazed the sky part of the Telepathic Daisy painting but made many clumsy mistakes in my room including dropping the ultramarine, causing it to eject a line on the carpet like the result of a lunar meteor strike! This stain is now a permanent mess. I didn't at any point feel like painting, my energies here are slowing off, but I must and will continue until the season ends.

I mixed up some test wood stain but the ethanol I bought for the purpose didn't at all dissolve the oil paint I'd planned for this! I need bottles to test different solvents. I'd fully expected the paint to dissolve easily and quickly. I regret buying the ethanol at all. I should have bought either isopropynol (which I've used often and know to work well as, for example, a Laropal A81 solvent), or methylated spirits. I expected the denatured ethanol to be meths, but it's not.

Made a new sound for some of the Fall in Green tracks, how I love my MODX! 'We Used To Store Sunlight' has strings on the lower part for the left hand backing, with a wind-chime for the lowest note for occasional accents. There's a triangle-wave arpeggio on the upper octave which matches the one in the recording, and a melodic lead of a flute for the right hand. A press of the AF1 switch and the flute switches off and a piano appears for the second half of the song. If I light AF2, I get a second piano an octave higher for the initial piano appearance. It's a full orchestra at my fingertips!

Rehearsed for the Paul McCartney night and made some financial moves. A frustrating day that felt terrible at all times, yet I can see that there are positives. Nobody knows, in the long term, whether a day is good or bad. Things done today may be crucial to success in ways that only hindsight can determine.

Live Music Rehearsals

Today, rehearsed my songs for the Paul McCartney night on Thursday, and for our Fall in Green set for Morecambe, a full day for small performances. The McCartney song I chose, Women and Wives, is piano based but I only have a puny (in range and polyphony) Microkorg, so I've decided to do a synth version with distorted saw-bass playing a riff almost like a doom version of 'Smoke on the Water'. A fitting alternative version.

The Impossible Hopes Of Sisyphus Tracing, Aspirations of Brilliance

Frame completed yesterday. The painting is now framed, but ideally I need a (very large) backing board for the frame. I can't afford it.

Today, a full day tracing the large Sisyphus painting. This is close to the largest painting I can manage without upgrading certain pieces of equipment. Over 1200mm, I'd need a larger drawing board, and spend more on the Polydraw film, as it's width is 1016mm (of course, this can be the shortest side, but that is a bit wasteful, in this case I used a shorter 841mm roll, but there's not much left on that). So, 1010mm is a reasonable maximum for longest side. 'The Impossible Hopes Of Sisyphus' is 1097x740 visible, the canvas is 1117x760.

For these works on Top Gun canvas I trace with the Polydraw and use oil paint, pencil won't stick to the waxy canvas. I used a new technique today, applying the paint with palette knife which was far faster than the subby brush along each line. It still took several hours to trace, but not as long as some works. I recall 'The Art Of Painting' taking many hours spread over 3 days to trace. This is of comparable complexity and took about 4 hours.

I feel artless and uncreative. My instincts and cries are all for music. It's a tragedy that the things I could make are being lost; this feeling last night inspired me to work on the painting today. It's a tragedy that the things I am making are being lost or unseen or unheard or ignored.

I feel I could do better, that everything is weaker than it could be. Every time I finish a painting, a piece or music, a piece of writing, it seems far worse than planned, far worse that I feel I am capable of doing. It instantly becomes a failure, yet that shame of failure generates an inspirational energy. The anxiety of the failure induces an aspiration to make the artwork again, or make something new, something similar, something better, and trying to do it as well as I'd planned, as well as I know that I can; and yet everything I complete generates the same feeling, that it's good or bad, but never as good as planned, and I'm again filled with the shame and knowledge that I can do far better.

Today I'm tortured by that feeling constantly. That everything is a failure and yet simultaneously know that I'm capable of much more, much better, if only I could somehow prove it.

Two days ago I watched a film called The Killings At Outpost Zeta by Robert Emenegger, a man who is perhaps the Ed Wood of the 1980s. Actually, from what I've seen, his films are worse than Ed Wood's. 'Zeta' is a cheap copy of Alien that is so immensely bad that it borders on hilarious, though it's usually more boring than scary. By chance I've also seen Beyond the Universe, which is perhaps the worst film I've ever seen, yet so bad I just had to keep watching. In that film, the Earth is running out of oxygen. The government plan on sedating everyone to save oxygen, but the 'world's best scientist' decides to overrule their plan and build a giant laser-gun-like weapon to beam a message beyond the universe to 'God', to ask him for advice (that's right, asking God for advice was his entire plan). I mention these films because no matter how bad I feel that my art is or has ever been, it is still at its worst far better than either of these films.

