Overturned Horse

This is a large painting I started in 2004...

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...

Light the New Old Ladder Moon

I finally finished this version of the Brian Wilson Moon/ Heaven Ladder painting that was started back in early 2004.

I posted some of my Beach Boys fan art on a Brian Wilson message forum, and I got this surprising response...

'What luck to see Chloe's fantastic Beach Boys-artwork online! I'm finishing an esoteric SMiLE-essay where Chloe's painting, the 5'th one from top (also known as "Light The Lamp" from its presentation in Open Sky # seven, 2004) will play an all important part.
Thanks Chloe and keep up the good work!'

I had no idea that my painting had taken on a 'folk name!' Or that people were writing essays about it.

That was in reference to the original version of this composition:





And here is the new one, finsished TODAY, a little bit more shuffly and snuffly, dusty and dirty. The composition is less graceful, with the sky jammed in. I blame my four years ago self for that. But it has its own thing.

Finished/ unfinished/ tidied up/ messed up.... it used to be a lot more yellow...

Van Gogh was a heavy advocate of yellow.

Here's an old painting that I started years ago, and sort of finished now. Though I'm not sure it's really finished. It might be called 'some men help Jesus'. It used to have a lot more stuff in it, some of which got painted out. I could always paint some different stuff back in.





And this is its previous appearance on this blog two years ago, 'bat flash jesus ghosts'.

Girl with a Bucket

She has a bucket.





You could call her a woman I suppose.

The Tyger

I started this in approximately 2003, and I only finished it the day before yesterday. With a long gap of inactivity in the middle.





It's not like something I would do now, but I quite like it. It feels like something someone else did. The colours are quite childish and the tiger is very static.





But he's alright.

Booby Lady

Here is Smiling Booby Lady II!





(I might change the title one day.)

She's a bit ghoulish, but she was mainly an excercise in using up paint.

How do Lions get in there?

This is Sleep Lion of the Graveyard.

Long Term Praying Lion

Here's another painting that I finally finished... the praying lion.

I really tussled about with this one and was quite hard on it for a while. But he's not such a bad old lion.

Maybe one day he'll be in an exhibition and other people can think stuff about him.

The Minotaur and the Dribbly Storm

Here's one of the paintings I finished in March. (Click to enlarge as always)

It's an oil painting including the Minotaur that I started maybe nearly three years ago. It actually feels good completing 'old' paintings and makes all this feel like an ongoing process rather than a series of frivolous mistakes.

Ghosty Leggy Bob

Well... this is one of the things I've been doing. A few less cute bloggable drawings, a bit of long winded painting a weird blue portrait of Bob with no trousers on.





These pictures go in chronological order. My camera is quite crude.









Going back to a flat sanded smooth sort of way of painting for this. Re-learning stick-to-it-iveness.





Anyway I have plans for a few more blogs, have done a bit of drawing and will do more.

Daddy cut in two with graphic chin

Here are two halves of the painting of my dad near the shed with the birthday cake. I expect I'll stick them together sometime. Scanner's a bit small for this sort of job. For this I could do with a decent digital SLR camera.










And here's a closer view of the mush.

Are these paintings finished?

Are these finished? Bear in mind, unfinished things look better on blogs than they do in real life.

I think this one is going to have to be finished, because it's so small and I don't want to drown its little mousey light.





This one would not be finished if it was left to me. But I painted it sort of with a commission in mind, and a different sensibility. You can see the brush strokes and that. The colour is chaotic.

The forms at the bottom are not clear or readable, which makes me uncomfortable. But my patron might like a bit of that.





This one is manic... I'm not sure quite where to go with him. The colours are dangerous on these. Less neutral than the last lot. He's a bit Vince McMahon, a bit pagan papier mache mask.





It's from when WWE were doing the 'Vince is crazy' bit just before the 'Vince explodes' bit, which they had to drop because of the real life Benoit tragedy. But Vince does have wonderful , wonderful facial expressions.





This next one is the left half of a painting that's been lying unfinished for a while. it's set in that graveyard I spoke of a few months ago. It has this big squish faced sleeping leopard thing swooping down draped in a tree.





Part of the thing is deciding whether the painting will be a fast fresh painting or a slow rembrandty crusty painting... not every way of painting is always compatible. And I'm not always good at decisions.





There there's this old thing, with Kurt who's now a bit bonkers himself. I always planned to do more to this, but now it doesn't seem necessary.





Which ones are finished? it's very hard to know all by myself.

Elf Green Bastard Explode

This week I have been flailing in a frenzy of green and elves.





