Beckett

This week I've been underpainting a new picture with an uncertain title. After five days of eight hours it's about half complete and will probably be my last original painting of the year. There are some angel wings that will probably prove problematical so I'll need to think hard about those over the coming days. Andrew Williams has caused me to think about Samuel Beckett so I've revisited Waiting for Godot. Most of his plays were rather surreal if I recall correctly but my memories of Godot are all good. It's a play with two nearly identical acts where hardly anything happens, yet it sums up life in all of its pointlessnesses and hopes. I've been writing the odd song too and have notes for three more but none are particularly good. The best is one that wasn't written at all, I just found myself singing "Well I've wasted all my time" over and over again. This probably sums up the long, arduous and probably pointless nature of the painting I was doing. "Well, shall we go? Yes, let's go. They do not move."

Island Song

I've just written my first song in a few weeks, this was inspired by my recent discovery of a remote British island, Tristan da Cunha. The song is called Home and it has rather a Scottish musical theme, here are the lyrics:

> As I hold the letter your wrote me
I can hear your voice sing to my heart.
For your lines like the hope in a memory
signaled me like a light in the dark.

As a man I have lived on the mainland
faraway from the place I belong.
I was born on a far away island,
and my years have fled by, now I long
to go home.

(chorus)

As I stand on the deck of the ferry,
As I see skies of scarlet and grey
I recall every childhood day memory
how we ran through the grass and the hay.

As I worked in the far away city
I remembered the promise we made,
and your words in the letter you sent me
like a rainbow resplendent have bade
me back home.

(chorus)

In my nights in my lonely apartment
I could see you still waving goodbye.
And now soon on the same wooden jetty
I will hold you and truly know I've
arrived home.

(chorus)

Penalties

Penalties is now complete. With my games sales close to zero it is time for me to decide what to do. Painting is more rewarding certainly and I'm better at it that at game development, but if I put several months of work into a new game it should equate to a few more months of steady income (assuming the game is successful). If Penalties goes on display then it would be nice to have some more recent and impressive works to show off.

Stealth Submarine Idea

I've had an idea for a stealth submarine that uses vertical vanes to eliminate sonar reflections in the same way as the protusions on the walls in an anechoic chamber. The ship is mainly flat based on a ray shape, to minimise horizontal or frontal reflections and the engines are hollow tubes with screw threads (Archimedean screw) to minimise sound output. The vanes themselves could detect vibrations, making those a sort of sensor.

Painting Updates

As far as painting goes I have some details to add to Penalties which I'll do next Monday, then some underpainting of a picture of some clouds. I'll probably start one more picture before moving on to music next month and game development for the rest of the year. The new painting is a complex symbol filled picture in the mould of pictures like Rhino and Eventide 3800, and more directly The Migraine Tree (although this picture is larger, the same size as Faces of Autumn which is my only other medium sized picture in this style). I'm refining an idea about art I call Symphonic Painting where one theme or motif is repeated (with modifications) throughout the picture, like the theme in a musical symphony. Each repeat can have a different emotion associated with it and so it's a way of adding a time dimension into the picture to tell a complex story.

Penalties and More

The first and most important overpainting of Penalties (my latest painting) is now complete. I've got 26 full days now for other works. I've got three half complete, one about feeling floaty and happy, one in the style of van Gogh which is quite a sad picture called "Today I Saw Him Far Far Away" ("he" is not van Gogh by the way) and the third one is about the oppression of a city, a landscape made of screaming buildings (this is a strange and dramatic picture). Those should take only a couple of weeks and I should have time to fit in one more. I have two in the sketch stage but I could ignore those and try something new, perhaps even the proms picture which, considering the recent fire at the venue on the very night that Beethoven's 9th was due, might have been prophetic.

First Painting Sale

I can report my first official sale of a painting, with the sale of Eventide 3800 at what is surely destined to be a bargain price. My skills are continuing to improve and now I officially consider myself beyond the student phase, the first two years being a wonderful experimentation in styles, and an inevitable and invaluable learning process. This month I'll be working full time on paintings, although I expect to finish just four that were started last month. I've been hard at work over the past two weeks on the glazing of "Penalties", a painting that tries to sum up the emotions of careful guidance, attentiveness, hope then disappointment due to a penalty shoot-out in a football match. Naturally there are deeper meanings than football to the picture too. If all goes to plan (and the hardest part is yet to be painted) then the picture will be beautiful enough in it's own right to adorn a famous gallery, and it should be the target of every artist to ensure at least that.

Proms Painting

A BBC Proms request for artwork has inspired me to paint something new today, a rush of paint is how I've described it because I'm very unused to painting ideas without a lot of detailed planning. This picture is mainly inspired by the dramatic music that I like best and uses my ideas about paintings having a theme, a shape or visual key that is repeated in modified forms throughout the picture. Here it is an arch shape because of the Albert Hall influence. My musical outlook has changed a lot in the past few months, partly because my ideas about art and painting have changed this year too. I haven't composed any original artistic music in a long time and I feel I can do it better now than ever. I'm itching to write a symphony of some sorts, something new and powerful to test my new abilities.