Types of Art Active in Britain

There are five types of art active in Britain, all very different.

1. There is academic art; made by art school graduates, exhibited at The Royal Academy and museums and galleries of prestige across the country, and a few relatively numerous London art galleries. This type of art is typically installation, sculpture, multi-media, mixed media.
2. There is commercial art, exhibited by smaller galleries and art shops, including artwork retail chains. This type of art tends to be paintings (typically acrylic) with lower-priced prints. Works are emotionally and thematically sterile, yet pretty; mainstream, like commercial pop music.
3. There is local public art funded and curated by local government or public bodies with government links. One aim here is a display of public engagement with a community, and the focus can be as much on the creator, or creative group, as the consumer. The art is necessarily bland and highly politicised in its primary aim of not offending anyone and avoiding saying anything important or interesting; aside from 'good news' propaganda about how good local arts are, and how brilliant local government is for supporting it.
4. The fourth category is any art made by hobbyists and enthusiasts, which may be exhibited or not, and can cover a wide gamut in styles, themes, etc. The median artist here is a retired old lady and the median subject a landscape or animal, though this category is the largest and most numerous and covers every style and type of art from the brilliant to the mundane.
5. A fifth category is commercial illustration, which can be everything from poster and book cover design, to painted portraits or commissioned designs for special (or even state) occasions. Perhaps historically, this was the primary type of art, first supplanted by photography and now by digital means.

Sleep Scan, Hudson Frame

A 25 hour day - joy! I can fill one more hour. I started by photographing the Sleep and 'Castle for the King of Death' paintings. This is a complex, physical job. I need to assemble a heavy wood base plate, the lights with 6 bulbs, two power extensions, and the wooden legs; then two tripods with aluminium rails, and fit the camera lens and plates; then calibrate the camera and align all materials. The process took almost all morning, including digital montage and taking everything down again and filing it away. The final image still looks poor compared to the actual painting, but this is always the way.

I keep thinking how to make it faster. I could do with money for more electrical wire to integrate the 6 lights. At the moment only 4 are integrated with 2 needing fitting each time. I could leave all 6 bulbs fitted, though they would be liable to get dusty. Setting up the tripods and rails takes time too, and the calibration. Ideally, these legs would be, or could be, fitted at exact right angles to the heavy wooden bed.

In the afternoon, work on the Rachel Hudson frame. It would be intolerably boring to simply frame this; it must look like a total artwork. I started by roughing up various areas of the frame with a wire brush, to make it look bruised and injured, then painting in the raw parts with dark wood stain. Then red stain to splatter it in various places. The results were remarkably pretty, perhaps even prettier and ironically smoother than before I'd started, as the sharp corner joints were now hidden.

Then, I rusted some nails with hot salt water and hydrogen peroxide. This fizzes iron into rusty iron in seconds. I tore some pink organza material and placed it around the edge, then nailed it into place. The organza was purchased for the 'Except For The Hatred' painting, and and nail rusting was a trick from the Hanged Rolf Harris painting.

Then I decided to write some text onto the frame. I had thought about adding more of the 'Sing a Song of Sixpence' rhyme, but I also thought that I needed to add something about Rachel herself, so I simply added her name and dates of birth and death as a tribute. I experimented with how best to do this. I wanted a scratched look, and initially thought of simply scribing the letters as I did with the 'Financial Circumstances' frame - I took a look at that to see how it looked. I decided to do a test, and got out my old (and much in need of replacing) soldering iron and burned some letters into some similarly stained wood. These looked much better. I'd used pyrography for the old Janet Frame picture. I also liked the idea that pyrography was included, yet more gamut to the methods employed, along with oil painting, woodwork, cloth and rusty nail chemistry!

Finally, the painting was framed with some Perspex. I've used 2 of 3 Perspex panes I have. Sigh, I'm running out of supplies and have no money for more. I need to sell more. Cutting the Perspex was as horrid as ever. Unless I can find a tiny circular saw (one which doesn't get hot) I must simply cope with the danger and exertion of a craft knife.

So, a full day complete. I need to file and photograph this in its frame, then I'm ready to enter the competition. Deb and I quickly visited the new Crewe Art Space yesterday, perhaps this would be a good venue to show this in some sort of presentation. My original local art space was The Cubby Hole. Many of my early exhibitions were held there, and Carol was so supportive and helpful.