Punishment Of The Sun Frame

A day of making the frame for 'Punishment Of The Sun'. A complex work, as the edge has to be bevelled and gilded, something I've rarely done, and not yet on plain wood like this. First step was working out the bevel depth. It's a matter of angling the wood lengths on the worktop and running along the sharp edge with a power-plane. Then planing that edge and sawing the 4 pieces by hand using a floorboard saw an an old iron mitre. The sizes were calculated using my Frameculator software to spare me the mental working out each time.

Then distressing and staining the frame. It's much easier to paint (sponge) each length before assembling the frame. I chose the colour to match the somewhat dried and cracked buddleja wood in the painting.

Then masking off the bevel and applying gold size and gold leaf.

Then peeling it off. The edges of the gold are a little rough. This can't be helped unless the gold is trimmed with a blade, it's impossible to get a 'perfect' edge. Often this roughness, and marks and gaps in the gold, is simulated on painted frames. The edge is rougher here because I didn't apply a framer's gesso ground beforehand, but I didn't want to; that's a whole extra layer of work, a few extra days.

I'll let the gold dry properly overnight. I have a few options for that rough edge. I could leave it (I'll tidy the gold a little when the oil is dry, rubbing it smooth now would create a sticky mess). I could add paint, or tape, more distressing, or a host of options. All of this took until 15:30. I'd often make a few frames in a day, but have none planned for the moment. I try to frame as needed now as unframed paintings take up less space.

Trips and Outfits

Three busy away days complete! Yesterday, collected a new lot of wood for framing - my next job is to make a frame for 'Punishment Of The Sun'. Then, a trip to the Good Vibrations event in the library followed by an overdue visit to the Oil Art Advisory. I took along the recently completed Kafka portrait and it was immediately hung on the wall. I wore more interesting clothes for the day and feel I should do this more. Couture fashion has always been part of art and is an important part of every artist as well as every art movement. My outfit, I think, improved Good Vibrations, made it feel like more of a special performance by all.

I'd like a head mould for my head so I can make custom hats...

Most of today was tidying and completing admin work for the past three days, plus an update to my framing software Frameculator, adding various preset sizes of wood, as I now often use two specific sizes.

Trips

Trip to Macclesfield yesterday to have my father's First Day Covers valued. Today, a coach trip to Gloucester. We met Kev Milsom, a long time writer for Ink Pantry.

Impossible Hopes Of Sisyphus Composition

A rubbish day of nothingness yesterday but I did manage to add social-media link 'previews' to my websites. My father arrived back from hospital. My mother is adjusting to becoming a full time carer.

Today, a full day's work on the Sisyphus painting, refining the outlines and adding more. The 1/3rd scale drawing was really useful for working things out. Another little job was woodwork, expanding two of my drying rack arms to permit much larger paintings, so another aid to painting large. I like this scale.

The next three days will be hectic with trips, so no free time until Thursday, which is set for lightning storms. I expect I'll need that day to rest.

Anti Digital Counter Culture

Listening to Stuart Lee's Radio 4 programme about Counter Culture. Thought it odd that he didn't comment on populist politicians being the modern rebels against the mainstream. I digress.

Stuart said that he hated the internet, and I thought yes I do too! - yet I have social media accounts, many websites which I use actively and enjoyably as an archive of my life, and I browse news and check my emails regularly. I hate computers, but love my computer too, it's the first thing I switch on every day. I use my software Prometheus to create music, even though it steals away some humanity from the result. I use digital photography and image processing tools to create my art, even though they steal expression too. What do I dislike? The easiness perhaps. Perhaps I remain embittered at the theft of so much of my life to those things, my decades of sole computer focus, my years wasted on making games (and a good many hours playing them).

Yet, does this mean I love the non-computer aspects of life and art? Not especially. Perhaps the digital world was appealing because it felt better than the real world.

