Uglycute Satsumahead Gift Explosion!

This is a post for numerous fragmentary drawings which are probably leading up to something. I think I need to lose my ambivalence and my doubts about frequently drawing wrestlers and commit to making something beautiful and complete out of it. And transcend petty issues like the mere choice of subject-matter!

But in the meantime, I have been attempting to fathom out various aspects of design and likeness and colour and generally trying to focus my intent by just drawing and seeing what grows.





(words about that last image:)

It's easy to concentrate a lot of energy into a page of tiny thumbnail sketches like this, when all is excitement and potential. It's harder to transfer that kind of energy into something more complete, complex and decisive.

We're going back and forth in time a bit now. When I started looking at the Orton/Edge pairing, I did this study in coloured pencils.

Then added a bit of gouache when I got frustrated.





And I remembered that coloured pencils tend to be better when I already have something resembling a design and then I can play with it, using the pencil marks in combination with the white of the paper. In this finding-my-feet drawing, just doing swathes of colour with no gaps, they were annoying. They aren't a good replacement for paints on jobs like this. They felt kind of girly and weak. They're more like a kind of delicate hybrid between a drawing and a painting implement, and I think this might be a good way of thinking about them in future. But still, it's just a sketch. I think I'm writing all this about coloured pencils because actually I like them and I want to get more out of them. Also I have a really nice set of 120 Faber-Castell ones.

I commited my self to drawing this man who calls himself Edge. Because he's a wrestler and therefore somewhat culturally... self-contained, he doesn't have to worry about getting mixed up with the guitarist out of U2.





The chin is key, obviously. He's not a person I was immediately excited about drawing, but that's the challenge, to try and make something fun out of it anyway. He did actually once have the Loveliest Hair in wrestling, all golden and wavy and soft and well conditioned and flowing. Now it's a bit stringy.









Now we're moving backwards in time to when the Christmas colours one wasn't finished. In fact, I'm not sure I'm entirely happy with the way I did end up colouring it in. I'm still settling into a new approach.

I think I gave Randy child-bearing lady-hips a little bit in an effort to squeeze in his enormous thighs, which are so important to his general silhouette and which I have too often heinously neglected.





Actually, one of the challenges with drawing wrestlers generally, and especially when I'm tending increasingly toward the cute or the cartoony, is fitting the enormous bodies in whilst not reducing the heads to the size of satsumas. I think with skinny people or girls it's easier and natural to distort the heads and make them proportionally big, but if you did that with wrestlers you might sort of miss the whole point. There's that, and also the fact that even if I'm 'tending towards the cute' a little more these days, I still want there to be something real-feeling or even classical about these bodies.



(A satsuma there, of the kind to which I was referring.)

Here's one of those sketchbook pages with old words and newer pictures.

I think it's got some quotes from Delacroix's journals.

Also me reminding myself to 'learn clouds'. Whatever that might mean.





For Christmas I got some new colours. I was staying in a small house with my family. I squoze out this masterpiece:





Well, it's nice to get in touch with one's new colours anyway.

I've been thinking about watercolours but I haven't got beyond some very rough primitive sketches because I just haven't put together all my intentions yet. But sometimes it's OK to make a bit of a mess if it helps me visually and tacitly to sharpen my awareness of how I should organize things.









Here's a little bumpy paper oddity:





Poor Randy, I'm sure I do still think he's beautiful, but frequently these days he becomes a demon turnip. I've been trying to strike a balance between ugly and cute or even ugly and beautiful, and these might be straying further into the ugly dimension than I want to be. But again, it all helps me to clarify what I do want to achieve.

And the other thing is, ugly-looking faces and ugly design do not necessarily go together. I could make a beautiful design out of an ugly face. Or even a beautiful design out of a beautiful face uglified!









I'm reading a book called The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World and even though its concerns are a little bit abstract and ethical to apply to the common sense/clarifying aspirations of this blog entry, it's made me remember in quite an immediate way that often the best way to make a painting good is to imagine giving it, or to actually intend giving it, as a gift to someone you care about or respect. It gives a kind of focus, removes the vulgar capitalism for a moment, and lets me just focus on the idea of making the gift-picture as good and honest and concentratedly beautiful as I possibly can.

tags: watercolour, drawing, wrestling, Rated RKO, Randy Orton, WWE, homoerotic, turnip, gift, chin, sketch, Edge, thighs, ugly

Liquid Bunnies and the like.

I've got myself all in a muddle, drawing too much and everything getting out of synch.
I took it upon myself to learn how to draw bunnies again.

Although I feel like the subject matter in the wrestler drawings is pretty much secondary to the formal experimentation it allows and the attmempt to express some overall energetic enthusiasm, I still wanted to balance wrestlers with something more straightforwardly cute. Maybe so that the bouncyness of my intent becomes more clear.

