Hello There Mixed Martial Arts

My friends Scott and John are obsessed with Fedor Emelianenko. So I thought it time I tried to see what the fuss was about.





My concentrating on Fedor has also made my leopards relax, now they appear only in peripheral vision... it suits them quite well.









As for Fedor himself, not sure I've totally grasped him. Have no printer and have been working a lot from my own quick sketches from youtube, not always having access to the obvious details but more the clumsy forms and my own misconceptions.





Things have too many limbs and bits and bobs to make into nice pictures... lately half things have been easier to cope with. Who says things have to have all their limbs in a drawing. It's a free country.





Fedor is calm and has a soft pink mouth. He has slight eye wonkyness in his bright blue eyes that I need to come to terms with.

















My paper is wrinkly and has cat mud on it.

Going back to boring

Here are some drawings that have been done for a while but that didn't make the blog because of being the first stage, the conservative drawing, the boring drawing, not fun enough, etc. Just studies. Just doodles. Just learning. No particular place to go. Unfocused. Likenesses only loosely grasped.

But I was looking at some of them and thinking, they're not so bad.






Besides, I'm thinking in terms of getting more subtle, rather than getting more wild and crazy. Retracting my claws. Retreating to a state of measured moderate centredness in order to find the truth that way.





I quite like Beatrix Potter at the moment. And her scientific naturalism and love of fungus.









This next one's a mess. But sometimes, mess is what one makes.





Gosh, aren't I chaotic. It won't do. Still there's just so much nice stuff to look at in the world. It's not easy to decide.





Here is one of my last wrestler studies. Randy's uglier inner qualities are seeping out increasingly.





I've actually cancelled my Sky Sports subscription and am on a break from watching wrestling. I have broken up with it. Still, I have plenty of material still if my ambivalence lets up.

Here's when I suspended my judgments and tried to look anew at these two faces. I had been overly mean to John and overly kind to the other one, possibly. There are lots of aspects to a face. It's almost like they're alive.





Here's Katie the moon scientist before she was pink.





'Hair not pretty' I wrote.





Here's Bob having fun in zero gravity and having no boundaries.





Note the Rex rabbit 'studies' in this one.





Meditations on a waxed sex monster. These drawings often threatened to become something obscene and riddled with rudeness. But I never quite went there. That would be... a niche.





So I shall make a nicer taste by leaving the last word to Jeremy Fisher. In this picture I identify with Jeremy. Jeremy is me, or perhaps you, and the stickleback represents all the scary things in life.





NB. sorry if any of these have actually been blogged before. It's hard to remember everything. They're all familiar to me, but I hope it's from real life and not from prior blogging.

shake the mountains when they dance

Here are some leftover boys. Boy drawings. Scrappy little drawings that are a means to some kind of as yet not quite congealed end.

See I didn't used to draw fast like this. Now I do draw fast as a way of thinking and getting a handle on shapes and forms. But the fast drawings give me clues to take forward to more purposeful drawings and paintings. And yet the fast drawings are still tangible bloggable items.

Blogs make everything feel like an 'end'. Here are my drawings... bish bash bosh.

This leads to a sense of 'What was I doing?'

But I am definitely doing SOMETHING.



I guess I like fast drawings, but I don't want to get seduced by them to the point of forgetting what I was aiming for. That's what I was getting at.

This is a pouty exhausted Randy.





These are rough Cenas with Fred Flintstone for comparison:





This manboy used to smirk when he was younger:





WTF? Is what I said to myself when I re-experienced this one:





This one combines boyman meanyness with Milt Gross studies:





I do like big boys these days. I wish I was better with words and could say more why I draw them.

A little bit without rude words in of E E Cummings: 'the boys I mean are not refined':

'they speak whatever's on their mind
they do whatever's in their pants
the boys i mean are not refined
they shake the mountains when they dance'

I was looking for poems about boyness but that one's a little bit unsympathetic. I don't want to reinforce negative stereotypes about wrestlers or anything. Then I did a little search for poems with the word 'wrestler' in and I found this line by a chap called Robinson Jeffers:

The second-born has strength for his beauty; when he strips for swimming the hero shoulders and wrestler loins Make him seem clothed.

But that's enough of all that.