Could I make music non-digitally now? I'd have to buy a tape machine, I expect, but I expect that I'd want or need a multi-track machine, and a mixing desk. Perhaps those things are already a bit 'digital', a bit easy and computerised, a bit controlled and artificial. Perhaps the only pure and organic way to create music would be play live and record the result in one take, or better still play to a live audience alone. Would this feel more satisfying? Perhaps, perhaps not. The music's record as a memory would be transient. The goal of life is resilience, and computers give us better informational resilience. Some aspects of the internet are not resilient, but some things are more resilient by being online. Computers and the internet are hard to ignore today. So much of daily use, official use, demands it. I had to pay £4 extra for real paper train ticket because I don't have or want a smart phone.

In painting I could paint from life. Ignore scanning my drawings, digital photographs, 3D graphics, AI tools. I could make clay models, as I do, and paint exclusively from those, or from my mind's eye. Would electric light be acceptable? Would the Amish of art paint by candle light? These pure results might be better for being more self-expressive, and occasionally I improvise paintings in similar ways, although I often use 2D reference material, like the portrait of Telly Savalas. I tend to be unhappy with the muddy results. These sometimes form a template for a new painting with clearer source material, as in the first Fly In Amber painting, as in the Sappho painting, and so the cycle begins again.

Ultimately, I use technological tools as any other tool: to make a better quality result. Without the internet or computers I'd probably find other aspects of 'real life' I'd dislike. There's a lot of technological interference in a lot of the music and art I like, but it must be a balance decided upon by the artist. Music from the 1950s to today hugely differed in tone by decade primarily due to technology. The muddy mid-range clang of the 1950s. The 'clean' low bass sound of the 1980s. The compressed and constantly loud sound of the 2000s. Perhaps now, we have control over this. We can sound like the 1960s-era Beatles if we want, but few, if any, artists do. Thousands strive to copy their song writing, none strive to have the same limited gamut of tone. We all want to sound like the future. If there are Amish artists, the key question isn't how but what do they depict? Perhaps both how and what have always been inextricably linked.

Impossible Hopes Of Sisyphus Begins

Work yesterday and today on 'The Impossible Hopes Of Sisyphus'. This was to be a small painting, a mere 40x30cm or less, as I thought the idea slight, but when working on it started to like the idea and saw more of an epic scale, so it's become one of my largest paintings at 109cm wide.

Due to the scale, I've used an involved and time consuming process of scaling up the 4cm idea sketch to a 1/3rd mock-up, then scaling that up using lots of A4 tracing sheets to the final drawing size, actually on the verso of the Lyceum Centenary painting from 2011.

There are numerous figures, each a different time snapshot of eternity. The visual themes are the boulders and scythes, for death and time (Kronos). The painting is ultimately about stoicism and the Sisyphean existentialism, the emotion melancholic, grave, accepting the eternity of work.

Live Music Settings Day 2, Solar Eclipse

A full and good day. Completed the admin of the 5 Fall in Green albums, noting live settings for each track. Then printed and practiced the new music for the Morecambe show, and developed a few new instruments. Then got to work on my albums, which also took a while. I remember performing quite a few We Robot tracks, and some A Drive Through The Town, and Secret Electric Sorcery! All in all, quite a few tracks needed noting, and I designed a few new MODX sounds for future live events (if there ever are any).

I made a crude eclipse viewer box for tonight's 90% eclipse. The results were rather poor, but I managed to glimpse the sun. The best shot was pointing my camera directly at it with minimum lighting settings (1/4000sec, F25, ISO100).

Websites still being set up. The new cornutopia.net, my first test site, is live!

Frame Photography, Live Music Admin

Started by photographing the newly framed paintings, plus singing practice. This took all morning. Then work on the Morecambe performance. I had hoped to rehearse, but 3 or 4 pieces haven't been performed live so I don't have the sheet music or know which instruments to use. Until now, I've recorded instrumentation and settings for each song we perform in the script, the set-list, for the show, but it's been a year since our last show, and I didn't, by chance, note those settings then, perhaps because they were relatively trivial and all on the MODX (no multiple keyboards).

Still, this was a wake-up call. It makes much more sense to store live performance information with each album, not with each performance event. We performed some tracks live many times, Janus Never Blinks, for example, and often used different instruments per performance, the P105 piano and a tubular bell first, and sometimes the little RefaceDX, but now the MODX almost exclusively; but what if we need to perform it again and need to see how we did it last time? It's a matter of looking through countless scripts of previous shows, and finding the best one for the equipment we'll be using this time. This takes far longer than finding the album. So I've made new 'live' text files for each album and will list there how we perform each track.

