I Seek My Solace

Today, compiled images to send to a gallery, and once done did some work on 'I Seek My Solace Where Love Lies Lost'. I found a branch of dried wood, very mossy and pretty. I sawed this to make a flat base, then cut and glued it to make a gallows for the panel to hang from. Once dry, I'll preserve it all with Paraloid resin.

Then, cut and drilled a piece of lime wood for the painting panel's rear, and drew out the poem. My plan is to gild this. I may need to enhance the lettering with a dark colour.

My gums are aching aching, despite weeks of meticulous cleaning. The problem which became evident in December seems to be no better.

Another Violet Night Music Pack, Snowflake Videos

Started the day by finalising the Flatspace Another Violet Night Music Pack, then work on the three 'Snowflake' videos. 'You're My Candy Cane' and 'Heaven's Day' are largely done, though my original plan calls for some video on Candy Cane. 'Heaven's Day' is surprisingly evocative despite being little more than fog and camera movements. I originally added some images but they tended to spoil the mental imagery of the song; of course they'd never match that. I've made a quick start on Snowflake, a new intro, but am still musing on the best way to do it.

My mouth aches aches, and I feel tired tired. Tired and weary, but I must do my best each day. I sang well yesterday and managed by 52 sit-ups today. I keep feeling like Logan in the film, healing more slowly with each passing day, month, year. Harder and harder to maintain and grow. Heal I must. Grow I must. Onwards we roll our heavy rock.

Woodwork Postponed, Painting Repair and Restoration

I'd hoped to rout new shelves, but it was too cold and I feared the dampness of my visible breath. Tested the new 12mm bit. The channel was too small for 12mm MDF, I wondered if the cold made the channel smaller, but perhaps not enough to make a difference. I'll aim to do this tomorrow afternoon, a still cold 5 degrees due, but better than a week of rain also forecast.

Then, work on painting restoration. After the first patch, a second yesterday to level it, and today a first application of paint.

This evening, an update to Prometheus to return the amount of pre-start silence at the start of a song; then a migraine on the left side of my head which continues agonisingly. I want to sit in the dark.

Rik Mayall Dream, She Just Looks Empty Underpainting Day 1

I dreamt that Rik Mayall wanted to publish a magazine. I advised that he needed and 'SSN' number for it, a magazine equivalent of an ISBN (in actuality, an ISSN). I became annoyed that he didn't seem to care about this, yet that it was holding up the publication of the magazine. I found a laptop and located the website for purchasing SSN numbers and tried to persuade him to use it, but to no avail. He lazily didn't care.

I awoke feeling so unexpectedly tired and ill, weak, and almost feverish. Still, I pushed on with my plan of painting today and underpainted part of 'She Just Looks Empty'.

All went exactly as planned. The colour study is so massively helpful as a guide here. No matter how I'd have painted it, there are so many options that without a guide I'd be uncertain if this is the best choice. One hour spent painting a colour study potentially saves days of repainting.

Dentist, Music Transfers, Gaia, Donovan Speculation

A visit to the dentist in the morning. I used to enjoy such visits, seeing them as a challenge of stoicism, particularly if something potentially painful was due. I don't enjoy these so much now; the price is very high, the treatment very scant.

Then, some of my regular music transfers. Just 16 albums remain, perhaps I can mange 4 per week. Some won't need transferring, or must wait a little... I'll need to re-record The Modern Game yet again, for example, as I can't use the Marius Fate name.

Then, a little more work on the Gaia painting, though too little! I've completed the tracing, photographed the underdrawing (it always amazes me how the tiny delicate pencil lines can be photographed) and then printed and prepared a small copy as a study.

Tomorrow I must write some music for the Donovan night. Donovan's music tends to be one note, and the lyrics always about being half-asleep in a stupor. Perhpas I can comment on this in the words, but I have no idea at all what to write. So far, my songs have been attempts to emulate the style of the artist I'm paying tribute to, but here I may have try something different. I have a self-imposed 24-hour deadline for this.

July Backups

A long and tiresome day. Quarterly backup day, this took a few hours. I had a short time, the all to brief time alone to sing. How perfect In Dreams is as a warm-up, then Runaway. I then recorded a new take of 'Smashing My House of Cards'. I may need some new 'aah' vocals for 'Breakfast Of Delight'.

The gas man arrived at 14:30 or so, and the noise and disruption hampered any progress elsewhere. I need to finalise this album, but it's very nearly done. Then, I feel I must paint something, so must find motivation to do this. Today's life has been somewhat lustless; lack lustre.

