Work

Awoke filled with sadness at the death of my painting. I feel I haven't painted anything serious or seriously in years because I have nowhere to show my work. The lack of selling isn't as debilitating as the lack of people to see it, but, I fill my time fully and as best as I can.

Sad now that my head is full of a beautiful symphony in the Beethoven or Haydn style that starts with a single note then expands into falling scales which are fugued and end in joyous majors, like the start of Beethoven's 7th, the most joyous of music. Yet nobody will hear this and I am unable to do anything about it but make a few notes, as I can, which I've just played on the piano. The music that fills my head, the entire symphony is so wonderful. How sad I am not to be able to share it or do anything about it. I feel trapped by the mediocre work I must drudge through when even this is for no reward.

Music filming set for today. If I am to release this Marius Fate music, it must be done but I wish it were over already. Filming takes an interminable time and the results seem so poor, and it's an artform I don't care for at all due to its sheer forgettability, it ages so quickly due to technological factors. It is, however, an outlet and possible for people to see.

Ate badly yesterday after a day of stomach pain and awoke in pain again, but less so than yesterday. On I must trudge, focus and do my steady best today.

The important thing is to focus on quality. I can paint or make music at any future time. So much to do, so little time. Time will always be limited so the key thing is to keep working at an efficient pace and with care.

Filming

Lots of filming down today, a day of frenetic energy and times of total tiredness between. The period between 11am and 12pm was particularly intense, setting up the camera, sound equipment, props and costumes for playing the mock-piano outside in the garden. The results were passable. I did a sensor clean on my old Canon camera yesterday too, which helped a lot. One key thing I did was take a wide aperture ISO100 exposure of a white surface first to note the dust pattern, and so check if the dust was gone. A simple blower was all that was needed to clean.

Anyway filming wasn't easy but I had enough time and space to grab to film a few short segments of playing.

In the afternoon, I recorded several scenes from the toy drama. I'm already faster at this stuff than when I made the House of Glass video last year, a video I might revisit for its Marius Fate relaunch. I need a few skills to make this puppetry more interesting. Stop motion animation holds little appeal, I simply can't afford the time. Often it seems that the harder I work, the less I get. As an artist I hardly make any money anyway, so if I make things for the quality of the art, then making good work and the most I can of it must get priority. This is the golden age of my life, I must make as much as I can.

I need reliable ways of making still and scenes move smoothly and be attractive with my limited equipment and resources.

Dreams of a Fly in Amber

Spent yesterday prop making and editing the first videos for the Dreams of a Fly in Amber music video. I hope that this will take less time than China Syndrome. Part of the film will include vignettes from various toys and models, here is a prospective still.

At times all of this work seems in vain given the low view of my of video work to date, yet a video is better than no video. Ideally I need one for each piece of music, or at least per album, and they are one of the few types of promotion I can do alone.

Also yesterday I completed the Love is Dead artwork, framing the paintings and decorating the frame. I also assembled the videos for ArtSwarm, edited the title sequence and script etcetera. Filming is on Tuesday.

I'm sleeping for 10 or 12 hours each night now and feel tired most of the time, but still working at a good pace. An artist's work never ends, it is a life commitment and everything is given to it.

Today, more filming. I must push myself.

Rattenfanger and Love is Dead

A busy few days working on the illustrations for Deborah Edgeley's new book, Wilkommen Zum Rattenfänger Theater. These are now largely complete. The scanning and filing process takes up at least as much time as the drawing.

Yesterday, more work on my refurbishment of Love is Dead, a small sculptural piece with paintings. I fixed up some damage to the thorns with Paraloid B72, then etched the surface to add more fine detail before repainting and retouching. The frame is now largely complete, just waiting for the paintings to be inserted. I'm not perfectly happy with the central portrait, but it will do for now. There comes a time when an artwork should be called finished.

I'm now keen to move on and complete my music videos, particularly the Marius Fate videos so that I can release this music.

Poetry and Ink

A busy few days. First, a good night at the Peterloo Poems by Manchester People on Tuesday night, at Manchester Central Library, sponsored by The Portico Library, with the ceremony mastered and organised by Paul Morris. Deborah and I were scheduled near the end which made the event more difficult to enjoy, my concentration before my performance was focused on my lines and act, but there was a mix of poems from the 18 poets; many political, a monologue, two which involved singing and one with a bit of audience participation. Members of the audience were invited to read at the end and these were on equal terms to the scheduled performers. Here's a photo of my Rusty Saxon piece courtesy of the Poetic Prince, Anthony Parker.

Deborah read and sang Janus Never Blinks.

In the day I finally completed the China Syndrome video, and yesterday uploaded and scheduled this for YouTube. It will premiere on September 7th. Then I started ink illustrations for Deborah's forthcoming poetry collection. This will take a few days.

