Tuesday, April 28, 2026

Music Pages, Hope and Death, Painting Thoughts

Today, updated the music pages of my website to include a Spotify embed, and removed the smaller booklet page images, and track list except for albums not on Spotify. This simplifies the look and the logic of the page's code:

Also submitted a track to Tom of Aldora Britain Records for a 50p promotional album to be distributed with other artists. I sent an image of my 'Abandoning Someone' painting for use as the cover. Later, glazed the small 'Hope and Death' painting. It's much better looking now and only took about 60 to 90 mins to glaze, but it took about an hour to become enthused for this necessary job.

I'm still reading Kafka and wonder if I'm like Kafka or being bent towards him with his words. At times I feel squeezed out artistically, but and yet perhaps don't. I'm eternally creative and eternally busy; it is Kafka who writes about being squeezed and when I feel these slight periods of stoppage, I recall his words and being. I tend to pause only for a short time before darting on a new and more alluring tangent, like the router table. Today I thought of darting out for wood to make the inner bevel, the insert, for one of the frames I have - yet I have no painting for that frame, so it would be a waste of time and money in the short term.

Perhaps even the router table is or was a waste of time, yet my instincts seem to work well, and many follies or diversions tend to become invaluable over time. My painting abilities, my music abilities have grown because of a drip drip of hundreds or thousands of little innovations, many fractions-of-percent's of improvement over many years.

As I age I find I have less solid focus on one thing. Years ago I would work on one game for months or years (The Heart of Aorkhan, Arcangel, both multi-year projects on which I did nothing else - to my detriment, I should have given up or expanded on other bow-strings). Now I dart between more jobs, yet this darting leads to more refinement. The process is like adding the fringes on a fern, or the last stages of evolution, compared to the solidness of the leaf and core design. Ageing itself and evolution seems to echo this. Animals from millions of years past seem to look smoother, be less detailed, somehow. The universe too, older stars are more crude and chunky, the newer ones with a wider range of elements, more detail. I am struck by these links between the micro and macro, the body and universe.

So what must I focus upon? What should my goals be?