This though will take days of work, because it means going through 100 shows or so, every performance to get this exact data. I'll also update the MODX program names. All Fall in Green instruments begin 'FIG' but I have custom instruments used on recordings that it's best I keep too, and sometimes different ones for live (these may have splits or layers, or samples). I think I'll name my live instruments 'MAS' too.

Lots of admin, but it should speed things up for future live shows.

Failures and Victories, The Blood Of Winter and Kafka Frames

An awful day of drab failure yesterday. I'd hoped to use my router table to cut new channels in wood for the 'Punishment Of The Sun' frame, but at first my mother didn't want to help; no work on Sunday is her motto. The cutting was better than the disastrous first attempt, but still a failure, the wood rose up and was chewed. The machine was noisy and messy. The results would perhaps be improved with work and more modifications. I like making my own things, I like 'reinventing wheels', but my mother insisted that I stop, that she would pay for custom-cut wood from a local timber yard.

I updated my frame calculator software, but most of the day was wasted, a day of plans abandoned. There were also food problems. My breakfast was uncooked due to some sort of microwave failure, and the other meals failed too, in odd ways. In the evening, problems with my father's illness kept us awake and I barely slept. He spent the night in hospital.

Yet, today was a transformation. I ordered the wood and it was cheaper than I expected. We visited my father, who seemed to be doing ok. Perhaps this incident will lead to a revised care plan for him. I returned home to frame 'The Blood Of Winter', and the Kafka painting, both worked well. The hosting issues about my websites and domains seem to be resolving after nearly a week of waiting. I bought train tickets for the Stockport art collection, a mere £2.50 per trip, less than a bus ride. I ordered some Ethyl Alcohol to make wood stain, and this too was a bargain price (I expect the price of these chemicals will go up due to the issues around the Strait of Hormuz). And I worked out the dates and possible entries for several open competitions. A good day.

Deborah has been wonderful, too.

Surrealism and Magical Realism

I paint ideas and feelings. From the beginning, my paintings were compared to surrealism, and this term is familiar to the general public as a certain type of painting, a fantastical, dream-like and eccentric image. For the reason of succinct description I don’t object to my work being described as surrealist, but I don’t adhere to or care about the principles of that 1930s group. For me, I’m trying to represent the maximum gamut of feeling and concept.

Another related term is Magical Realism. The principle difference between the two is that surrealism is supposed to depict the unfiltered unconscious of the artist, although to many adherents of surrealism, including its founders, surrealism is not an art form but a tool of mental change which can be used to drive social change. Surrealism was almost a form of therapy, but initially a form of experimentation upon the mind without an external outcome, it was an internal examination.

Magical realism, on the other hand, is an art genre which includes imaginative elements. Surrealism is supposed to contain only unconsidered, unfiltered, unconscious output. To some extent, surrealism is designed to be unfathomable and enigmatic. Magical realism creates a realistic and possible world with elements which may be fantastical or beyond normal experience. Magical realism can be, perhaps should be, created consciously and understood by the viewer or reader, taken as normal. Its imaginative tools are used to create an emotional and intellectual effect; reality is pushed into the fantastic to enhance a narrative, to make a point. In this respect, perhaps all literature could be seen as a form magical realism with more or less magic, more or less fantasy, as all literature is an abstraction of actual reality. Actual reality, in all its wonder, can’t ever be portrayed in full by an artwork; the artist must abstract, parody, enhance and bend reality in ways subtle and otherwise to make a point, and light an emotion.

What makes magical realism magic is that it contains fantastical elements, so its reality tends to be bent substantially. H. G. Wells ‘The Invisible Man’ is not generally considered to be magical realism, although one could argue for its case, it’s more fantastical than a Charles Dickens work. A similar case can be made for fairytales or works of fantasy. For me, these labels may be useful for some form of genre categorisation, but there is another simpler metric, one from mundane reality, stretching to a strange reality of fantastical imagination, and that is all.

