Painting Plans

Much of today was spent tracing over the underdrawing to 'The Angels Musing Over All That Is Left Of Rachel Hudson'. This is ready to paint, but I need to paint a colour study first.

After that, work on a simple, spartan work directly inspired by a vision in a dream. It was four circles forming a man's torso, with white circles where the hands should be. I realised that these were 'hosts', the body of Christ. The image is simple enough but I'm unsure of the colours. I had in mind plain grey, similar to 'Don't Think I Can Feel Love Anymore', but then I thought I should make the lower 'sky' near black. There is some floating bread there. Should I make it dark brown or dark green? The upper sky could be any hue... but cold, green, yellow, or gold.

There are no right or wrong answers, just different moods and meanings. I've looked at some Rothko's. I'm reminded that he never seemed to slope his works, always stability for a form of religious reverence.

Portents Of Desire Glazing Day 2

Second day of glazing Portents Of Desire. This is a strange painting that constantly baffles me. I worked on it even when drawing the idea sketch, adding bits here and there, then added or removed more when drawing it, then did the same at every stage of the painting. It's almost evolved from notions of balance, prettiness, emergent textures, rather than any other consideration.

This is unique for me. I like to at least have a plan; emotion, concept of some sort; or if not, just 'improvise', but this is a strange hybrid, like a snapshot of a sentence in a never-ending novel. Even now I keep thinking what I can change. Perhaps it's best left as it is.

In the afternoon, I enhanced and re-uploaded two of the forthcoming music videos. I added some pretty expanding rings to An Autumn Tale (before these were simply star-shaped lights), and added a racing road to the drag-race section of Cat Parasites.

Portents Of Desire Glazing Day 1

A long and slow day of painting. Was simply titled 'Portents Of Desire', now renamed 'Thomas Hardy: Portents Of Desire' to give this enigmatic and strange painting a clue to its origins. I'm unsure what to do with it, to improve it Today, 6 hours or so work glazing the lower right half.

I feel like van Gogh today, a prisoner of my own art. I need a place to show and sell my art. In the meantime I will keep working, creating, improving.

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!

More On Free Will Meets Absolute Determinism

I've been considering more conclusions of free will being an aspect of expectation and prediction. Will falls away when anticipation becomes memory, what we know as experiencing the present.

Free will is a property of false perception of possibility. Consider a 6-sided dice. We may think that the odds of rolling a particular number is 1 in 6, but in truth the odds are 100% for the actual number rolled and zero for the other five. Before the roll, our feeling that other outcomes are possible is what we think of as free will. If we were to slow down a film of the rolling dice, there would probably be a time when we can see which numbers are more likely than others, and ultimately we could determine which number will actually be rolled before the dice settles. This analogy shows that the 'present' is variable and fuzzy.

There are many implications of this.

First, that will of this sort can be observed in non-humans. Rutting stags, for example, must use their judgement to predict if they would win a contest against another male. If they knew the outcome for certain, they would not need to battle. With this argument we can show that stags have free will as we know it. With a similar argument we can show that any universal actor which makes a predictive judgement can be shown to have freewill. What a predictive judgement is, is a different question.

A second implication is the definitive end of ideas of an infinite (or any) number of possible universes which contain all outcomes from each event. There is only one universe; this one. Any beliefs of more than one universe, more than one outcome to any event, stem from false beliefs in other impossible outcomes. Like the dice prediction, these beliefs are a property of will (a delusion, a fantasy, a false prediction), rather than a reflection of the actual universe.

Will here implies control over the future. Control over our memories or the transmission of information could also be considered part of free will; and with that we can extend will over the past. Consider that we exist at the end of the universe and ask which universes may be 'possible'? We are at the end, so we could clearly say that this is/was the only one, but we have limited knowledge of what is there (we can never know all of the universe, we would need a brain as big as the universe for that). The limited knowledge creates gaps which can be filled with guesses, predictions, fantasy; and thus false beliefs, a 'will' over past events, would emerge. As with predictive will, the inaccuracy of these predictions would increase with distance.

When time is relative, we actors have different pasts, and our perception of the present is personal. If we revisit Schrödinger's cat, we can split the present. If one person sees the alive/dead status of the cat in the box, but doesn't tell his colleague, then the cat is in the 'past' for the observer, but in the uncertain future for the unknowing colleague.

It is the personal relatively of time which grants us individuality because the flow of time gives us information. Information determines belief, and allows prediction; and prediction, imagination emerges as will.