In June I started daily exercise and now do 52 sit-ups every other day, and am moving to the same number of other exercises. As one gets older, muscle mass tends to fade away, and stiffness beckons. It's important to stem this tide now.

Onwards we roll our heavy rock. Heave at it we must. Creak forwards on the dry desert floor it must. The gods will thank us for our efforts.

Daytime Teevee, Remastering Thoughts

Yesterday, created some folders for annual photos. Deb and I print our photo memories each year as a long term record but sorting these out can be a chore. Now I'll do this throughout the year.

Then did more work on a new song called Daytime Teevee which I sketched out. It has a simple march rhythm, and uses Casio-style instruments. Here are the words so far:

Daytime Teevee

Daytime Teevee
Daytime Teevee
Daytime Teevee
Daytime Teevee

My life feels long
It lasts for ever
You make it fly
You kill the pain of why
And in my chair
I pass the days
The pointless years
I love you through my tears

Daytime Teevee
Daytime Teevee
Daytime Teevee
Daytime Teevee

With you I fly
Beyond this world
Beyond this room
Of dust and broken light
And I escape
Into your dreams
For I have none
For I have none

This follows on, in visual terms, from the 'Parents in the Walls' song, and 'Fear is Everywhere' seems a logical song to follow, as it begins with audio from a 1950s television clip. Much of Daytime Teevee is complete already, the production is deliberately simple.

The evening of an indigestible meal has led to a night of agonising pain once more, and drinking about 4 litres of water, all little more than my usual IBS, an irrational flare-up of self-attack by my immune system.

Emubands have added a new £90-per-year tier, plus unlimited uploads to its services. As with other distributors, this means that the music isn't permanent, but taken down when the annual payment stops; presumably to stop registering, uploading lots of music, then unsubscribing. I wouldn't expect many people to do that however, as any record company would require a long term relationship. One can pay £20 per release with or without a subscription to leave music there forever, so music there without an ongoing payment to process royalties must happen, but ironically not for those who do pay regularly. At this stage it makes their costs vs. services about on-par with Distrokid.

I'm feeling a overwhemed at the task of remastering all 50 or so of my albums for this re-release process. Might this continue forever? Must I stop at some point? I had aimed to re-work a few older vocal albums, up until We Robot, that was the first I think was good enough in balancing and mastering terms. Now, I have the chance to re-work everything back to 2002, and it's certain that some albums like The Flatspace Soundtrack, and the many computer albums like The Twelve Seasons would benefit from rebalancing and better mastering and limiting. The Golden Age was the first to use the Gothic Limiter, We Robot the better Cathedral Limiter. Before this albums were either much quieter (reduced to avoid clipping, like Remembrance Service) or excessively clipped like the old The End And The Beginning.

I need a long term plan here.

Vocals, Guitars, Dentistry

A slow day. Recorded the main vocals for 'How Lonely', then for 'The Light Bulb 1', then a trip to the dentist. It's hard to find one in Britain, nigh impossible to become an NHS patient, so I'm a private patient which is expensive, but I am lucky to have found this after 6 years or so without any access to a dentist. I remind myself that this was normal life for Beethoven and most people of the 18th and 19th century. The NHS is effectively non-existent for dentistry, with a declining number of legacy services distributed by luck and nothing more rational.

A little more work on the music when I returned, and guitar parts for 'Written on Rice' and 'How Lonely'. I recorded lots for both, but after hours of editing and trying this and that, the latter hardly used any, and I'm unsure if even the fragments that remain are needed. These tracks are just about complete I think.

My plan is to paint tomorrow, the 20cm paintings. I must summon strength and crawl forwards.

Prometheus Effect Upgrades

A feverish night, but my cold appear to be relatively mild. I'm sore inside and a little itchy rather than congested.

I decided to do some long-planned upgrades to the Prometheus effects. There are three old effects which date back to the earliest versions of the program: Basic Distortion, Maximized Clip, and Reflective Clip. Each is very simple. Basic Distortion boosts then clips the signal, Maximized Clip simply clips at a certain threshold then increases the volume to maximum, and Reflective Clip 'folds' the wave above a threshold, then 'maximizes' the result.