The unconscious is a problematical concept altogether which I explore in more depth in my book ‘21st Century Surrealism’. Setting that analysis aside we will consider the unconscious in the most commonly accepted way as a pile of ‘hidden thoughts’ which can impose themselves on our conscious minds. There is undoubtedly a constant dialogue between what is conscious and what is unconscious, and any creative act involves both of these factions of mind. We cannot say for certain that an idea is wholly conscious or wholly unconscious, a thought is a thought, and when a thought used to generate idea in a creative context, the origin of the idea becomes moot. It’s quite possible for a genuine and trained surrealist to output a stream of consciousness pile of words, and for a second magical realist artist to create the same words. The effect of a fantastical scene upon a viewer or reader would be the same whether the source was conscious or unconscious, or a mix of the two. This, more than any reasoning, explodes the boundary between art genres.

It is the job of an artist to communicate an idea, to communicate a meaning and feeling, and any and all tools are valid. A random act, like an ink-blot, an act by a machine, can do this; so the source of the information, the method of creation, is not important.

Reality, non-fiction, biography and autobiography, realistic fiction, crime fiction, fairytale, science fiction, fantasy, magical realism and surrealism. These labels may help a bookshop or critic, but it’s perhaps more rational to rate a work on a scale of tedious and ‘real’ to extraordinary, creative, different from the norm. It is the latter to which all artists aspire, but we can only go so far, or the result is randomness, nonsense. Science fiction uses tropes to build a structures which ground the educated reader in the mechanics of the world, and for more complex and creative works, these are needed as mental scaffolding to inform the reader, or viewer of art. The job of artist is communication, not mere expression. It is for this reason that fantasy is always, to some degree, grounded in reality. In nonsense, only those patterns of reality we see, become art; only a bad artist would consider those random encounters art. The task of the artist is to touch a known reality in new ways.

Woodwork, Routing

Woodwork today. Started by making up an extendable hole-part for my drying rack system. These have a 15mm wide bit of wood in the middle, so to fix this to the holey 'ends' I thought I'd try my router-table-guide-thing I made last year to cut out a 15mm slot. It had a few problems. Firstly the 120mm bolts in the guide were not long enough to set correctly. The results were not great, and for the second recess I sawed by hand. The final drying rack part looked messy, but it was accurate and straight, so good enough for a drying rack, and all made from recycled scraps.

Then I bought full wood lengths for the 'Punishment Of The Sun' frame, a proper test of the router table. Alas I had no wood of this size to test, I'd have to test it on the actual wood. First I fitted longer bolts, some spare I'd made for my defunct painting carrying racks. I needed to cut a 10mm recess so thought I'd use a 16mm bit, reasoning that using the 'edge' of this would make the cut cleaner somehow. I positioned the guide so that the router cuts 'away' rather than towards the wood as I feed it... I thought that it might split if cutting towards... but the results were disastrous!

The wood was pulled away, the bit acting like a roller to pull it through. It pulled so violently that it ripped some of the guide wheels off my table, these were only glued, but should have been screwed too! I re-fitted them and screwed them. Tomorrow I'll try again, this time I'll use a 12mm bit, and make it cut towards the push direction.

AI in Artificial Intelligence Discovering Perfect Pornography

Underpainting complete for 'Artificial Intelligence Discovering Perfect Pornography'. This painting follows a few weeks of my first experiments with AI to see if it can help with painting creation.

AI, at time of writing, is remarkably rubbish for any creative task, and I suspect it always will be because it aspires to produce an average. This might be good news for competitive and brilliant artists because so much art by rubbish artists (pretty flower painters! quirky landscape painters!) are this, and AI might out-compete them. Still, perhaps this can't be ignored, as the aesthetically ignorant majority like this sort of thing. Art elitism aside I'm concerned with utility and good art, being creative and expressing my unique personality and world, this is the goal of all artists rather than mere craftspeople, us composers rather than mere performers. AI is really powerful and it can have use as an artistic assistant.

I experimented with AI here partly because the painting is about AI, so I thought I'd share a walk though of the process. Here's the idea sketch from around 2014. It was then named 'Alchemist Discovering Perfect Pornography':

I thought the idea was amusing, but, as I've said elsewhere, it seemed to resonate today with the joke of AI 'becoming human'. My paintings always begin with such idea sketches; small, unconsciously sketched ideas which often jump into my head complete with title. These are notes of the image in my head at the time, so often come (in my head) complete with colours and textures. These sketches serve as a mnemonic of that vision. They're more than a seed, but a record of a finished idea which I can revisit when needed.