Hudson and Sappho Frame, Sound Packs, Theresienstadt Painting

A long day yesterday, starting with cutting and assembling the Rachel Hudson frame. It was tricky, the wood was consistently not level. it was the first frame of its type to use my Frameculator software and the aluminium measuring tool. Both of those things worked well, but the wood itself was warped and would not lie flat. The corners are, as such imperfect, but they are sufficient. The colour of brown layered with neutral blue looks rather nice. The worst aspect is that I had to trim the painting by 2mm to make it fit; but the recess is smaller than on the similarly framed paintings of Cromwell and Gynocrats.

Then I spent many hours completing a first draft of the new sound packs. There is more to do on these and I can't do more until the major SFXEngine update, which I'll work on in November.

Today, deframing Cromwell and framing Song of Sappho:

I've heard that all three of my paintings have been accepted into the Castle Park Open this year, which is wonderful news. I've also prepared the other two works with labels, mirror plates, wrapping etc. and prepared the painting for Ty Pawb. I'll enter Theresienstadt into the Grosvenor. For me, 'Self Inspection At Theresienstadt (after Fritta)' is one of my best works, and a painting of its time on many levels. Trouble in the middle east aside, it has universal values. Life is a concentration camp, of sorts, but one we must endure, but then thrive within.

Sound and Civilisation

Sigh! What a hard year it has been. So often I feel that everything I do is unnoticed, unrewarded, and pointless. Yet, this has been how just about every day has felt for 30 years, and clearly some things have made a difference. Perhaps every act, however tiny, makes a difference. We can never really know what will become important and what not. Perhaps everything is just as important, as even trivial things can be necessary steps to important things.

If I were instantly rich, or even able to instantly live without the constant worry about money, I'd live most of my life in the same way, but perhaps not make any more sound effects or sell my software. I may give it away, I may just use it, but this I do only to scrape by. The art; painting, music, writing, I would still do as now.

Today I planed the wood for the two new picture frames, then continued work on the new/future sound effect packs. These are a lot of work because all of the samples used must be recorded by myself from scratch, so I'm having to duplicate many of the sounds. Some of these are already useful.

I many finish a first draft of these packs tomorrow. Then I'll pause the whole thing. My aim was only to plan what to release and how, and this is more than complete. The next step will be the major SFXEngine upgrade, but I must complete the painting jobs and music too. I'm well aware that, should I stop now and die, no soul would notice; yet I'm also aware that many people use my 20 years of sound effects, and many, tens of thousands of people at least, have heard them. Many will use and hear these new sounds in future, even if this achievement is the casual one of the jobbing designer.

We see and use hundreds of things daily, unaware of the people who made these things, yet without those people they would not exist. Does one need acclaim? Not really, sad though it can be to have none. This is the nature of civilisation.

Onwards we roll the rock, towards the warm horizon.

Sound Effects, Jobs To Do

Full in sound effect mode today and yesterday. Updated SFXEngine to v1.35 today and began work on future sound effect packs.

I've decided to release these after another major update to the program. Given all of the recent big upgrades to Prometheus, I've decided to incorporate the bulk of these into SFXEngine. The principle improvements to the program would be the ability to change the core program frequency from 44100hz to just about any (48000hz is more common than 44100hz now), and the use of double sample pointers to extend the sample size beyond the current 90-second limit, and up to several hours if memory permits. These two changes would make SFXEngine ideal for mass audio processing of many sorts; audiobooks for example.

These changes are big, at least a week's work, and will require the recompiling and hand-tweaking of all 100-or-so plugins. It's a long term goal, not something I'll start just yet. Today I've been working on 16 sound effect packs of 75 sounds each, and will continue to compile these over the coming days.

Other jobs are pressing. I've glued by three lengths of wood, so need to make the frames for 'sleep' and the Hudson painting. I may do more on those tomorrow too. I have two weeks to finalise the Hudson frame at least (I'd like to make it part of the artwork and decorate it with cloth) and scan the sleep painting before the Grosvenor deadline. I also have a song to write and practice for the Paul Simon night, frame the scarecrow painting for John Lindley's album launch, and finish the Fall in Green album.

My method of working is to think only of completed things. I don't 'tinker' or create for the sake of creating. I think: 'If I can complete anything instantly, what would I do?' and move from there. This is why my to-do list is a list of completed items.

Onwards!

Hudson Framing, SFX Packs

Something of a recovery day yesterday, after the most lovely meal and party on Saturday evening. Of jobs done, I glued up a wooden length in preparation of the frame for the Rachel Hudson painting. For the first time I'll use my Frameculator software and new cutting guides, and have set to recess to 10mm and, for the first time, will need to plane the back of the wood to level it.

I also adjusted for timing (tiny movements!) the bassline of Eckelmann; the day of work were worth it!