I played a computer game called Heroes of Might and Magic V and got stuck for a long time on a level with a git of an elf called Gilraen. His army kept beating me by having massively more dragons in it.






Someone wrote on a forum 'If I ever meet someone in real life called Gilraen I will punch him in the face'.





So I'm using this palette with a lot of green tendencies





I thought I might want to paint lumpy people at Tolkien conventions dressed as elves





but then I got distracted by pictures of Christina Aguilera for some reason





But mainly I'm still doing minotaurs because I have been kindly asked to





I've gone against my recent training and tendencies and gone quite mental with paint application, and colour wetness, because mother and patrons may wish it so.

Next blog might be about bees and trees. How do you like them apples!

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...

the Era of Too Many Rich Reds

Well since I seem to have quite a lot of pictures to show you, I might do the paintings first, pace myself a bit.

There’s a palette I’ve used for a lot of paintings over the past year or so. I’ve been trying to finish them so I can finish up this era.

‘The passionate controversies of one era are viewed as sterile preoccupations by another, for knowledge alters what we seek as well as what we find.’ -
Freda Adler

Lately I’ve been finding these colours problematically bright and sweetie-like. There are too many of them. (Though this also presents an interesting challenge…) In the paintings I’m planning, the colours will be more ‘limited’, one way or another. At least limited enough that I feel in control of the colour and that it doesn’t dominate the other formal aspects of the picture. And so that it doesn’t look horrible and make me want to be sick.

Let’s be thorough about this. Here are the colours I’m lumbered with:


Michael Harding Phthalocyanine Blue and Zinc White





Grumbacher Pre-Tested Oil Quinacridone Red





Grumbacher Pre-Tested Oil Cadmium Barium Yellow Deep





(I think I made the yellow big because yellows are tricky bastards.)

Grumbacher Ultramarine Violet





Old Holland Flesh Ochre





Mussini Burnt Umber



Later, when I came back to the palette and it all seemed a bit too warm and cosy, and I had just bought a MASSIVE tube of raw umber, I added that to the mix too.

It’s the size of the big tube here in front of the little tubes:





Only it’s this colour:





Wikipedia has this useful piece of info about Raw Umber:

Raw Umber is a color that resembles raw umber.

I have a brain that doesn’t like wastage. So when I have a great big tube of a colour, I mind less about using it liberally.

Some of the artist grade oil colours are very expensive, so I become quite… aware…of this when I use them.

The thing is, at the moment I’m veering more toward using acrylic and other waterbased media UNDERNEATH a final layer of oil glazes, rather than using oils alone.

This is because acrylic dries fast and flat, is pleasingly opaque and allows for a more dynamic ‘drawing’ process in which changes and adjustments can be made spontaneously. The combination of acrylic/ the other plethora (plethora!) of media compatible with acrylic/ and finally the richness of oil colour gives quite a lot of scope for intricate other-worldly finishes, and quite a lot of scope for the painting to develop a strong sense of purpose along the way.

So this is Shelby, she’s a lady I painted with just oils, and taking advantage of the blobs and crags that inevitably appear. Using the above palette, I should add. I don’t think she’s finished.





Here’s her face in closeup so you can better see the texture. She’s painted on a ceramic tile:





in contrast, here’s a tiny painting from a while back painted in this palette but with a drawn/ mixed media underpainting and quite a lot more sensitive detail. Of course, it all depends on how much you like sensitive things….





Now a peculiar half-breed… a painting that was getting on quite well being shiny and plasticky, but which has had a decisive opaque oil makeover in recent times. It’s another startled giraffe:









That’s all in the same palette. But I have been subduing it more, painting in flatter swathes with tertiary kind of mixtures, rather than being dictated to by the bossy primaries.






Now… this one’s got really weird. Bob said to me it’s funny that I should turn on a particular picture and call it weird when I’m always painting weird dog explosions and minotaur tantrums. But I’m finding this one tricky. It’s based on some of those old drawings, but it needs to evolve its own authority, it might need a radical change.

I think maybe it’s a transitional type of thing where I’m figuring out HOW I’m going to paint and using wilfully obscure combinations of subject matter and atmosphere.





And Kurt’s developed a bit of a tan.




Here’s another old one in the same palette. This one’s all in oils, but with the texture worked up to a fair old level of detail and teeny tiny brushstrokes and flourishes. There are lots of ways I like to paint, but I think this isn’t quite the way that’s right for Right Now.






I have more painted stuff to show, but I will save it for an imminent follow-up, since it’s all in different colours and generally it’s got a lot more to do with bats. Then there will be some drawings too.