Scientific progress in fluff, bunnies and glistening boymen

Uuuuaaaaarhhh!

(Kurt says that)

(It signifies intensity)

Here are some drawings and paintings that reflect my thought processes, but are still part of a build-up to something more big and whole.

I began this painting of a rabbit in some specific fluffy vegetation and being overseen by an evil Ortonish sneaky manboy.

It feels like a condensed exercise in figuring out the mechanics of how my next paintings will be constructed. It’s in acrylics which allow for quick changes.





Here’s the fluffy plant that visually interested me so. I took the photo on the way home from the gym, my buttocks still warm from their herculean efforts.





And now here’s the painting in its current state, a little bit cleverer and more advanced:





(I did the last session while I was watching the end of season 2 of Lost. I think I missed a couple of visual plot clues because of it.)

I keep meaning to come up with some mindblowingly cute self-portrait to use as a new avatar and myspace picture. But then every time I draw myself I end up looking like a deranged hag. And also I’m not nearly as interesting as lumpy testosterone charged glistening boymen.






In a phone conversation with my friend Scott, I came up with the insightful gem of a statement: ‘I like faces, but I like arses too.’





And here’s how the rest of that page grew:





Oh Randy, you throw yourself about so beautifully, but where are your eyeballs?

Speaking of Scott, I did a couple of initial Bob and Scott studies just to get a feeling for how easy they were going to be. Scott was surprisingly easy. His eyebrows are the key to him.

He’s the one with the dinky bow tie.





I can’t pretend I haven’t drawn any wrestlers though. I’m afraid I have.





John Cena: what was God thinking when he forgot to finish whittling you?

When we fed Cena’s head into the genetic celebrity face-match finder, there were no matches. It’s because he looks like an action figure more than a human.

He is inexplicably worshipped in India.






Sometimes when I’m trying to plan way-out paintings with plant life and punching, it all gets a bit scribbly.


In this next one I made Randy look like Sloth from the Goonies. By accident. I’m not sure I’d show him this if he came round for tea.





In my sketchbook I do loose limbed doodles by which I try to think. You have to start somewhere. Humble beginnings.





I wanted to paint Randy looking scrunched next to some holly to see how my acrylic technique has evolved. Everything I do is like an anal little experiment at the moment. But I think I needed this phase after many a long day getting swallowed up in the haze of relentless painting slog.









Here’s the painting a little bit further along.

Bob said it was turning into a Vice Reeves Elvis. This was not intentional. I’ll show you what a Vic Reeves Elvis looks like in a sec.





It’s interesting painting in acrylics again. I’m very aware now of the strengths and specific qualities of acrylic as opposed to other kinds of paint. It’s great for fast opaque changes and adjustments in drawing along the way. The opacity feels a bit ugly compared to my oil and watercolour paintings, but you have to milk the strengths of each one for all it’s worth, and something good will emerge.



Vic Reeves was a favourite comedian of mine during my adolescence. He also draws and paints. He only ever seems to do anything to amuse himself primarily, which can make him a bit complacent and lazy, but I still have a soft spot for him and sometimes I feel I could get a little bit more complacent and lazy myself occasionally.

When people prefer my phone doodles to the paintings I have spent hours of thought and labour on, that’s really…ggghgg… annoying.

And I know John K would disapprove of aspiring to draw like people who draw in a deliberately naïve cheeky sort of a way. Mmm, frictions.





Bye bye for now, kind blog readers.

I hope you’ve seen something that’s been worth stopping for.

windy snowy night time reading

Hello. I have been a little bit ill. I’ve been posting frivolous and feverish piffle-blogs on my myspace. There you can read about my fevered brain, sneezing and bland superman Dean Cain. And lots about how a big part of me guiltily likes being ill.

When I was ill I finished reading a book called Letters From a Lost Uncle by Mervyn Peake. I was quite taken with it in the end.

I don’t think it was ever intended to be published, and the drawings are quite rough in some ways, but they have a quality about them that attracts me.






I like drawings that make stillness in the midst of stories. This book had been can’t get to sleep reading for me.






I also like the naturalness of the invention.






I’m not personally much cop at writing stories. My sister might write ones that I can illustrate one day.

I’ve been going through childhood things. I used to start ‘epic’ stories that I never finished. Her stories had beginnings middles and ends. She was less pretentious.






I like it when my work appeals to children. Children have tended to write the best and least idiotic things in my comments books when I have had exhibitions.

Here is an actual page from a past comments book at my foundation show:






I’ll do you a proper entry with drawings soon. Maybe more than one!