This morning I stuck a second length of wood (I'll need to glue three, one per day) but have charged into a new sound effects project. I'd like to create a series of sound packs, presets if you will, for SFXEngine. I've been thinking about this for some months and have decided to vend them as DLC.

There are many difficult parts to the job. Sound effects aside I need to make a suite of graphics and marketing material for each pack (I hope to list many, up to 100, if this is permissible). I also need a new licence, to make it clear that people can use and modify and sell the sounds, and I need to modify the program. All sounds will use varying levels of the Bolt-On DLC, which means that most packs will complain about the lack of engines (people lack that DLC). At the moment, each missing plugin pops us a separate error which is a headache when loading 75 sounds. So, I need to at least make this process neat.

I've started everything today; creating a new test pack, test art, and started the program modifications and testing. This may take several weeks, but I've neglected sound effects for months, or even years. In sound terms, these packs could be a breakthrough for developers. In SFXEngine format they are far more useful than plain sounds, and will be cheap and allow access (and use of) the source waves and modulators.

Prometheus v3.50 MIDI Import Victory

A long day of programming that ends in victory!

It's hard to explain what I'm trying to program, I will try. Imagine you have a MIDI sequence at 60 beats-per-minute that plays three bells, one per second, so one on each beat. In most MIDI imports, the sequencer would set the time to 60, and import one bell per beat, as you may expect.

But I wanted to import the notes at one-per-second irrespective of the speed the song is playing. Even if the song is slowing down or modulating. I wanted the notes to, rock-solidly, appear at 1-second, 2-seconds, 3-seconds. For this, I converted the MIDI notes into samples-offsets, so 44100ths (by default) of a second. Then I back-converted that into to location in the sequencer by running through all of the time modulations up to that point.

It was complicated, but I got it working in the end. On the way I discovered two older bugs; one which 'forgot' the initial modulator settings, thus changing them after playing and stopping a song (if they were programmatically changed during playback); and a second crash bug which should have been checked for in any of the previous 250 updates! It simply didn't update the selection when a track was deleted, so the selection could span beyond the sequence to dead tracks, causing a crash upon copy or delete.

It's amazing that 'The Cabinet of Dr Eckelmann' has directly led to two big new features in Prometheus. Several tracks are now complete for this album, 11 or so. Most are drafts that need final tweaks. Deb and I recorded some leaf-tramping sounds last night, which I may add to 'We Used To Store Sunlight'. I've also completed about 50% of 'Dumberdash', but there is a lot to do there.

Oh for more time! Of for more life! I need to divert a little now. I need to do work on some paintings to prepare them for the Grosvenor competition, and I want to create a new Flatspace IIk Music Pack: Music Pack 4. I also want to create a new array of sound effect packs specifically for SFXEngine. The biggest job here is the store artwork.

Onwards we charge.

Dumberdash, MIDI Bass

Started work on the Dumberdash song/poem for Fall in Green. This is an odd one for us, closer to a electronic rap. The words are a novelty on old Cheshire dialect, and as such the imagery and feeling is uncertain. My job is to make the music as interesting and eclectic as the words.

I also programmed a new routine into Prometheus. Eckelmann uses a tempo which varies, bends, speeds up/down. This is fine, but it messes up a MIDI import. A song at, say, 120 B.P.M. will import fine, showing the exact notes where they should be, but if the sequence slows down gradually, then the notes should be shown spaced closer and closer together. This can get more complicated when the tempo bends radically, which most sequencers can't do, but Prometheus can modulate anything. I can (and do) attach a sine wave, for example, to the tempo to make the whole song shudder and jump. This complicates the timing calculations.

The import is an issue when playing and recording MIDI tune to a backing track which modulates it's timing. Of course, I can insert the resulting audio recording, the tempo of the MIDI file is irrelevant then. Or, if I really need to see where the notes are, I can stop messing around with the tempo; but an ideal would be to import the MIDI notes at current the sequencer speed, calculating the note placement by time in seconds and milliseconds of the final song, and back-calculating which measure/beat/tick that time is.

So, step one is a "skiptocalctimeindexmodulated" routine (the name of which is a bit of a mouthful; 'skipto' is there because the routine is part of a group of routines which require initialisation and exiting; 'calctimeindex' describes what it does; 'modulated' shows that modulators, bends and other dynamic changes are calculated). If I feed it a sample index (eg. 44100 for one second), it will return the exact sequencer tick of the source song at that time, calculating all speed modulations to do so.

It's a slow routine. My former PC used to take up to a second to calculate it, as it has to run through the entire song and process each modulator on each Song engine.

It works but I can't spend more time on this. Must continue with something that will produce results; but if (when) I can get the MIDI import working, it will be useful to have.