Two very busy days. First yesterday, first listing two more works for sale on the Saatchi website, and backing up some new painting images with frames, new since July 1st!
At 11am, I started painting 'Inspection At Theresienstadt (after Fritta)'. The colours largely matched the study, but I decided to use a colour called French Yellow Ochre. This is a gritty pigment, almost like painting with wet sand. It was as frustrating as painting with wet sand too; I had to pile on the paint to get any to stick. This act was poor training, as it meant that the other parts of the painting done later in the day used too much paint, and I wasted paint by preparing too much of those colours, too.
I chose the colour because I knew it was gritty; the painting was of a sandy, muddy, concentration camp so I wanted sandy paint, and the 'French' name was an inspiration too. The overall effect is good, the transparency allows the green imprimatura to show though; but the process was unpleasant and I'll happily throw this paint away when this work is complete.
A delivery of more newsprint (blank paper I use as desk protection when painting, each painting day uses one sheet), and some cardboard L shapes, arrived in the day.
Today, I completed the underpainting. It's based on an ink drawing so I needed to add far more detail, and try to capture or keep some of the raw emotion of the original; but of course, I'm adding my own emotions (and details) here. You can see here the challenges and choices I faced:
The underpainting was complete by 15:00. I then cut some of the L-shaped lengths into cardboard corners, using hot-melt glue to make some, experimentally. It worked well.
Then, art photography. Of my Old Lazy Candle painting, and some new (better colour balanced) images of 'The Wheel Of Attraction And Repulsion'. There's quite a colour difference in the (very blue!) old vs new, the new one is an excellent match.
Plus framing that work:
It is election day tomorrow, so I will vote. The polls (which are always wrong) indicate a Labour landslide, despite their policies being the same as those of the Conservative government. The country is in a dire state due to the Conservatives. Rishi Sunak seems like an honourable and reliable politician, much like John Major was; but like Mr Major he was unwilling or unable to change direction or take radical action; he was a steadying hand after difficult times, nothing more. The country was definitively ruined by the instability and stupidity of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Brexit has substantially harmed the economy - though the arguments against unchecked immigration remain valid and still cause problems within the European Union itself.
I expect that every left-winger believes that Kier Starmer is lying to gain votes, and that his government will be more left wing than his stated policies (and the current government). It's hard to know what will happen. I expect that the Conservatives will lurch to the right, as they did when Tony Blair was in power, and that they will remain out of power until they regain the centre ground; though this is a less certain prediction, as much of Western World is lurching to extreme right, nationalist, governments - in panic over diminishing resources, and the tide of immigrants this can cause. Each hungry country is preparing for fight for the remaining sandwiches; this is not good (or sensible, or sustainable).
Kier Starmer's jobs are so huge that it's very likely that he will fail; not be able to grow the economy, fix the badly damaged health and social services, stop the tide of illegal immigration, or clean the polluted rivers. All of these things will require extreme measures.
Those problems are due to Brexit and its punishing cost to trade and knowledge, and, far more-so, climate change (that is specifically the historical use of more resources than is sustainable; the good times are certainly behind us but the populace remain philosophically addicted to them - welfare standards are too high for those who do not contribute to society, and too low for those that do, including nature). There is no sign that those two key things can be or will be reversed, or directly addressed. So my final prediction is that the government will fail to fix these problems, and that the high point for popularity in a new government's term will be day one.
Of course, everything will be fixed eventually, but one hopes this will happen quickly and relatively peacefully, rather than over the course of a century after a few wars and revolutions.