I've long thought that it would be better to merge all three effects into one, so I did this today. The result is faster and more elegant than before (well, it's not faster code than, say, Basic Distortion, but certainly faster than two effects in a row). I've added a few more features too. The sound can be boosted by an exponent, which has the effect of 'bending' it towards the top; a sine wave would become gradually more and more square here. This is most useful on simple waves like that. I've also added a general post-effect Amplitude parameter, as the pure clip of the Basic Distortion, by far the most used effect, is naturally quieter than it can be. I merged some of the code from the Maximizer, and allowed everything to be turned up or down at the end without affecting the distortion.

I also added a new 12-part Arpeggiator, which can now perform scales (yay!), replacing the 6-part first version, and upgraded the High Pass Filter with it's new Q.

The hard and crucial part is updating the many hundred extant sequences (about 500) that use one of these effects. This process can be automated, so I've done that too, thus saving lots of plugins AND adding more functionality. There is a 'Bounce Arpeggiator' which goes up and down. The new 12-part Arpeggiator could replace that too but I'd have to edit each sequence by hand.

Now it's late and I'm weary. My insides are still sore. I hope I can conquer this virus soon.

Scores Updated

The mammoth job of updating all of the published music scores is complete. Some took a lot longer than others. There are still a few inconsistencies. For example, I decided to name 'Saw Synthesizer' instruments 'Synth Saw', with 'Saw.' as the short name, but the short name is sometimes 'Ssw.'. Before now, there was little consistency, such that you'd really need to know the music to know what timbre to pick. The new versions are better in that way any many more.

After all of the changes, and new text descriptions formatted in HTML for itch pages, and new 'screenshots'; there was still a lot of admin to do. I had to ensure that all versions were the same, both filed with the album and in the master score archive. I have an xcopy command which runs via a spreadsheet which will auto-update the albums from that archive, but in this case I've been working on the album copies, because I list them album by album, not all in one lump. Well, all I can say is that it was a lot of work.

In most cases, prior to this update, not a single person downloaded any of the scores. I've made these $10 now. Perhaps if someone wanted a copy, they may pay $10, and it's certainly a little sum if an ensemble ever wanted to perform any, which I'm sure will happen one day, though perhaps in centuries, perhaps beyond my life and the life of itch.io. Well, either way, these are too important, and too much work, to be free.

I've now scored 21 of the 40 albums. I hope to write more new music though, scoring at least one old album for each new one, so it's perhaps not halfway yet.

My throat has been very sore all day, and now, as evening hits, it is less-so but I'm starting to feel weary and feverish; but this virus seems to be very mild. The worst aspect is that it stops me from seeing dear Deborah.

Score Refreshments, and a Cold

Exhausted last night. I felt so sleepy at 10pm that I had to aim for bed, then collapsed and slept solidly for 9 hours. I woke and charged into updating all of the music scores I've published online so far. Most of the time, a new change or standard evolves as I discover different issues or problems. For example, a 'Piano Version' of a song has a lead vocal or lead melody plus a one, or usually two, staves for an extra piano to accompany it; but a 'Piano Melody' has the lead music played by the piano. Many different standards and guidelines evolve for properly presenting scores.

The new changes to instrument order, and more knowledge about the division of instruments has led to a big upgrade in these standards, and I'm at about 50% of the way though my multi-year plan of scoring all of my published (ie. recorded and released) music, so it seems like a good time to go back and update every score so far (nearly all 420 of them) with the latest standards. The oldest ones will need the most work.

Today I've charged into the existing albums on itch and made changes as I went. Scores will now include screenshots, and a list of the instruments that each score is for; so the admin burden of listing them (and updating them) has increased. It will increase again if and when I publish them in print, but I must remind myself that I must focus on making new music as much as updating my back catalogue.

It was early, before noon, that I noticed a raw soreness in the back of my nose, which crept into my throat. I'm certainly coming down with a cold. I think I picked it up on Wednesday.

It shouldn't affect my scoring work, except to add a romanticism to it, evoking Beethoven in his days of illness.

Falling Apart Video, Sleep, Ears

Two extremely busy days, exhausting, darting between jobs. I started yesterday by filming for the Falling Apart Again video. One principle is to always try new things to some extent, but not to be too complex with those. New things can start simple and grow, evolve. For this video I had the idea of notes (rectangles, like piano keys) falling away, and those act as a mask for a video of a somewhat ragged self.

The filming took about 40 minutes, but the video longer. It's easy to do the complex part of making notes appear per-keypress. The hard part is all of the tweaking of levels, glow, and look. This was done today. The filmed aspect looked too good, too crisp, so I made it pixelated, broken into 4x4 squares. I think this will suffice.

