Digital Super

Scary Ass Paintings from the Wrestling Phase

I just sort of... sort of finished this Ric Flair based painting, started a couple of years back. Feel ambivalent about it. Very weird perverse palette, with cadmium red purple and light kings blue. The face is good. I found it hard to make the rest harmonious. Maybe it was never meant to be.





And with similar raw wet on wet pinkness, here is a painting featuring Randy Orton and Chris Benoit, done before the unpleasant end of the latter. I was reluctant to even show this to anyone because of the kind of darkness it brings to mind.





On a more light and lovely note, I posted a myspace blog about the drawings of J.H. Dowd... click the picture for more...

Notes to Self

Truly other-worldly.





Seeing through things.






Mean it, mean it.

Pick of the Pops

My deviantart top 5

Deviantart has a feature where if you 'browse' a gallery and then arrange the items by popularity, I can get a sort of a hit parade of my most popular images according to how many views and favourites and comments they've got. I'm sorta fascinated by which of my pictures end up where in popularity. I never quite would have predicted they would end up in the order they're in. Maybe the Deviantart crowd are a very specific demographic.

Here's the chart rundown from 5 to 1. (Click on the images to get the the corresponding deviantart page including comments.)

5. Gypsy Chaos Goat





-I put up this one and the other goat, and I really always thought the other one 'Softie Goat' was better. But this has only been up for a week and it's already top 5. Maybe it's more rough and rugged than the other one. Or has a more sexy title. It has computer game mage hijinks or something appealing the the WoW addicts of the world.

4.Three Teenage Moons





- I kind of understand why this is top 5. It has detail and it's all emotional and soft and warm.

3. Empathetic Minotaur





- This old chestnut... this is always popular on the internet. The original was tiny. I must have hit on something good with chaotic mix of delicate little mediums. The original was tiny. But the internet isn't fully cognizant of that.

2. Kids in the Forest





- I would not have expected this to be number 2. It must be the cuteness of the theme or the multiracial niceness or something. It's all vague, like some of my stuff of that era was, and quite primitive in its shapes. It was from an obscure movie photo or lobby card or something.

1. (By some distance): Orton Flair Three





- And it's funny because it's not mainly wrestling fans who like it. It's people who don't know who they are. But comments say things like 'moving' . I can't quite put myself in their shoes and see what they see. It is the third version of this image I did, and it's the closest of all my images to straight 'fan art'. I never really thought of it as part of the main flow of my oeuvre. No way! I think in the end a hardwired conservative part of people likes convincing heads and likenesses, but also pretty people and simple things.

The whole of the top twenty on Deviantart are all paintings. You have to go to 21 to get the first drawing. People like colour. It's more real to them or something. My favourite way out drawings tend to be less popular. Or maybe people just don't know what to say about them. Maybe they're less comfortable and more radical in a good way.

Peat Brown Muzzlebulbs

Well....

I've done lots of drawings but I've been scared to show them... well not scared, but I was trying to work up to some kind of 'culmination'. I'm sort of in a process of deconstructing and reconstructing my whole picture-making process, so a lot of what I have been doing is really 'pieces' or parts and not the assembled whole.

I had fun when I got out my dip pen and some ink that calls itself 'peat brown'.





You see, Edge and Randy Orton are a tag team now. I still love Randy more, but they are quite visually comical and homo-charged and pleasingly similar in height and bulbousness, so I thought I'd make hay while the wrestlesun shone on this partnership.








So, eventually I thought I ought to colour something in.

I did this just before Christmas, I was listening to an Old Time Radio production of A Christmas Carol with Lionel Barrymore as Scrooge and Orson Welles narrating.

I'm getting the hang of controlling my colour, but trying not to be overly anal about aforementioned control.





I got the likenesses a bit better in this one possibly, but the composition is nothingy and wrong:





Here's a sketchbook page with some connected scrappy little thumbnails. If you look at the text there's some of me documenting my hurt feelings about the received wisdom regarding 'contemporary art'. the text is eighteen months older than most of the pictures.

But that's quite fun, looking at the frictions and congealings between new picture thoughts and old word thoughts.





When I was on my little Peat Brown adventure, Edge the wrestler eventually and quite according to the whims of nature, turned into a cat, and his gigantic chin became merely a muzzlebulb.