In the sketch, which I know from that memory but others perhaps can't see, the top 1/3rd of the image is bone, the wiggly blobs on the right are teeth, and the shield-hole above is a skull's nose. Below is a dawn sky over a rocky landscape. The flesh-like rock-like 'monolith' man emerges from it and gazes with fascination at the flower, a human egg, the 'discovery'. The arch in the sky is a reflection of the skull's nose, like a window in the sky, which had (at one point) a sun peeping inside. A falling tooth makes the window something of a mouth of a startled face. At one point (in 2014 when drawing it), I dripped pendulous tears from this window, but erased them.

My goal when realising a painting is to stick to this idea. Sometimes I want to keep the exact shape, and sometimes the shapes are notes for me to find an image (like a rough sketch of a figure that I'd need to locate in an exact pose; I prefer photo-realism, not illustration or cartoon figures). The key goal is to match the feeling. In recent years (well, um ten or so) I've started to blow up the tiny idea sketch (4cm) to full size using tracing paper to closely match the idea's outlines. This is step 1. Then I'll tidy up any rough areas, re-draw and fix up things to look more realistic if needed, like the teeth and skull parts here. I wanted to keep the exact look and shape of the figure here, his expression and pose is vital.

After that, the painting sketch in final size looked like this:

At this point I'd normally locate source materials for the different parts, some skulls, a landscape, a sky. I can invent those things from my mind, like Bob Ross did all of the time, but if I did this my 'happy little' paintings would all look the same and would be based on my same collection of mental images; this would stagnate my art.

One thing I can do is make a lighting model, often from plasticine, and most useful when there are objects which can cast shadows or have complex lighting. I've used computer models before, but they look worse AND take a lot longer than a plasticine model. This, I thought, is an ideal job for AI. It could also help with those textures, saving me trawling free image sites, or the need to photograph real world objects (like myself for the figure, I don't have many skulls hanging around).

I sent the outline drawing to Gemini and described the scene and its textures. To help it, I sent it two images of the texture of bone from my personal image library of texture references. The result wasn't too bad...

...but obviously flawed. The best bit is that bone texture because I gave it some bones, and it placed them well. It didn't get the skull part right, but there's enough there for me to use. Why it added a second head and a second 'flower' I don't know, it absolutely would not stick to my lines. I decided that this didn't matter so much, I'm not using this image for anything except approximate shading.

I wanted things more lit from the 'flower', so I asked it for a sunrise, and to remove the second head and second flower.

Better, more useful (it added a weird hand!). This will do, it's on par with a model lighting guide, with the bonus of more realistic textures and colours. The sky isn't what I had in mind, it's too dark, too cloudy, but I decided to ignore that. It'll never be perfect but I don't want it to be too refined in case it interferes with everything I add as I paint. In this case the actual mistakes and lack of quality help, they leave spaces for me to fill.

The arch window is missing... this was intentional. I decided that, rather than the 'sun of discovery' there, I'd add a couple about to kiss; a robot and a beautiful woman, thus re-inforcing the theme of the painting, so that anyone who had no clue about the title would understand it. I found an appropriate pose from a silent film, and took some images of the robot in Metropolis. These I fed to Gemini and asked it to create the couple.

This worked brilliantly. When supplied with material it's brilliant at extrapolation and transformation, it can change lighting and poses in ways far beyond 2D image editing. Here's the underpainted window:

And the finished underpainting as a whole:

You can see how much of the guide it was or wasn't in the end. It was certainly useful; I've used the bits I wanted, not what I didn't.

I wouldn't consider this an AI artwork at all, but it is AI assisted, particularly the kissing couple. Without the AI I'd use the silent film couple (as I did earlier this year in 'Love And Fragility In The Age Of Perfection') and make the male robotic, but I think this painting is better for that robot. When painting the rest I was constantly aware of not wanting to use the AI imagery, aware that this may dilute my vision, yet some of its suggestions, like the placement of the shadow on the 'wire' were great; this is the sort of thing I'd look to a guide for.