Most of yesterday was a list of Christmas related, rather than work related jobs.

Today was a lot of admin. My 'Sleep' painting has happily made it into the Grosvenor Open, although (typically!) it is the only painting that isn't framed, so I must make a frame for it. I've had a submission request from Galleria Balmain's new website, and news from the Society for Art of Imagination.

My new Rode NT1 mic has arrived and I've tested it. It seems to work. It is rather light and cheap feeling. The packaging, the cable, the cradle, so much seemed to be top quality for the cheap £135 (I seem to remember this mic costing £400). It's amazing they can make anything for this price. It weighs less than my still wonderful (20-year old) NT3 (which cost £300 or more). Time will tell which mic is better.

I've had my blocked ear vacuumed, and I can now hear - yay! Though I now need to repeat the procedure for the other ear. About half a mug(!) of oily goop was extracted.

I feel I've done so little. Onwards I must push.

SFXEngine Filing, Prometheus v3.51

Well, I made a few changes to SFXEngine first thing, a few relatively small things, mostly concerning fallbacks if the core frequency can't be met upon initialisation, and a test for the success of buffer locking. When testing it in Steam, it seemed to work with no sign of either of yesterday's problems.

I feel that the problems were, like that Taskforce issue, something connected with security or some form of Windows validation because a lock-out is a rare thing. In code, it would be an infinite loop, but that's easy for me to spot and fix, and the only cause here was reactivating the main window after opening the manual. My code pretty much does nothing in that instance, so it seems to be a Windows system issue.

Well, I immediately filed v2.00 for the time being, and will revisit it next month for more testing and new graphics prior to the public release.

After that, I updated Prometheus with a few changes discovered while working on SFXEngine. One was the correct deinitialization of the floatutility and longutility variables on song exit. One was the correct deinitialization of the text file after various text-based imports. One fixed (and improved) the sample and modulator resampling. The only new features were a new cursor skip, which can jump by a fixed proportion of a beat (eg. 1/4) or based on the notes in track 1 (a guide track). This is now a toggle for both settings, so from now I'll use keyboard keys only for toggles or commands, never a cycle - a key should never be pressed many times. This became confusing.

The other feature skipped to the next valid parameter rather than moving though many blank ones, if prev/next were chosen.

Finally, I updated a few plugins for speed vs. size, repating the small code 16 times rather than use a for-next loop.

Today was a generally happy rest day compared to the extremely busy and stressful past 7 days. I now have a couple of days to work on a new song for the Paul Simon night, and some other art things which have been neglected.

My left ear remains annoyingly blocked with wax, though not painfully so as it had been, so perhaps progress is being made.

Onwards we move.

Hudson Glazing Day 2

An awful night of poor sleep and stomach twitches led to a waking morning of extreme grogginess, a mild headache, and stomach discomfort.

In a clumsy daze, I started work on the Hudson glazing, and managed the sky. Today, the opposite of yesterday, everything about the painting seemed disastrous and bad, as I battled like a soldier marching through the thick mud of time, gazing though the viscous air, swimming with my friends the brushes as I cut through the jelly-like space between my mind and the outside world. For much of the first few hours, my teeth were gritted tightly to wrestle my viscera into some sort of alignment, all the time battling to make the painting work despite my wounded state.

The sky was darkened compared to the underpainting, and the sad storm near the tree darkened yet more as I'd planned, adding more intensity there. I touched a little on the Rachel Hudson portrait, to make the background more red, more pink to give this crucial element attention.

At 4pm, I still felt tired and pained, and decided to stop. The darker sky to the right, and the plain green plains remain.

My mind was also occupied with the Prometheus upgrade, which I'm eager and ready to start. Our trip to Morecambe will get in the way, but it's perhaps better that I start before we leave.

This evening, still somewhat dizzy; perhaps, I thought, due to coffee, a drink which often drops my blood pressure and makes me feel dizzy and extraordinarily weak. I found some spare picture glass, so cut the pane for the frame for 'You Know How It Is When You Remember A Friend'.

Angels Underpainting, Flesh Colours and Glazes

A night of constant stomach pain and tremors, like being punched in the abdomen by a million pesky elves. I started by tracing over the 'sleep' painting idea and researching various copyleft licences to apply to my free software one day, then into a steady day underpainting the Rachel Hudson painting.

