Postage and Walnuts

Started the day by adding a web-form to my website so that anyone interested in buying a painting can enquire with a click. Working out the postage and packaging for a wide variety of paintings; from 15Kg, 70cm paintings like the Tiger Moving Nowhere, to small watercolours is a challenge. I'd rather list everything for sale than limit myself to things that are easy to post, so working out the best delivery option on a case by case basis is the best option for the moment.

After that, spent most of the day glazing a small painting on panel today called A Light Can Shine Only In Darkness, an appropriate title for such a dark, rainy day.

Home Life

Feeling inspired and joyous today. Have some ideas for Cromwell, but they can simmer for a while. Decided last night that it would be good to finish any paintings in progress this week, so I went to grab a painting this morning, and picked another instead, Home Life, which was so big and imposing and smoothly perfect in its underpainting that I'd been almost afraid of glazing it until now. That's always a good feeling. All good paintings should evoke that fear of touching it.

Here's the idea sketch, from 2016 or so I think.

For this, I simply scaled it up and painted it in. Here is the underpainting in progress, last summer.

I now tend to use a toned acrylic background, a change in my practice. I used to transfer a drawing, then apply an oil imprimatura; a similar toned wash, but the variety of surfaces and the consistency of the oil medium and rubbing away or losing the drawing made this less reliable than starting with a toned background. I'd never use a white background. There are three primary colours; three notes in a chord. Imprimatura, underpainting, glaze: let these be the three colours of chord for each atom of vibrancy in your painting!

The finished underpainting remained that way for a year and was glazed today, almost entirely in earth colours. I aim to use the most stable pigments and tend to avoid overly powerful or staining modern pigments (like phthalocyanines). Very strong pigments listed as stable might have their stability masked by their strength. Generally speaking I use ochres for everything and ultramarine or cobalts for blue. One exception is my beloved benzimidazolone red, Winsor and Newton Transparent Maroon, a real 'ultramarine of reds', black in body yet thins to an intense red. Many of the other modern reds make a sickly purply pink when mixed with white but this remains true. If I really need a bright intense red I'll use a pyrrole, but that's it. Cadmiums are lovely too, but there aren't many reasons to use these expensive pigments over pyrroles.

Here's a brief look at the finished painting, and a close up. The colours aren't true here, the white-balancing isn't natural.

Lots of tiny details there, something I could be lovingly trapped in for many hours, but I'm always aware of the clock. Good painting is efficient painting.

I paint better and with more endurance in silence, but often the same tune will play round and round in my head, so today I put some music on: Selling England by the Pound, then Foxtrot, by Genesis; The Dreaming by Kate Bush; and A Curious Feeling by Tony Banks.

Monday

Awake all night with stomach pain which made today tiring and difficult. Working on the Cromwell portrait, most of it is drawn out now, the panel is prepared and the basic drawing transferred but the composition still seems too simplistic. More work needed yet, thought, power, work, effort.

Cromwell

It was 4am, two days ago. I was thinking about the mood of the country and, compared to last year, or perhaps even compared to before the European Elections,it seemed more sinister now somehow, riven with divisions. Suddenly I had an image of an Oliver Cromwell, his eyes shaded like a Rembrandt self-portrait. The rebirth of a spectre from the past... summoned. I was so struck by the idea that I thought about buying a cavalier hat! How good it would be to be Frans Hals every so often! - but only for short periods.

I spent today working on the plans for this painting. It's complicated by the fact that there aren't many portraits of Cromwell, there are probably more statues. The best painting is a miniature by Samuel Cooper, and a bigger portrait, which isn't brilliant, copied from it, which is often wrongly attributed to Cooper and silly on many levels (including wearing armour with a cotton collar!). Copying anything from a painting is difficult because so much is missing that our minds fill in automatically. Even Raphael's paintings are full of flaws that aren't obvious, never mind the poor quality of any images that you might have. Look how grainy this is!