I'd never use AI for writing because no-one could convey what I want to say better than me - that's just obvious. There's no 'better' or 'worse' or 'right' or 'wrong' in that, the best is how we actually write; our personality. This is why I love performing without a script and love improvising on piano; everything we say or do is what our unconscious intended and this is correct, the 'wrong notes' are correct as far as our unconscious creative mind is concerned, correct in an unknown but true way. I've no desire at all to use AI to create music because I love making music with my own tools and I absolutely hate the sound of modern pop (and the idea of pitch correction and the awful sound of auto-tuned vocals!). I've not done any experiments here, maybe it could create a unique sound effect (a Boeing 747 crashing into a junk yard of bedsprings?) or sample that might be useful, or for cleaning up audio, like The Beatles did with 'Now and Then'.

When painting I remained constantly aware of the threat of dilution of the concept by its 'personality'. Perhaps my plasticine lighting guide can also dilute the freedom and impact of that idea sketch. These creative problems are even worse for a film director who has so many competing forces which battle his or her vision. It's a key goal of an artist to weigh up each creative choice and target that intial core vision, that 'orb' of image and emotion which sparked the idea. Perhaps we never succeed, but we can at least be aware of potential pitfalls as we walk that tightrope to our vision, the final artwork.

Drying Racks Changes, AIDPP Underpainting

An unplanned slow start to today, I'd hoped to charge into painting but felt tired and listless. Instead I found myself making some new drying rack parts, as the new painting, 'Artificial Intelligence Discovering Perfect Pornography', needed a drying space and I'd run out of racks. This is partly because I'm painting larger this year, I had enough smaller racks. Here is my rack design. I made them in 2009 or 2010:

I have 4 of the small 8-hole middle parts, but too many, as I tend to paint large now, and small panels are easy to rest somewhere. So, I cut a 7-hole and 8-hole section up to create a new 10-hole piece, which is much more useful. This means I have the spare end pieces. I could do with a very long one, and I thought that I could use some spare wood to make a telescopic mid-section which would make it fairly easy to store yet allow a very long length if needed.

My biggest hole-section is 18 holes, 88cm, and that's now in use under the Telepathic Daisy painting. I've never needed larger than this. I used to have 2x 18-hole pieces, but one was bent so always wobbled, so I recycled it this year. Perhaps though, it might be useful to have one that can be as large as I'll ever need... not much bigger than 88cm I think... but one never knows. So I'll make plans for an extendable middle-part.

I felt so hungry at 11:30 that I ate lunch then. I can't remember ever doing this before, it might be the first day in 30 or 40 years that I've eaten early when at home (I may be forced to adjust if I'm out). I did this specifically to give me time after eating to paint, so I did so and painted part of the AI painting.

Them And Us Framing, YouTube Updates, Art Writing

Framed 'Them And Us' yesterday, and updated my Artist's Statement.

Today, edited all 300 or so videos on my Music Channel to permit comments, and updated the tags for consistency. Then entered the RBSA Prize Exhibition, I'll need to frame 'Punishment of the Sun' if required. Later wrote a essay on Surrealism and Magic Realism, and related works of fantasy. For me, there's no difference. I'd like to write more essays on art, and ideally video these.

It's the last of a few hot days. I hope it remains sunny as tomorrow I'd like to paint again. My instincts are calling for music again, new work, more unified with my painting and new philosophy on 2026. The new is always so much more appealing than the now.

Bickerton Collection, Art Photography

A very full and busy day. Started with some computer admin, then quickly off to Bickerton to collect my work from the exhibition. I sold 'The Time For Love Has Nearly Flown', one of my favourite 2007 paintings which I exhibited in the Lyceum Theatre at my first exhibition, and clearly remember showing at The Cubby Hole at my first 'Surrealist Art Exhibition' there in 2010. It was even exhibited in the RBSA in Birmingham later that year, and many times since. It was reframed a few years ago, and I think this Bickerton showing was the first in its new frame. This is my first Bickerton sale since 2021, but all sales since 2020 (and Covid) have been scant as I've barely exhibited. My focus since 2019... until this year... has been music.

Then, lots of art photography with the new rig I've built this summer. It was a lot easier, but still hard work. The job involves assembling the lights, the flatbed, the towers, the steel tracks, the camera and it's shoe, taking the photos section by section, digital stitching (by hand at the moment, I need software for this ideally), then taking everything apart and re-packing away. Everything is in small parts for storage, so it normally takes a day for a session. Today's work was complete by 19:00, but I still have some filing to do.

The photography was done for the sake of 'Punishment of the Sun', so here is the finished painting. The face is good enough but suffers a little due to the heavy texture of the canvas. I'm not really used to fine details on works of this scale.