The yellow background makes the flesh look more violently violet than it should (and more violet that it actually is in real life - that's auto-white-balanced photography for you).

I stuck generally to the colour study, my typical flesh tones of MH Naples Yellow (PBr24 that is, Titanium Antimony Chromium Oxide; not the historic Naples Yellow), light red, mars violet, black. Dali said that Venetian red was superlative for flesh, but I find the violets of mars violet essential at times, and the rosy pinks of light (English) red too. Some of my best flesh paintings (the hand in The First Grasp of Rebirth, the figure in The Death of Man) are simply white, black, light red. I've rarely used Venetian red for flesh. This is also because, I think, red glazes over yellow were less reliable and transparent than yellow over red historically. I often prefer a yellowish underpainting and a red glaze, if glazing. This is partly because it fits a secondary to primary layer format. If you think of glazes as transparent filters, you'll reason that all colours filter to primary. For the best glazing then it can be best to start with whites, then secondary colours (yellow, violet, cyan), then primary (red, green, blue).

Of course we don't have perfect primary hues in paint (thank the heavens!), this is a rough guide. This manifests as red over yellow seems to work better than yellow over red. There are caveats though, there are no always-correct answers. For a start, paints reflect as well as transmit, and the top most layer will give a reflection of that hue, and the best colours for this are light ones, so here yellow would trump red.

Twitches, Spheres and Droplets, Kratos, Art Classifications

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.

You Either Believe Layer 1

Traced over Kratos yesterday.

A terrible night of nightmares and bad sleep. My chest hurts, feeling fuzzy as though at the end of a cold, and given my immense feelings of weakness over the past two weeks, I feel I may have unknowingly contracted a virus.

Today I painted another layer on the miniature 'You Either Believe In AI Or You Don't'. Each layer seems to improve things hugely, then when looking at the dried result it seems to require a new layer. That is the mark of oil painting.

Oliver Cromwell Not Dying Twice

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!

Website Update

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.

Stomach Pain, Frame and Tripod Fixing, Oliver Cromwell Not Dying Twice

Another awful night of stomach agony. This reminds me how blessed I've been over the past year not to have experienced this so much. This led to a day of great tiredness, seeing the world through a strange mist of fatigue and confusion. The digestive system so closely reflects the mood. Historical cures for mental disorders were always purgatives or diet related for good reason.

Still, I got many things done.

First, I de-framed 'The Love Affair' in preparation to restore and fix its frame. I've got 20 or so old paintings with visible screws in the frame, and my aim is to remove and reframe all of them. Here's the de-framed work:

This frame is a complex work of rippled plaster, which makes it easy to remove any evidence of screws perfectly.

Then, fixing my tripods. One of the tightening bolts is held by a nut behind some thin and brittle plastic such that if you over-tighten it, it strains (and in this case breaks) the plastic. I glued the broken plastic and added a second flanged nut on top, then applied Polymorph all over both. This is much stronger. The metal bolt ideally needs a rubber tip or better grip for the cylindrical shaft, but for now this is at least a bit better than before.

I also announced a Taskforce sale, in honour of 30 years since the Amiga version appeaed in CU Amiga, then looked at some painting ideas with an aim to paint lots this year. I re-awakened one that I've started before and set to sleep in 2021; 'Oliver Cromwell Not Dying Twice'. Here's the idea:

I sketched out a bigger version back then, and kept that sketch to reuse the paper, but looking at it today, I decided again to paint it! I made some changes to the 2021 sketch and restored the carrot fronds in the hat (the 2021 version made these a limp carrot, but Cromwell is a fearsome and proud vegetable villain). I added a second character on the 'hill/shoulder' on the right, a frightened protagonist and defensive mother tree.

My plan for the next few days is to sketch out and plan more works, and complete the Descartes painting. I need money and will orient my activities more towards sales; paintings, CDs, books, software. I'll reduce the amount of music promotion and reduce live performances.

This evening, I went to mum's sister to do some woodwork. A new skirting board needs four cuts: 3x 45-degree vertical cuts, a common cut in skirting boards. I used a power-plane to do this, which is very smooth and can be very accurate at such cuts. The fourth cut was, unusually, a curved cut with a coping saw (a 'Charlie-Chaplin-cane' cut) to match the profile of the board itself. For the room itself, this should really also been another 45-degree cut, but the work is to replace an old rotten board, so it needed to be cut the same.

A busy day ends. Deb is recovering slowly from her cold. I wonder if I'll be able to see her soon.