Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Giant insects invade

Right I’m going away for a couple of days, to a place of pigs, tents and leeks.

I have elucidated this fact on my MySpace blog and my grey blog. Go to those places if it seems slow here ever, something will be happening somewhere.

I’m actually doing some drawings involving attempting to incorporate the shapes of holly leaves into faces, but they feel like a little set that’s not quite ready to see, so for now I have just these:




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Old half finished paintings of minotaurs. When I looked back at them having experienced my drawing renaissance, I realised that they seemed to be all paint and no architecture. They were drowning in their own paint. So I’m kind of re engineering the whole thing with the old masters in mind, starting with white lines, progressing logically into establishing dominant forms etc.


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And how about this. We had an insect visitor, I cannot express how massive she was.

My dad is an entomologist, so I rang him up and tried to express to him how MASSIVE the beast was, all excited, but he was playing it cool, unfazed by this talk of massiveness, being familiar with these creatures like an old pro. But I could tell he was secretly pleased with my ringing him up to talk about insects. It was a female great green bush cricket.

My dad, being a caution-happy scaremonger, also informed me that they do bite and can draw blood.


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She was standing on top of the fabric dog that sits atop the television set.

Will be back with astonishing frequency in future weeks to let you know about my collapsed little micro-world of bath-wrinkled vision.

Monday, July 17, 2006

Nipper Eyes

I’m sorry it’s been so long since the last update. I have been painting with a view to getting some things finished. Painting is time consuming.



I’ve thought about posting stuff that isn’t my work, but then I thought that might get confusing and I like the purity of this blog.



I’ll give you some boring updates on things I had already started last time first.



Like I’ve been working on this monster painting with lots of red and green and yellow. I remember thinking when I chose the palette that I wanted the red and green to rub up together in an optically awkward way. There’s too much yellow in it at the moment, I plan to make it more cloudy and moody. Then when I’ve finished it I’m going to do something I’m more in the moment and passionate about. This is a strange exercise in problem solving at the moment, but it is improving as I persevere.
















Then there was that pink ink one which I’ve ruined by putting other stuff on top. But it will get better before it’s finished.





And the one with the wrestling and the orc and the by now familiar cat man… This one will look a lot different by the end too. This is more sandy. The other one was more wiggly. It’s got everything and the kitchen sink in this one.





Then the bat one, that has grown. It’s acquired some colour and some new pecs. This is part of my perverse wrestling imagery Chloe revolution reaching beyond the comfort based tyrannically cool school of imagery choosing and reaching toward the transcendent power of enriched vision beyond culture. And it has a bat.






I wanted to get to grips with the somewhat fascinating graceless rectangularity of John Cena, as those of you who vaguely follow the incoherent babblings of my grey blog may know. So I started drawing him, I started the big one in the bottom right corner wanting it to be purely done with coloured pencil since I hadn’t tried that for a while. But I felt I copped out when used watercolour and ink too. Also it looked too conventional or professional or something, not very interesting. Because he already looks like a cartoon or an action figure, there’s nothing clever about this drawing really. If there are elements of him which are unedifying, I wanted to try and make my drawings in some sense edifying despite the odds.






So what I did was I redid that entire page almost purely in coloured pencil, to see if I could take it to somewhere more interesting and uncover my purpose a little bit more.





In the top centre one, in his eyes I made him look a bit like me age three and apprehensive about being photographed. My motherly instincts and compassion seeped out, I couldn’t make him entirely hideous.

And working in coloured pencil took me back to age thirteen when they were my main medium. The memories were surprisingly potent. That was an age when I significantly started developing my own ‘techniques’, which had been a private milestone, I realised. I’m quite soft and gentle with them, which is interesting as a counterpoint to all the other media I’m using in less puritanical ways. I’m re-educating my seeing at the moment.
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