Backups, Platform, McCartney Songs, The Impossible Hopes Of Sisyphus

Backups yesterday, then the final proposal for an exhibition in Crewe's PLATFORM gallery. A slow day today, lacking in focus and still somewhat tired. Why? Am I still recovering physically from the Punishment of the Sun?

I've put my name down for the next John Lindley tribute night, Paul McCartney this time. I never like performing well known songs, seems boring and pointless to me. I prefer writing something new, but I searched through a few of his solo albums and picked one new to me called 'Women and Wives'; middle of the road lyrics but a great dark feeling, echoes of 'House of the Rising Sun'. It would sound much better on piano, needs percussion really, but I'll have just my weedy Microkorg and its 4-note polyphony. My first instinct was to play 'Temporary Secretary', let down by the fact that it's perhaps McCartney's worst song and one of the worst songs by anyone. A plus side is that I could improve it!

Of next paintings, I want to paint 'The Impossible Hopes Of Sisyphus' in large format, larger than I normally paint. I think it would help to draw out a small version first, so have marked the paper for a 1:3 scale version.

Rest Day, Prometheus v3.90

A rest day after too many exhausting days, again awoke tired and full of aches. Did some singing practice. Manged to hit D5 without much trouble, this note was unreachable in years past, yet my general performances were not good, perhaps I need to practice more, or perhaps I'm still recovering from last Wednesday's Dancing Queen!

Went out in the lovely sunshine and bought a few things to cook later. Updated Prometheus to v3.90, making yet more use of the FX text box to dispose of multiple menu options (eg. Frames Per Second, Tuning, Split/Merge Tracks; these had lots of menu options, now a small number of common values with a 'Set to FX' option to make a smaller menu with even more flexibility).

In the evening, played keyboard to a CD as practice, a joyous jam. I dream of doing this with other people. Monthly backups tomorrow.

Punishment Of The Sun Complete

Day 4 of glazing, the 8th day of work on this painting overall. I slept reasonably well, but awoke practically exhausted and demoralised as is typical at the start of a glazing day. I began at 09:00 as usual, initially struggling due to the rain-soaked darkness and an eyestrain headache. I took an early break at 10:15 and employed many enthusing techniques; exercise, coffee, tea, and re-evaluation of the work from every angle, then got to work to much better effect finalising the drapery, and in the afternoon adding a few final touches. As usual I've documented the work and parts of which I'm happy with, unhappy with, notes for future improvement etc. The work is unusual in a few ways: my first to use AI for most of the source reference material, and my first of canvas self-adhered to MDF.

Tired, tired, tired now! I feel like sleeping for a few days; but rest will be brief, there is much work to do in this short and limited life. The great rock of art awaits its joyous roll.

Punishment Of The Sun Glazing

Two solid days of painting, both completing at about 19:30. Another day of drapery remains.

Have applied for the Castle Park Life Portrait Painting event. I'm not much of a live portrait painter, but if I manage to be there I'd make it something of a spectacle.

Human-Like AI, Punishment Of The Sun Glazing

The first day of glazing 'Punishment Of The Sun' today. A long and tedious day painting the sky, tree, parts of an intensely detailed sandy floor. Perhaps I need to add more interest in these details, but for now, the art is this detail; in emulation of Cabanel - this was a goal of this painting.

Spent the last two days working on a new painting: 'Artificial Intelligence Discovering Perfect Pornography'. An idea from perhaps 10 years ago originally named 'Alchemist Discovering Perfect Pornography', I modified it to give it a new resonant meaning.

My interest in AI led me to the concept of a intelligence singularity and of greater-than-human intelligence. I became aware that to possess actual human intelligence, an AI would need to know about many things: what hunger feels like, and what different foods feel like, toilet intimacies, possess a sexuality (to accurately emulate a human it would need a gender too; male and female intelligence and behaviours are different), have moods and emotional desires, and a host of other biological behaviours and knowledge that would be utterly without utility to industry - yet these would be vital to an intelligence that must 'be human'. This led me to this painting, an amusing comment on this, a painting with a satirical mood. I drew it out over the weekend and prepared some models and studies.

I can start work after 'Punishment Of The Sun'. I'm glazing this unsually early after underpainting with the aim of entering the RBSA Prize Exhibition. The hot weather means that the underpainting is dry enough.