This Rust is Saxon Blood

Productive day yesterday, putting together a script for an absurdist theatrical piece for a poetry event on Tuesday at Manchester Central Library. My piece, This Rust is Saxon Blood, is about the foundation of the North/South divide during the Norman conquest. Have been rehearsing and memorising the words, which is often a matter of recalling the links between the end of a sentence, or the end of a verse, and the first word of the next. Imagery is also important. For this I've also designed a costume and a prop friend, Guillaume, made from sack cloth.

After that, made a short video for the next ArtSwarm programme on the theme of gardening, piano variations on the theme of English Country Garden, with a hastily filmed video.

Then, booked the tickets and paid for my entry into this year's ING Discerning Eye exhibition, which is an excellent art exhibition of smaller works. What is nice about this event is that there are six different judges each year and all work is judged in person, rather than by photo.

Today, collection of work from Bickerton. Later this week, creating new illustrations for Deborah Edgeley's new poetry collection.

More Video Work

The new month continues and I'm keen to get as many videos complete soon, not taking up too much time. Have re-filmed segments of the new China Syndrome video three or four times, each different and now have broadly completed a video. I must avoid worrying about perfectionism for this old piece of music, there is only so good it could be given my time constraints.

The same is true about the Marius Fate music and videos. I hope to have three videos done as soon as possible; China Syndrome from Stupid Computer Music, Dreams of a Fly in Amber from Music of Poetic Objects, and Masculinity Two from The Modern Game. Always more to do.

The opening at the Williamson Art Gallery for the Wirral Society of Arts was excellent, really high quality work. I spoke to one or two people. The venue was outstandingly hot on a below average summer day of 22 degrees. The building really needs air conditioning, for the sake of the artwork if nothing else.

In the night, thoughts about gravity fill my mind. Massive objects radiate gravity, theoretically in all directions equally and homogeneously, which obviously can't be the case in real life. I imagine that quantum effects restrict the flow of this information only to areas where it is used. Gravity that is never acted upon is simply never emitted (I must work out how this could be tested, by testing itself you break the rule). This factor could eliminate infinities and lower or change the amount of energy emitted by a massive object; perhaps this could be the test.

Does gravitational radiation contain energy, or merely information? Transmission of information would seem to require some form of energy, and is generally prone to the possibility of error (nothing is perfect, and I suspect that errors in information transmission are of fundamental importance in all things). A planet moving towards another due to gravity does not require energy of momentum, according to general relativity, it is merely moving more slowly through time, and so is simply moving as always, simply deflected by something like a perfect mirror. Thus, gravity is information contained in space which radiates from massive objects. Do neutron stars and other stars lose mass purely due to gravitational radiation? I recall reading so, but can't locate this quickly. If a single proton emits gravity, it must also radiate and decay by this method, but this seems somehow unlikely, counterintuitive. A single proton radiative gravity in all directions is predicted.

China Syndrome

Manically busy day making a new video for China Syndrome. First, I did my regular computer backups, as it's the first of August, then updated Prometheus to fix a bug in the exact sample calculation of certain timing events. Details unimportant but song events that might manipulate the tempo need to be processed to calculate timing, I have a feature that can calculate the exact output sample of a particular part in the song, if, for example, I wanted to do very specific edit or something. Anyway, these calculations are much more complex than they appear, as most songs vary in tempo.

After that I exported a list of frame numbers for major sections of a new edit of China Syndrome, then exported a list of frame number for the main lead notes. Then I made up some 320x320 pixel images and processed each one by hand, making them fade to darkness over 11 images, saving these out as still images that can be animated. Then I animated these in AviSynth, each in time with the notes in the song. This took until lunch; a record tome as this took me a couple of days the first time I used this technique.

In the afternoon I knew I had to film sections. First I made a small recording of the chorus of an electronic tunnel zoom effect; I'll superimpose myself over this at some point, then set up various rooms to record different verse scenes, and changed outfits three times and filmed each scene, with the music playing for later synchronisation.

The final scene involved playing two synths.

After all of the filming and conversion, I decided that the chorus that leads up the finale was too long and, perhaps stupidly, re-edited the music! This made everything out of time, and also means that I don't have enough filmed material to fit into the song, so more is needed.

The whole process has taken 12 hours, more or less without breaks. If I had thought about the music first, I could have been more efficient. As it stands, I might have to move lots of furniture and wall hangings again (as each scene needed) and re-film some parts. One take was out of focus too. There are many downsides to filming and acting alone; these can be overcome with quick tests, makers to know where to stand, autofocus etc., but the chance of being out of focus or not in the middle of the shot is much higher. It's amazing how much I can achieve alone. These words would probably make a suitable epitaph (of course, nobody would read it!).

I expect this will take another day or two to complete. Tomorrow, I'm off to the Williamson Art Gallery, which is hopefully not flooded, to attend the opening of the Wirral Society of Arts exhibition.