Vermeer Underpainting

Underpainting today for the new 'circuit board' painting. The work is about one quarter or one fifth scale from the original. I wondered if it's easier to copy a painting larger or smaller than the original? I think it's probably no more difficult or easy either way. Here it is so far:

The details of the girl's face are complicated because I didn't have a brush with a tiny enough point. Things should be easier in the glaze.

With a miniature, everything is scaled down. One uses softer, smaller brushes to simulate shrunken normal brushes, and less paint - though still enough to blend.

My colours are a little grey. I perhaps need more blue and more hue generally. Vermeer is one artist who has a similar love of grey to myself. Observing his work today, I don't think he was patient. I know that some types of brushwork can look quick and spontaneous while actually taking a long time, but sometimes I felt that his work was rushed due to impatience rather than a desire for flair. I rush myself at times; one can't take too long, but also can't be too quick either. Everything, in the performance art that is painting an oil painting, is balance.

Determinism, Freewill, and Relative Entropy

I've been thinking again about absolute determinism and how this can be compatible with freewill. This morning the answer became obvious.

On freewill, assume that every actor in the universe can control some aspect of their destiny, from atom to bee to human. The end result of this would create some reality which, one could say, was always destined. It's impossible to know if an alternative could have happened.

If time is a dimension then the past and future are laid out, the universe must be one multi-dimensional sculpture. Knowledge of this is the root of determinism; but such reality is not incompatible with freewill. The key element is predictability, knowledge of the future. The future can be laid out, and freewill can exist, providing the future is not predictable. This is clearly the case.

The key comparison is with the past. We assume that we know the past, that the past is fully predictable. It is perhaps this knowledge that frustrates us when trying to predict the future, this plus the human ability to make predictions, and the ability of science to do so; but the past is not fully known. Information about past events degrades over time and distance. More recent events are more certain, but more distant events are more obscure. This degradation applies to the past and future equally. Elements of the near past are much more certain than elements of the far past, and elements of the near future are much easier to predict than elements of the far future.

There is a difference between past and future, a 'flip' of types of knowledge; from predicted outcomes, to knowledge of the outcome. This flip defines the present, and the flip is dependent on our knowledge. We actors have knowledge, and this knowledge gives us a sense of 'now', when the present moment is.

The universe is timeless. The people and other actors across the universal domain always consider their time 'now'. From our perspective we determine the present moment by the flip from prediction of events to knowledge of events. This has an interesting implication: Because we can predict some things better than others, and know some things better than others, our sense of when 'now' is can vary compared to that of others. We can literally live a little in the future or a little in the past. If, for example, we don't know the result of last week's football game, then the football part of us is living in last week. Indeed, the phrase 'living in the past' applies to people with less interest in and knowledge of current affairs; the phrase is accurate.

Information decays over time, this is a universal law of thermodynamics. Time is ours, relative to each actor. I've outlined here that the present moment is relative too. Information can only decay when we know what the time is and with knowledge of that past, so this decay is a personal decay, not a universal one. If time is relative, entropy is too; but knowledge of the future decays with distance too, so information also decays forwards in time. The most certain moment is the present moment.

Knowledge-power is unique to each actor, so the strength of entropy is relative to each actor. Perhaps a new value of this knowledge-power could be assigned. It seems that there is a relation between actors with accurate knowledge of the past, and ability to accurately predict the future. Computers are high in this regard, humans too, and animals less-so.

Drive Videos Complete

Spent much of yesterday rendering, converting, and proofing the A Drive Through The Town videos, making a few small changes as needed. Each video has taken about an hour each, with about another hour each for the conversion, rendering, proofing, uploading, filing; those time consuming steps.

There have been a few improvements and innovations, a few pretty moments. I rather liked the skewed camera in 'What Has Happened To My Dreams', as used in parts of 'Incomplete Version Of The Writer', too.

Ready to move on, to return to visual art. After three completely full days I'll rest a little today, and complete the tidying and filing process.

The videos will premiere every Friday at 7pm, starting this week, 12 July 2024, with the videos for the two recent single tracks; then one week's gap, and one video per-week to correspond with the release of the album.

In a strategic move, I've taken all of my music down from Spotify apart from the latest two albums (which I will take down in future). The royalties are too poor, and their whole philosophy of making money of the backs of the thousands of small artists and giving their royalties to the bigger artists, is completely wrong. I'm unlikely to ever return, they would need to hugely change that philosophy.