I've found a lot of references to use for my bunny drawings. Nature for starters. Actual bunnies in my garden.





My cat Stephen kills a lot of bunnies in the spring. Little tender cute ones. But sometimes they can be rescued.

Surely you can see why rabbits belong in wrestling!






I had to figure out how my bunnies would be put together, even if they were going to end up as mere props in the squared circle. They became increasingly more liquid.













I've also begun to get into studying Beatrix Potter's rabbits and Thumper and various other bunnies of note. There have definitely been some clever bunny observers.





On an unrelated note, I just found a blog that an Australian lady called Ethel wrote about me. I think she likes my grey blog but she says not to read it on an empty stomach. From this frivolity about about Benjamin Bunny and Thumper you wouldn't think I was a thought-wrangling hardcore maniac, but clearly I am.

So perhaps I might try to have dense rich layers of many consistencies, like layers of heavy thought-rigour fudge, and layers of whipped bunnycream too, as we have observed today.

I'm going to try some tags. tell me if I've done it wrong:

rabbits, WWE, wrestling, beatrix potter, Randy Orton, bunnies

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.

Composing Overlapping Chins

I'm sorry I haven't been especially erumpent lately, or that I haven't appeared to be. I think I felt that I didn't want to just pump out stuff to fill a blog, I wanted something a bit coherent, and I didn't want to get too repetitive.

Having said that, here are some wrestlers and bats. This time in technicolour!





Oh manly boys, how they love to frolick in the undergrowth!

I am in a truly transitional period in that I'm evolving new ways to paint, quicker and fresher ways. That one was a bit of an awkward hybrid and a bit fussier and bittier than I want to be.

I'm working on a bigger version of that, which is becoming problematic, but I'm rying to give the colour in particular a new level of sensitive attention. Because I was having trouble with the John Cena in the big painting, (The one with the big head), I did some sketches today to try and make his design less stiff and symmetrical, more fluid and interesting.

he is stiff and graceless in real life, but it's my duty to find pretty ways of interpreting that. He's also childlike and inexplicably endearing, so those are the qualities I think I ought to channel.

In the first sketch I was only just waking up. You can almost taste the dullness of my brain in this one.





Then the head began to expand even further as a standalone object, dwarfing his ever more chubby cherubic boyman boyfriend. But it was getting more fluid.





Then I reintroduced some attention-seeking nipples to the scenario, for balance.





I never used to like drawing on bobbly paper, but I got quite into it today. I was using a 9B pencil too! Smudgy.

I have oil paintings, that are just not quite finished to my satisfaction, and there's not much point posting them until they are. But I can post little cropped details. You've seen these before in previous states of uncouth crudity.





Oh, and dear old Kurt.

My oil paintings take a long time, but I'm sneakily developing techniques that don't take as long, and that get to the point without dilly-dallying.





I keep feeling a strong urge to remake ALL of my old paintings in a bouncy happy dynamic cartoony style, chase away all pretension and confusion... which I'm sure is easier said than done. In real life I could probably only do that with some. But it's a stimulating thought.

I'm pretty sure I'm being directly influenced by John K and the purity of his vision for 'entertainment', and the purposefulness of entertainment. And increasingly I'm fatally turned off by the pretensions around all the things that call themselves fine art and the people who call themselves artists.

It may be time for me to learn new ways of drawing bunnies.

Did you spot the deliberate mistake? There weren't any bats! Ha ha!

More soon I promise!

Moving towards controlled playfulness

OK drawings now.

I've been following through on my bats and men, in fact the two things have rather fused in the middle.

Facially, as in the following:






Some of those have a bit of Triple H, the well paid big nosed wrestler, looking kindly, as he often doesn't.

Some bats, I think they're called horseshoe bats, have holes in the middle of their faces. The graphic possibilities are many.

Then some bats like to get intense down at the gym...

Randy and Edge are a tag team now. Unfortunately for Edge, he looks rather a lot like an ordinary mortal man, although his chin is so extensive I look at it and can't quite believe it's all made of face. Anyway he's below on the left.





The bat-man thing got so it was something I had to get out of my system. This kind of had its peak thus far in the next drawing.





While I was drawing that, I was watching Mark Kermode interview Steven Spielberg. They were talking about Munich and Mark thought that it wasn't that great cinematically and that he preferred Spielberg's popcorn fodder. Spielberg kind of said that he made that film to get it out of his system, and that's how I felt about the man-bats. I felt like a ten year old boy when I was drawing them. One they were out, I felt I could move on.

Bless John Cena and his quasi-box-shaped head.