Even here you can see the eye on the right which is lower and more distant has a larger iris when it should be smaller. Eyelashes, caruncles; lots of anatomy isn't there at all. Entropy! The disintegration of data with each copy! These are problems with every painting, and I have no choice but to fight my way through each problem to create a painting many times larger than the original. How can we paint something more accurately than the only painting painted from a live subject?

This idea reminded me that I had a Cromwell idea way back in 2006. Maybe I'll paint that up too, complete with carrots!

Pi, Art

Back from London, collecting my unselected 'God Being Killed by Theists and Atheists' painting from the Royal Academy, a nice feeling that it was shortlisted, my second shortlist from three attempts at entering. The theme of religious battles might not be the most prescient in contemporary life, although the painting is, of course, as much about psychology as anything. It is one of my best paintings, although it is a few years old now; it is the new frame in gold and clay that is new, far better than the one detailed on this blog.

I did manage a pie/pi video last night. The problem I had with yesterday's attempts is that they were not new. Newness is vital to add excitement to anything, so I decided to made some new music using the mathematics of pi. First I convert pi to base 7. We are used to pi in base 10 (3.141... etc.) but the number can be in any number base.

Then I converted each numeral into a note, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, and the same with timing, so the C was a short note, the D longer etc. This was my music, literally the music of pi. You can hear the result on the ArtSwarm Pies episode, due on the ArtSwarm YouTube Channel on 21st June 2019 at 8pm.

Anyway that is trivial and immaterial; last night at 4am I had a clear vision of new a great painting and will start work on this immediately. My "Resurrection of Napoleon Bonaparte" might have been shown at a few places (well perhaps only one, at the Discerning Eye) but I'm still amazed that my "Taking of Excalibur in 2018" has been submitted to the Discerning Eye, The Wrexham Open and The Grosvenor Open and turned down by all three, when for me it captures the drawn out self-harm of the Brexit process quite explicitly, without judgement. I avoid judgemental, critical, protest art; for me this is bad art. Show, don't tell, is every artists' motto. Art should show how we feel, or how society feels, or reveal some truth, but not criticise or finger-point or lecture. Perhaps this very paragraph is breaking this rule. Perhaps this is the difference between poetry and prose? Perhaps all rules need pushing.

More on the new painting as it progresses. I can't wait, but must make it as true as I can to the original vision. Now, to rest.

Wishing you a happy and restful evening.

Emotions and Pies

Awoke late, after a long sleep, to a slow day.

I began by trying to write some music for the ArtSwarm 'Pies' episode. I had decided to write some music based on the number pi, each note representing a digit of pi, like the music from my album of the same name. I loaded up a few of those pieces, and explored with changing them around. This took a long time and I remained unhappy with the results. Perhaps I needed to be certain what I wanted first, but in anything creative, actually trying something is almost always worth it.

I gave up after an hour, my head aching with strange, listless tiredness, the world seemed like a grey liquid that I had to fight though. In these circumstances the best course is to think without emotion, like Spock from Star Trek. I make a list of what needs to be done and consider every item logically, work out any problems and solutions, and make a list of steps to complete. In all lists I try to tackle the hardest and most unpleasant task first, after that, everything is easier.

I am always mistrustful of feelings, those archaic simian messages that flow up, down, all over the place at seemingly random. Some people say that the point of life is to be happy - how ridiculous! If this were possible, everyone would have attained it. Happiness is, at very least, a change of state rather than a state in itself, and besides, happiness and contentment are dangerous for productivity. How careless happy people are! Emotions are empathic messages. If we're on our own, I wonder if emotions are our cells talking to us? I once thought that our cells think of us, our self, as a sort of god, and perhaps feelings of holiness are actually messages from our cells, tiny animals in worshipful awe of the unknown body in which they live and work.

My list involved adding my portrait series to my website so that is now done. I had planned to paint lots of these, and might, but for the moment there are five. The third one, Tempus Fugit, bothered me a bit on the rightmost eye, the eyebrow parts too thin, so I grabbed the painting and touched it up, only adding a few tiny details, tiny, tiny hairs. This made all the difference, now it is complete.

