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.