I felt I needed to return to Randy's head to redress some imbalances. I'm still a beginner and I'm learning about caricature as a process, and I've come to realise that if you get in the habit of exagerrating a certain feature it will be at the 'expense' of a different one. Like in recent drawings I had been making Randy's cheeks all massive and rounded, and forgetting that he has a habit of pointing his chin at people and pouting in a distinctive fashion.









One of the reasons I think I return to this head is that it's quite open to interpretation.





I'm still scribbling manically in my sketchbook, splurging thoughts out with only slight coherence. Hey, now I have a new computer, so photoshop won't make it burst. I think I'm figuring out how to aim for where I want to be, in a never-finished kind of a way.





(This next bit also appeared in my myspace blog)

I've been having dreams which take the creative visual excitements from my life and push them deeper into magic.

This is a drawing based crudely on a memory of a dream in which I was at a Stanley Spencer exhibition and there was a painting in it of men in a winding tunnel, clusters of men, with radiant light shining out of their heads which fragmented the surrounding forms with its rays.

You can kind of see where I scrawled 'clusters of men'.






Then in a later part of the dream, there was a special secret library with massive volumes devoted to Spencer, Goya and of course, the famous fish bowl expressionists. That book mainly seemed to be filled with multiple colour variations on the same painting of a fishbowl. But it had special esoteric meaning, the colour, of course.

I have a lot of dreams about book shops, second hand book shops in hidden cities, and the important part is that in them I find the books that I need to find. The special books with the knowledge that takes me where I need to be. Because the thing is, my waking attitude is similar, I do think there may be one or two or three books hidden in the world somewhere that are the books I need to find.

-----

And this bit didn't appear on myspace, it's an exclusive: I had another dream the night before last in which Marlo invited me to her home, an apartment in a sort of intimidating pearl white castle labyrinth.

But she was kind of a superhero, I think this was directly based on her wonder-inspiring real life drawing skills. It seemed that my visit had enticed some kind of egg shaped red haired begoggled lady archvillain to Marlo's house, so Marlo kindly shoved me down the chimney hole in order that I could hide/escape. I became swamped in soot.

A tribute to my cats

I was going to post drawings, but I thought I'd stall and post some cats. I wouldn't want to get repetitive with all the wrestlers and the bats and all. Punctuate it a bit.

Maybe it's wet and soppy to talk about my cats. But they are a daily part of my life, for now they are my family in fact, and they are my only company during the day. I feel very close to them and I often worry about what might become of them if Bob and/or I have to move away. It's probably a silly worry. I worry, but I am working on it.

This is Joyce. She is the mother of the other two. She is very neurotic and possibly has cat obsessive compulsive disorder. She washes herself a lot. She's quite a tiny kitty. She likes eating person food, even if it makes little sense. She's upwardly mobile. Last night she chose to eat broccoli instead of corned beef.









Stephen is the favoured son, in that he gets wapped round the face by Joyce less often than his brother. Everyone loves Stephen. He is a massive, humungous barrel chested fat glossy bastard of a cat. He has the softest fur and ears in the world and he's so inky black that he's quite hard to photograph. He is extremely good natured and easy to get along with. He has emotional intelligence and therapeutically tactile stomach flab.









Then there is Hal, who is one of the most singular life-forms I have ever met. He was the runt of the litter, but he's not that much smaller than Stephen, he just has tiny ears and a skinny tail.





Hal spends all the time he can outside in the garden amongst nature, because he finds human things like doors and carpets scary and unpredictable. In the spring he sits and stares at a single flower for six hours at a time. He always knows when we're talking about him, even when we don't mention his name. He lets us know this by giving a unique squeaky staccato miaow. He has a exceptionally varied range of vocal expression, possibly because he doesn't really understand that he's a cat.

In fact, we had a theory at one point that he might not be a cat, he might be an owlbear.

he shakes his paws a lot and walks as though literally walking on eggshells. He has flaky skin and nipple crusts and scaly paws, and is technically a mutant, but may have the prettiest face of all the cats. You can see his soul knocking about inside.





Here's Hal on the left and Stephen on the right:





Here are Joyce and Stephen being affectionate on Bob's lap.

I think Stephen knows when he's being photographed and poses.





We were given the cats to look after when we lived in Brighton, city of posers and assymmetric hair decadence. It was originally going to be a temporary arrangement, so the names were only going to be temporary names. But they were the names that felt right.

I love them and value them a lot. It feels good for my soul to be friends with animals. They are a wonderful part of my life during this stretch of youthful semi-settledness.

Drawings and all that will follow.

P.S. Thank you Eddie for writing about me, and thank you the people who commented, that really made my day.