joy of chalk

Now this is a bit more fun, if not actually less stupid.





I have some pastels now, but most of the colours are a bit full on. They are probably better in the long term in conjunction with more sobre media, but when you have something new, you gotta make a mess with it.

some but not all of the characteristics of a bee

Have you ever wondered what Ric Flair would look like if took on some but not all of the characteristics of a bee? Yes I thought as much.





So there was a drawing that had some semblance of shape about it. Here are some that are barely more than undignified puddles of regressive finger leakage. Yet they may hold the very keys to the future.

These aren't the kind of drawings I ever plan to post, then time passes and they are what I have as the traces of my thought, which I suppose is what blogging is.

And sometimes the lines I draw so fast I barely know what I've done can be the key to growing something communicative. In the meantime I hope your brain can bridge the shortcomings of these barely existent gnat farts of scrawl.









This was my pencil's initial response to Dusty Rhodes:

























Then there's this (next) one, which is really rather conservative and doesn't live up to the promise of the weird squiggles... it's like a neatly coloured in little girl's birthday card, and yet it's just another signpost on the way to somewhere.

note to self: always leave plenty of room for the bottom half of Cena's face.

Also his expression isn't nearly dopey/benign enough

Bat Mess

Now, when I start trying to plan big ambitious complicated paintings, the first drawings ain’t that pretty, because if they were, all perfect, there’d be no process or growth or point in doing anything to them.

The ‘ambitiousness’ needs time and space to grow.





That was a tiny drawing from my sketchbook. In tiny drawings in little pencil boxes on a sketchbook page, I can be quite nuts and stream of consciousness about things.

On reflection, I think a lot of the swirls and scribbles come from looking at good etchings (Rembrandt, Goya, Picasso) and wanting to get some meaningful expressive line-business in there amongst my paint. I want it all!

Wanting it all may be a crucial part of making my new work good.

There is to be a large threatening bat encroaching on a post 2012 world in which wrestling has been declared the supreme means of human cultural expression.

There’s more to the setting and backstory, probably, but I’m not no storyteller.





I’m going to get my boy wrestlers in there and make them be meaningful with their shiny sweaty faces.

I want to find the humour in my pigheaded seriousnesses and the seriousness amongst the silly pleasures in my life and in my hands.





Sketchbook pages get quite ugly when you’re trying to think about which acrylic colours to choose and which oil colours to put over the tops of them.

I should clarify, possibly, in the light of my last blog about those particular colours and John K’s recent blogs about colour, that I listed the actual tubes of paint I had picked out to use exclusively, rather than the neat colours I would be using on the picture. I mix them up. And I glaze and mingle them and it’s all very confusing, but I’m getting less confused. Whether I mix them up well or put them down nicely is not for me to say.






There are the mere rudiments of a painting. There’ll be progress on this soon, as I’m all obsessed with bats and inserting them in pictures.