Tentatively Erumpent

I finally got around to getting one of these zippy little white blogs!

I’ve had a big lumbering grey one since last October. But that’s for sprawling thought sneezes. It’s for sweeping cultural meme-smoochings. This one is for unambiguous visuals.

It’s for my drawings and the incremental revealing of the paintings I am making with my hands.

I’ve planned a parallel ‘cute’ blog like this for a while. Initially I was going to call it ‘the lixiviation of Chloe’s Fussy Ball’. Lixiviation is a word that was used in alchemy to describe the separation of soluble from insoluble substances.

(‘A Fussy Ball of Intensity’ is what my big hulking weirdo blog
is called.)

The idea being that when my thoughts start getting a bit dense and heavy, a bit insoluble, I cream off and condense the soluble goodies and present them here… so that you can dissolve with your logic glands them and then absorb them with your spongy love lobes.

Here are some of the names I considered for this blog:

The Lixiviation of Chloe’s Fussy Ball

Chloe presents herself for Mass Consumption

Chloe Cumming Dissolves

Chloe Cumming Lixiviates

Chloe Cumming Condenses like Milk

Chloe’s Emunctory Valve

In a spirit of introductory friendliness, here is some self-portraiture from earlier this week. It was the first time I had made any attempt at self-portraiture or cartoony expressiveness of this sort for quite a while.

I unintentially pout when I feel looked at.

I feel like I’m still approaching it like a painter in a lot of ways though. I couldn’t help becoming conscious of how I was arranging the heads on the page. And I was feeling like to properly represent all the weirdness I see in my face I needed ultimately to give it skin and colour and texture. And on top of that, I was thinking ‘How am I going to get this monstrously fun manual dexterity I’m discovering into paintings?’ How do I translate the discipline of linear cartoon-inspired robustness into robustness in my compositions and the spatially arresting worlds I want to invent?

I kind of feel that if you take all the versions of me on that page together, you get an idea of what I look like. But I’m not satisfied with any single one of them. Maybe that’ll come in time.

My face is lopsided because one of my jaw joints was eroded way by arthritis when I was growing up and it had to be replaced by a piece of my rib.

For the sake of balance, here’s a recent tiny mainly watercolour painting of a Minotaur I did recently. It didn’t take very long and it sold for not that much money, but it has something about it that makes it my irrational favourite:

It has delicacy and urgency, or something, but I don’t want to define it too hastily. Words can get in the way.