Make it come true

I'm now trying to paint some 'beautiful paintings' that combine together all the best things I've learned from drawing lately. The kind of paintings that would be self-justifying, even if I never wrote blogs or tried to be clever. I have to think the word 'beautiful' to myself to make it come true.

But in the meantime here's a lady with awkward composition. I don't think she minds. Except she's lacking one of her eyes.

I think I unintentionally made her look a bit more like some of the female members of my immediate family than she oughta.

Plush Brush Mush

I've been easing myself back into oil painting, and simultaneously back into things feminine. With some paintings of soft fluffy ladies.

I've got much more into the mindset of 'let's see how much painting I can do in a day'... I think I'm much less long-winded than I used to be. But I still have to hone my technique if I want my next major paintings to be perfect distillations of my thought.

I was listening to a lot of Old Time Radio while painting this, Dragnet and The Whistler...

Lion Voyage

I'm trying to focus my attention on how I am going to do paintings that feel like they do justice to all I've learned lately. This has led me to draw in slightly odd, fluffy bluffy ways. This is drawing towards painting more than drawing for its own sake. Whatever that might mean. I'm veering a little further away from 'cartoony' again, if you want to picture that continuum. Also I wasn't quite comfortable leaving up the last blog full of noncommittal wrestler scrawlings for days when that's not really where my head is at.





These oddballs I drew whilst watching Now Voyager:





These are just really experiments and doodles. I was looking at strange anthropomorphic lion statues and at well designed cartoon lions and just seeing whether I could hybridise them, what that might look like, and whether this whole nutty process might help me figure out what my painted lions will be up to.





I'm still taking lines and rhythms from wrestler sketches.





Here's a slightly creepy night sky type sleeping foetal lion. I'm not sure how satisfying it is as a drawing but I have a feeling I can take it forward. This is kind of what I was saying about 'drawing for painting'. It actually isn't a process I've blogged about much. It's quite elusive. Quite slippery. Etherial. Wraith-like. Eelish.





Of course there's no real reason to abandon 'cartoony' in paintings. Secretly I want to achieve everything all in the same place. But sometimes, I realise I have to concentrate on doing one thing in one place whilst doing the other thing properly in a completely different place. Like, some of the detail of my caricature observation has to have its own stage to evolve for its own sake, it can't just all be subsumed to a larger floaty lion oil painting artsy fartsy cause. See it's really not very simple at all. I have a lot of time on my hands you see.

In case it passed you by, here's that leopard and flower combo I sketch-painted recently... it might give the vaguest whiffs about where my painting is headed.

Red Meat and Ron Howard

Time for some men... the lions partially evolve out of them in times to come. Oh boy, I do love men.

I told my mum I was taking a little break from wrestling and I think that gave her false hope that I was going to stop drawing them cold turkey.



I still draw Randy Orton and John Cena, not because I have no knowledge of other, smaller, hairier men existing but because somehow I don't feel my work with them has come to fruition yet. It's a conviction that's hard to explain to those on the outside.



Don't worry mummy, I'm also painting lions. There is room in my bosum for all these beautiful children.

This one is quite careful... I may colour it in. May just move on to the next phase. No I won't colour it in. I'm too impatient to get onto the next one.

John Cena's bottom has turned out to be erumpent.





I might do a blog soon explaining a little more psychologically my interest in athletic oaf bullies and perfectly proportioned grunting dropkicking villains, maybe with the help of R Crumb and his stories about Skutch, stories of my own bodily enfeeblement, feminine delicacy, controversial things about gender and lots more.





Randy and John actually did a bit of nose to nose on Raw this week. Randy's really quite a lot taller. Randy's somewhere between a gazelle and a fifties beach bully with a touch of extra red meat. John is a waxed gorilla with a touch of extra Ron Howard.

Although in this pastel sketch, he looks a bit like an Easter Island head.














In this next page of doodles, whilst on tour in Japan Randy speaks of being more better than you. Elvis begs to differ.

Randy used to do a lot more of this sort of thing... on television... Lounge about and talk about being better than you. He's still my favourite but on occasion his face now appears spread out and lumpy compared to its previous sculpted slenderness, possibly (allegedly) as a result of steroid use. The poor lamb. Other times it looks like it just puffs up and unpuffs on a day to day basis, and three days after looking a bit uncooked he's sauntering about like Michelangelo's David again. Fascinating stuff.