Tempus fugit - yes! Tonight I must battle with 'Pies'. I'm off to London tomorrow. I must aim for a Pie breakthrough in two hours. How can I inject emotion and meaning into that subject?

So, How Have You Been Framing?

Steady steps today. First, ensuring that my new payment system is set up and working on www.marksheeky.com, www.cornutopiamusic.com and www.pentangel.co.uk. It's always good to update these things.

Also, for the first time, I've put first edition copies of The Many Beautiful Worlds of Death on sale on my site and Pentangel. The book is available on Amazon, but I had 150 copies printed when I first published it, and so had a choice of paper, finishes and other details that the modern automated publishers (a staggeringly recent phenomenon) don't offer. My books are the same in almost every way as the Amazon version, but the cover is thicker and uncoated with a pure white, velvety finish. Well, these can now be ordered from my site for the first time; until now they were only available from me in person at any events I attended.

Then an article for John Hopper of Inspirational Magazine about dramatic contrast in art. More on this in future weeks.

Then, framing. The big "So, How Have You Been?" frame. It looked rather strange in its brown and black, I wasn't sure if I liked it, and I began by sanding it off a little to distress and lighten some edges. This had an interesting effect and I decided to leave it.

The next step was facing my accursed foe of perspex! Horrid stuff, a nightmare to cut even with the sharpest blade, and here it crackled and tore under my blade like ice bitten by skates. Ideally I need some sort of tiny circular saw, yet tiny teeth tend to melt the plastic and clog up. Even pre-cut perspex looks a flaking mess on the edges. I considered options; a hot wire cutter (rather messy and gloopy, I imagine), then dreams of a solvent-based cutter. Surely acetone will melt the stuff; it's a good solvent for most acrylic resins. Perhaps a sword of frozen acetone, or, more realistically, a thin bath to dip the edge of the perspex into. When I get some acetone I'll experiment.

Yet, it's far safer than glass, and for anything big I'd not use glass for that reason. After that, a spacer from mountboard and a backing board from 3mm M.D.F. (which is hard to find these days, it seems, although B&Q now sell 3mm H.D.F. which can be used for the same sort of thing, albeit less beautifully).

Then cleaning up the mess and ready to assemble. The worst bit about perspex is the static charge, it sucks every dust particle and hair from the air like magic, even snow-like flakes from 15cm away magically jump up to stick to it. There are two tricks that can help:

1. Never wipe it or touch it with anything. Wear gloves. This creates static (of course, it's loaded with the stuff the moment you peel of the backing plastic). Another downside is that wiping, even with the softest of cloths can scratch it so very easily.
2. Use a hoover constantly running to create negative pressure and blow dust away into it. This works but it's noisy and difficult in itself. I must make a perspex nozzle for the hoover!
3. Use masking tape, or another weak tape (like Post-It notes) to remove dust. This works really well but has to be done particle by particle, it can take an hour or more, during which more dust will settle. Can I get Post-It note tape?
4. Have a black background, to see the dust with.

With that, you can eventually minimise dust, but it's still nightmarish and it's amazing how dust and hairs and scratches and fingerprints can magically appear despite all precautions.

Eventually, the frame was assembled. I take care to make the back of works as attractive as possible now, sometimes even painting them too.

Here is the finished framed painting. "So, How Have You Been?", oil on canvas panel, 80x60cm in its frame. I love this painting, it's an entire Bergmanian romantic drama in one image.

Competition

Artists don't compete with each other because they arrive at their decision of what they do and why they do it from every possible option, from an infinity of free choices. As such, each artist knows exactly why he or she is doing it and is unswayed by others. Artists, instead, compete with everyone; every person who mocks "I can do that!" - the artist proves what he or she can do by doing it, or at least by trying, pushing, striving. Artist is the ultimate job, the paragon of lives. Philosophers think, politicians argue, artists do, and give everything in the doing.