Battles

I'm having an extremely extremely frustrating summer of painting. Most of it had gone yet very few pictures have turned out well and even the simplest ones have taken far longer than needed. Some that have taken a mere two days have needed two months, and numerous failed versions. Sometimes only the simple fill-in ideas have worked at all. I often think I'm going backwards and that 2007 was better. Yet, I will continue to bang my head against a brick wall and persist in painting.

Hopefully the better paintings will finally become completed in the last dash. The larger ones in progress are coming along and I have plans for several smaller ones in my more classic style of mountain forms with dramatic figures, skies and surrealist objects.

Painting Progress

The underpainting to 31st Century Crucifixion is now complete. It will need at least two more layers however. Next week's work is the main glazing layer of a picture where a tape measure measures life, it's all a bit Frida Kahlo. Two other small ones are nearly finished and need scanning or very minor work.

My next local exhibition starts in a week at Bickerton. It's quite a big show for a small village, showing about 250 pictures last year.

Politics

It hit me today that both the political left and right are missing the point. The early Socialists (in the 19th century that is) didn't object to the rich, they objected to the lazy. After watching The Cheeky Girls talking about how hard working people should spend spend spend, it struck me that most people equate money with work, and equate more money with harder work, when in reality this hardly ever happens, in fact it's more common for the rich to do hardly any work and for poor people to work like crazy for very little. The aim of socialism, and of capitalism for it to work best, shouldn't be wealth redistribution, it should be to ensure that people who work get paid according to the amount of work they do, and that is all. In this respect, the political left should be closer to capitalists than the right. The class war is nothing to do with rich and poor; it should be the lazy vs. the workers (although Karl Marx, the laziest famous man I can think of, might disagree with my analysis). Perhaps I'll write a new manifesto.

31st Century Crucifixion Progress

I've now finished the second day of underpainting 31st Century Crucifixion. Time is tight due to other commitments (not to mention other paintings and my full schedule). I hope to do this in five days but it's difficult for such a large and complex painting. The picture is about the victory of technology over religion and the ultimately hollow awe and worship of technology. The picture uses abstraction to remove emotional content from the composition and juxtaposes that against more traditional figurative forms. It is one of my first paintings to directly cross the abstract and the surreal, in a way that Pleasant Dreams does for example. The finished painting will incorporate 24ct gold and perhaps gemstones.

Nine Hours of Nothing

Well I'm stuck in a production rut at the moment. Yesterday for 9 hours I painstakingly painted my stone wasp in a desolate mountain lake but so messed up the colours that I'll have to restart from scratch on another day. Dropping off my strange portrait to Birmingham on Sunday also got in the way of my working week (normally Friday to Tuesday) so I've done nothing but work and produced nothing. I wrote a poem that sums it up, so that's something!

I'm tired of doing nothing.
Nothing all day long.
I woke and worked and worked and worked
and now the day is gone.

I've worked all day for nothing,
and now I have a lot.
I've got no something here to show though;
nothing's all I've got.

Boring

Here are the lyrics to my latest song, penned just this night and my first in a while. It's called Boring.

I have a lot of exciting friends.
They follow all of the latest trends.
They talk about all the things they do,
but, I just find the things they do boring.

They talk about all the cars they drive.
They talk about all the skies they dive.
The watch the action in action films
but, I just find the things they watch boring.

For life itself is boring.
Days go on for ever.
Life has become boring
for me.
My days are filled with nothing
since you went away.
Everything is boring
to me.

My friends are living exciting lives.
They live them with their exciting wives.
They talk at parties and people laugh
but, I just find the things they say boring.

My friends have hobbies that people like.
They watch the football and mountain bike.
They listen to all the latest hits
but, I just find the things they do boring.

For life itself is boring.
Days go on for ever.
Life has become boring
for me.
My days are filled with nothing
since you went away.
Everything is boring
to me.

I sit at home and I read your books.
I light a candle and watch it flux.
I get a phone call from my best friend
but, I just find the things he says boring.

And so my days slowly drag to weeks.
All of my fluid joints turn to creaks,
and all my colour just fades to grey
and, everything I think about bores me.

For life itself is boring.
Days go on for ever.
Life has become boring
for me.
My days are filled with nothing
since you went away.
Everything is boring
to me.

Update

The self portrait is now complete and drying, as is a second Starving Scarecrow. At the moment I'm underpainting Sunset with Petalliforms, a picture that was planned and prepared last November. 31st Century Crucifixion is ready but I need to paint a detailed colour study first. My skills appear to be improving with each finished picture and I'm learning more about framing and decoration too. I hope to customise more frames in future. But enough of paint work!

I've added an events page to my website, which I'll probably take down after the exhibition season. The two paintings exhibited in Nantwich church sold, making a total of five sales since the start of May. As I type, two paintings are on display in Nantwich book shop too, with hopefully five of my best to be shown in the last exhibition of the summer at Bickerton.

31st Century Crucifixion Plans

Today I've prepared the underdrawing to 31st Century Crucifixion, one of the few large sized painting planned for this summer (by large, I mean about 50 to 100cm edges). This one is about the destruction of emotion by technology and uses a mix of geometrical shapes and more realistic organic forms. Other pictures in progress are; A balloon released by a small child long long ago; Alain the sad bathysphere, which is about working in isolation under pressure; Light at the end of a long dark tunnel, uses a trapezium shaped panel; a second version of the starving scarecrow picture; a picture about the changes within post war Britain depicting the god Albion; a sad construction called Arrow stabbed vine; a surrealist portrait of hypnotist Derren Brown; and a new self portrait. There are 3 or 4 others ready but not yet started too.

With luck all of my painting for the year will be mostly concluded by October allowing me to get some work done musically. A long standing project with my best music to date, currently called the 12 seasons, awaits completion and I'd like to work on a second symphonic work like The Spiral Staircase.

I must remain confident that all of these works will eventually be seen/heard, and I do so with an increasing and glorious certainty.