2005, 2006... paper, getting good at drawing, lovely wrestlers

2005... I did all these little square paintings for a gallery that only sold square paintings (now defunct). Utterly pointless as a business venture. But it encouraged me to develop my on-paper painting techniques, watercolour plus others. Things got quite itty bitty but sometimes the cloudyness worked.

When we were smaller, my sister once drew a 'fartist's impression' of me, what I might look like if made of gas... these remind me of that.

















Also, wrestling was in the air.. I mean I needed something to get excited about.









and then 2006... wrestling chickens come home to roost... also it was when I started thinking of caricature, focusing on drawing, and when I started this blog...














This new kind of weirdness was quite special for me. I remember the first time Marlo Meekins sent me an instant message, I couldn't beleive she liked my work. (This was the era of Myspace. I attempted to Network.)

















These are all still quite 'bitty'... I've always tended towards the bitty, and relied on untrained instincts to provide any kind of structure or hierarchy. I'm getting better now at seeing the big picture, trying to avoid getting swamped in unnecessary complexity of my own making.

It meant a LOT to me to have peer approval about my drawing. It still does. I still hover between worlds of solid masculinity and concrete old fashioned values, and some kind of intangible artsy fartsyness, my own kind. (neither thing being very commercial on the local level.) I sometimes hate my 'artist' nature, but it remains.

Anonymous Baby

Picture no.1 of 2010... soft long headed pastel baby.

I didn't initially mean it to be weird. I am just trying to find ways round babies. This was my first try. It's based on a picture of Bob in the bath as a baby but it doesn't look like him any more. It didn't matter too much though, I was trying out new paper and a new approach to combining materials. By repeating the process and taking notes I might end up with a more confident approach that is either sellable or showoffy. One of the major hazards with drawing babies is ending up with something creepy or ghoulish.

Many Tiny Lines

I've been arting... I got a book about Durer's drawings with my book token so I have done some studying Durer and his lines, but also thinking about kitties and kitty breeds.

Here is a Pixie Bob and a turban.





Here's a Havana Brown cat that looks like an otter and Durer's Oriental King.

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.

Nipper Eyes

I’m sorry it’s been so long since the last update. I have been painting with a view to getting some things finished. Painting is time consuming.

I’ve thought about posting stuff that isn’t my work, but then I thought that might get confusing and I like the purity of this blog.

I’ll give you some boring updates on things I had already started last time first.

Like I’ve been working on this monster painting with lots of red and green and yellow. I remember thinking when I chose the palette that I wanted the red and green to rub up together in an optically awkward way. There’s too much yellow in it at the moment, I plan to make it more cloudy and moody. Then when I’ve finished it I’m going to do something I’m more in the moment and passionate about. This is a strange exercise in problem solving at the moment, but it is improving as I persevere.

Then there was that pink ink one which I’ve ruined by putting other stuff on top. But it will get better before it’s finished.





And the one with the wrestling and the orc and the by now familiar cat man… This one will look a lot different by the end too. This is more sandy. The other one was more wiggly. It’s got everything and the kitchen sink in this one.





Then the bat one, that has grown. It’s acquired some colour and some new pecs. This is part of my perverse wrestling imagery Chloe revolution reaching beyond the comfort based tyrannically cool school of imagery choosing and reaching toward the transcendent power of enriched vision beyond culture. And it has a bat.






I wanted to get to grips with the somewhat fascinating graceless rectangularity of John Cena, as those of you who vaguely follow the incoherent babblings of my grey blog may know. So I started drawing him, I started the big one in the bottom right corner wanting it to be purely done with coloured pencil since I hadn’t tried that for a while. But I felt I copped out when used watercolour and ink too. Also it looked too conventional or professional or something, not very interesting. Because he already looks like a cartoon or an action figure, there’s nothing clever about this drawing really. If there are elements of him which are unedifying, I wanted to try and make my drawings in some sense edifying despite the odds.






So what I did was I redid that entire page almost purely in coloured pencil, to see if I could take it to somewhere more interesting and uncover my purpose a little bit more.





In the top centre one, in his eyes I made him look a bit like me age three and apprehensive about being photographed. My motherly instincts and compassion seeped out, I couldn’t make him entirely hideous.

And working in coloured pencil took me back to age thirteen when they were my main medium. The memories were surprisingly potent. That was an age when I significantly started developing my own ‘techniques’, which had been a private milestone, I realised. I’m quite soft and gentle with them, which is interesting as a counterpoint to all the other media I’m using in less puritanical ways. I’m re-educating my seeing at the moment.