Man-Head-Crevice Sproutage

So here are some recent scribblings.

I’m trying to evolve myself in a forward direction as usual. Everything feels all urgent and dynamic in my head. I don’t know if that’s what it looks like. Probably just looks like more boring old wrestler drawings to the layman.

I am trying to make my drawings and paintings be ultimately of one purpose, and that’s a technical challenge but it’s also about sort of overcoming the compartmentalised technical challenges of my various media and giving myself a feeling of a unified vision.

It’s also about getting man-meat and flowers in the same pictures.





That was a page from my sketch book. Note the instruction to ‘be more erumpent’.

I’m painting a painting with a rabbit in it. So those were some drawings of the rabbit.





I started trying to give equal weight to flower studies and man-head studies. But Randy was getting a little bit habitual here so I did some biro scribblings to loosen myself up. Biro is good for the soul.





So there they are.

Also good for the soul, I think, is working on cheap paper… helps to loosen me up and get over my uptighteries. I start these drawings as if they are purely for my own loosening and for no other external purpose, not for showing or anything. But that makes them more betterer in a way.





That was a painting that’s still not exactly finished. It has existed through several of my recent micro-phases and has been bashed about from pillar to post by them, as by a storm at sea.

It has a problematic Jesus figure in the middle. He’s a bit weedy.





Some more thumbnail sketches there… I hit on the revolutionary idea of drawing the man-heads of the men in my life, rather than the men in the magical ring of meat grappling… I thought I might draw my friends Bob and Scott in a similar spirit to the way I draw Randy and Kurt together. Bob and Scott have never actually met, but in my mind they could potentially have comedic chemistry.

‘Whilst intangibles intensity radiates all over the place’ I seem to have written that.





That one was mostly done whilst watching a reality show called ‘How do you Solve a Problem like Maria’ where Andrew Lloyd Weber looks for Marias for the Sound of Music.

Lots of biro ink was spilled on this one. Actually, it never spills, that’s the beauty of the invention. Yes Randy has sprouted flowers out of his lug holes. I feel I’m moving a bit further away from cartoony concerns with these, my drawings and paintings are kind of in a retarded way beginning to coalesce… is this what I want? What have I learned? Hmmm.

Pictorial Diary of a Domestic Task involving lots of Fat

I was going to blog about meat

(actually I already did that in my other blog
)

Maybe about George Herriman

Maybe about my bottom

In an effort to be more regular with the blogging… then I got in a fluster of indecisiveness, which made me put it off. Irony!

Then yesterday I decided to document my cooking of a roast dinner for Bob. Bob is my housemate. He is large and eats a lot.

I am a lady and I nibble.

I also took one or two pictures of paintings. You’ll notice when they come up. They aren’t chicken.

Well, here’s the chicken. The one that came with garlic attached was cheaper than the one that didn’t.





The clock in our kitchen is well classy.





And Kurt’s face has got fatter again. I’m using a wider variety of brush sizes these days. Also going back to the old Rembrandt trick of dark thinned oil paint seeping into the cracks of dry textured underpainting.

The whole thing has become more meaty. Meat, fat, meat, fat. Man meat.

A major component of the popularity of my roast dinners with Bob is the stuffing. One of the secrets is how much saturated fat there is in it. See how I fried lots and lots of bacon in frothy yellow butter.

Joyce the cat stood on the window sill having mental problems whilst I buzzed around the kitchen washing up as I went along like some kind of domestic ninja.

The stuffing also has dried apricots in it. Bob likes sweet things as well as fat. His tastes are varied.





Meanwhile, I have started some mental paintings of flowers growing out of men’s heads, erumpently. I’ll post some drawings along these lines very soon. But I even started an oil painting of it. You can kind of see the erumpence building, though it’s still a bit murky.





I had made a banoffee pie the night before. It was in the fridge.

We say pudding. Americans say dessert. They mean something else when they say pudding.

Bob has been going through a ‘cream phase’.





When bob got home from work, he was very excited about the nice food that was going to be in his tummy. Note natty cycling helmet.





I’m not sure that’s the most flattering picture of Bob. Here’s one where he looks much more graceful. See how his nose is heading in one direction whilst his adams apple has other ideas.





Here’s the dinner all assembled. It has bread sauce, leek and cauliflower, potatoes, parsnips, stuffing, chicken and gravy.





Here he is sitting beneath the mighty wall of wrestler drawings.






Soon I’ll post a bunch of scans of drawings I’ve been doing. They will reveal more of my earnest thoughts about the earnestness of reality.

Perhaps this post has provided an insight, in the meantime, into my life and lifestyle.