Elvis, by contrast, had the smoothest face that was ever gifted to a man. Despite this I see facial parallels between these two... but it's not good enough just saying it. If I want to make points about faces I ought to be able to do it in pictorials.

Not this one though, this is just piffle.






At the very moment I wrote the word 'Elvis' just then, Ben Fogle the nice posh television presenter announced that there is a new small camel called Elvis at the wildlife park. They also played the music of Elvis on the programme to signify this small camel. All Shook Up. He is mixing very well with the other camels.

Come to think of it...

I was just having a good old serious talk with wise Bob about my main website (as recklessly promoted in the last post) and I've come to the realisation that I could really do with an entirely new one with new presentation.

The site represents where I was three or four years ago OK, with the little sad rabbit and the rather timid little font... having just emerged from studenthood, blinking and shivering... it's all quite cute and confessional and diary-like, but as a shop, or as the site of a professional artist, it's a bit poo.

I'm always reluctant to take the old stuff down in case someone buys it, which now I think of it, smacks of desperation... and I know google likes the site because of all the obscure text, especially google picture search. But google picture search is not a wealthy patron. It's not an upper middle class breezy art couple with a jewel encrusted handbag.

I've been secretly embarrassed by the site and its some of its aging contents for a while, but I've been denying it to myself.

My pal Frog did a good job with it and it was a vast improvement over what I had previously. No, Frog made me a nice little (actually oversized and needs pruning) site for making friends and making google like me. But now I'd like to frolick with the big boys. I want to be a contender. I'm not criticising your good work Frog! Frog is ace. In fact I'm sure he could be the one to help me improve it or make a new site, but I feel guilty asking him to do any more, as he's busy having a life.

So I may cast about a bit... At least explore this so I can get a handle on what I want... Does anyone know a web designer who deals with kind of thing? Or an artist with a really convincing looking professional site? I need to get onto this. I don't have a lot of money to pay somebody, but that might be because I don't have a website that's very conducive to selling stuff, so we may be talking vicious circles here.

Maybe I could work out something with little wrestle-grunt sound effects when one wobbles the pointer over certain images. Or something futuristic of that nature.

Soon: slightly bent lions invade.

NEW WEBSITE

This is a post to inform all of y'all that my website is back up, only the name now is chloepaintings.net, you see.

I am going to put some of the drawings I've done over the past year up for sale soon, so watch this space. A massive promotional price drop type thing on older work is also on the cards. And I'll be updating it with new work and a new frontpage and stuff very soon.

Wouldn't it be nice if you possessed a piece of my kinetic pencil thought? It would be nice for me if you did, I can tell ya.

Here are some of the nice thumbnails as they appear in the quaint little site wot's called Chloepaintings.net (remember this)... click little squares to see big things. Don't take too much notice if it says 'not for sale' this may very well change soon.

Where's Arnold? I wonder if you can find him.

This all looks a bit of a mess, but I think I'm learning that the best and most organic ideas often sprout from this kind of mess.

Doing these little wild thumbnails seems like quite a natural part of the process to me.
Can you spot Arnie?

An offended spotty cat?

(It may help to click to enlarge)

An erumpent green rump?

Some stinky carthamus pink?





The carthamus pink I got in a sale at Herrings, the art shop in my home town Dorchester. The tube looks like it's from at least as long ago as the seventies. And heavens it's stinky stuff.

Boggy Leopard

Here's a flower, that's not a wrestler, and a leopard, that's also not a wrestler. I need to push past the novelty of not drawing wrestlers and figure out what's really going on here.

the leopard's face got a bit boggy and overworked. Where to go next?





And here's a painting by Lisa Yuskavage called Kingdom. It's in the mix, in my mental visual mixing bowl. I just wrote about it in a wordy blog about ambiguity.



Here's the lithograph of the same image, which almost brings it a little closer to home. A bit closer to what I've been doing.

I look at this girl painter art and I understand something of the sensibility that arrives here.



And yet... and yet... how to inject a little soul into girly art doodles... a little empathy... a little cartoon-integrity... a little honest functionality...how to be ambitious without becoming art-pretentious...

All my sketchings have been fun but I'm working on pushing them to congeal into something more together, less fragmentary... some kind of status symbol big bucks Rubensian epic is where I'm headed. Or a little further in that direction. Well, I've always had it in mind to go there. Or a little further in that direction.