Moving towards controlled playfulness

OK drawings now.

I've been following through on my bats and men, in fact the two things have rather fused in the middle.

Facially, as in the following:






Some of those have a bit of Triple H, the well paid big nosed wrestler, looking kindly, as he often doesn't.

Some bats, I think they're called horseshoe bats, have holes in the middle of their faces. The graphic possibilities are many.

Then some bats like to get intense down at the gym...

Randy and Edge are a tag team now. Unfortunately for Edge, he looks rather a lot like an ordinary mortal man, although his chin is so extensive I look at it and can't quite believe it's all made of face. Anyway he's below on the left.





The bat-man thing got so it was something I had to get out of my system. This kind of had its peak thus far in the next drawing.





While I was drawing that, I was watching Mark Kermode interview Steven Spielberg. They were talking about Munich and Mark thought that it wasn't that great cinematically and that he preferred Spielberg's popcorn fodder. Spielberg kind of said that he made that film to get it out of his system, and that's how I felt about the man-bats. I felt like a ten year old boy when I was drawing them. One they were out, I felt I could move on.

Bless John Cena and his quasi-box-shaped head.





I felt I needed to return to Randy's head to redress some imbalances. I'm still a beginner and I'm learning about caricature as a process, and I've come to realise that if you get in the habit of exagerrating a certain feature it will be at the 'expense' of a different one. Like in recent drawings I had been making Randy's cheeks all massive and rounded, and forgetting that he has a habit of pointing his chin at people and pouting in a distinctive fashion.









One of the reasons I think I return to this head is that it's quite open to interpretation.





I'm still scribbling manically in my sketchbook, splurging thoughts out with only slight coherence. Hey, now I have a new computer, so photoshop won't make it burst. I think I'm figuring out how to aim for where I want to be, in a never-finished kind of a way.





(This next bit also appeared in my myspace blog)

I've been having dreams which take the creative visual excitements from my life and push them deeper into magic.

This is a drawing based crudely on a memory of a dream in which I was at a Stanley Spencer exhibition and there was a painting in it of men in a winding tunnel, clusters of men, with radiant light shining out of their heads which fragmented the surrounding forms with its rays.

You can kind of see where I scrawled 'clusters of men'.






Then in a later part of the dream, there was a special secret library with massive volumes devoted to Spencer, Goya and of course, the famous fish bowl expressionists. That book mainly seemed to be filled with multiple colour variations on the same painting of a fishbowl. But it had special esoteric meaning, the colour, of course.

I have a lot of dreams about book shops, second hand book shops in hidden cities, and the important part is that in them I find the books that I need to find. The special books with the knowledge that takes me where I need to be. Because the thing is, my waking attitude is similar, I do think there may be one or two or three books hidden in the world somewhere that are the books I need to find.

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And this bit didn't appear on myspace, it's an exclusive: I had another dream the night before last in which Marlo invited me to her home, an apartment in a sort of intimidating pearl white castle labyrinth.

But she was kind of a superhero, I think this was directly based on her wonder-inspiring real life drawing skills. It seemed that my visit had enticed some kind of egg shaped red haired begoggled lady archvillain to Marlo's house, so Marlo kindly shoved me down the chimney hole in order that I could hide/escape. I became swamped in soot.

A tribute to my cats

I was going to post drawings, but I thought I'd stall and post some cats. I wouldn't want to get repetitive with all the wrestlers and the bats and all. Punctuate it a bit.

Maybe it's wet and soppy to talk about my cats. But they are a daily part of my life, for now they are my family in fact, and they are my only company during the day. I feel very close to them and I often worry about what might become of them if Bob and/or I have to move away. It's probably a silly worry. I worry, but I am working on it.

This is Joyce. She is the mother of the other two. She is very neurotic and possibly has cat obsessive compulsive disorder. She washes herself a lot. She's quite a tiny kitty. She likes eating person food, even if it makes little sense. She's upwardly mobile. Last night she chose to eat broccoli instead of corned beef.









Stephen is the favoured son, in that he gets wapped round the face by Joyce less often than his brother. Everyone loves Stephen. He is a massive, humungous barrel chested fat glossy bastard of a cat. He has the softest fur and ears in the world and he's so inky black that he's quite hard to photograph. He is extremely good natured and easy to get along with. He has emotional intelligence and therapeutically tactile stomach flab.









Then there is Hal, who is one of the most singular life-forms I have ever met. He was the runt of the litter, but he's not that much smaller than Stephen, he just has tiny ears and a skinny tail.





Hal spends all the time he can outside in the garden amongst nature, because he finds human things like doors and carpets scary and unpredictable. In the spring he sits and stares at a single flower for six hours at a time. He always knows when we're talking about him, even when we don't mention his name. He lets us know this by giving a unique squeaky staccato miaow. He has a exceptionally varied range of vocal expression, possibly because he doesn't really understand that he's a cat.

In fact, we had a theory at one point that he might not be a cat, he might be an owlbear.

he shakes his paws a lot and walks as though literally walking on eggshells. He has flaky skin and nipple crusts and scaly paws, and is technically a mutant, but may have the prettiest face of all the cats. You can see his soul knocking about inside.





Here's Hal on the left and Stephen on the right:





Here are Joyce and Stephen being affectionate on Bob's lap.

I think Stephen knows when he's being photographed and poses.





We were given the cats to look after when we lived in Brighton, city of posers and assymmetric hair decadence. It was originally going to be a temporary arrangement, so the names were only going to be temporary names. But they were the names that felt right.

I love them and value them a lot. It feels good for my soul to be friends with animals. They are a wonderful part of my life during this stretch of youthful semi-settledness.

Drawings and all that will follow.

P.S. Thank you Eddie for writing about me, and thank you the people who commented, that really made my day.