Bardot studies

I got it into my head the other week to participate in caricaturama 3000, whoever it was the next time, and it turned out to be Brigitte Bardot. Which actually was really interesting. Youtube's the best place to go first of course. Her sexuality and beauty was all there in the flesh and the movement, it was natural and rare, even in low res. Almost sinisterly powerful. Not like now when some people seem to measure beauty by the amount of money an ordinary faced stiff lady spends on surgery and dodgy photoshopping.

So I sketched and sketched and it was hit and miss, but I had missed this frenzy of drawing, searching out the truth in lines and squiggles.

Suede

I have a subject!

I have been remembering Suede, my favourite band when I was 15.

For some reason I have yet to examine, pregnancy agrees with Suede.

The main men in Suede were Brett the singer front man and Bernard the guitarist. (The songwriting team.) They were my initial exposure to what front men and guitarists were. And I think they were quite good examples.





And I am enjoying them very much in retrospect.

I cannot expect it to be easy for me to put across the special complex personal nostalgia and affection I feel in my head for Suede, in these drawings. But if I aim to do that, I might get somewhere.

If I aim to put across the special feelings, I'm doing more than fixating on shapes, lumps and cheekbone configurations.





Brett and Bernard have one of those slightly comical homo buddy creative tempestuous gatekeeper/keymaster dynamics, which is great fun.

I liked them at the same time as I liked skinny weird boys at school who also played guitars.





I will write more about Suede on my other blog, I can't say it all here.

It was about engaging with the sordid things of adulthood in a playful textured beautiful woozy way.





Although it's not a thing I usually like to do to proclaim the objective importance of things, I will dare to say that Suede are underrated. And I still love the first two albums a lot. They had hype in 1993 but always a certain amount of hostility for one reason and another. Their fame is kind of forgotten. It was all a bit British music press fame. From when Indie seemed important. Now indie doesn't feel like it has much validity as a distinct idea or genre. Not that Suede ever wanted to be indie anyway.

They're bigger than that for me.

It is music for on your own. Or at a Suede fan club concert in 1994. Not casual or sociable.

Things that you liked in formative years... go some way to forming you.





I had a massive personal backlash against Suede, loads of reasons to hate them all of a sudden. But I changed my mind. That's what makes it all the more interesting. It's good to have strong feelings, even if your allegiances can end up feeling arbitrary at any one time. And to revisit things from your past NOW, isn't just diving headfirst into stale feelings... it's a new thing with added layers.









Get a big kick out of this pic, skulking around Glastonbury as one unified beast.

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

Handsomeness Engulfment

One post on its own on a new blog looks completely sad and depressing, I’m going to have to cheer this thing up a bit.

And I already got some feedback so I’m getting hungry for attention now. I shall turn into a blog monster.

I’m going to have to just tell you now: I draw wrestlers a lot. And paint them. I’ve tried to explain aspects of my fascination with wrestling before, but here’s for pictures. (if you click on any of these you can see the whole page that they come from at a nice big size):












There are some Randy Orton studies. In which Randy becomes engulfed by his own voluminous handsomeness. I understand his face so much better now!

Lots of faces. I get obsessed with faces and neglect to give them bodies. There'll be more whole people in some new compositions soon I think. Need to get as obsessive about manipulating space as I am about manipulating FACE.

Here are the wimpy wussy conservative studies that the manly cartoony drawings are derived from:

And here’s a painting based on terrified Randy's face and a young sad looking Meatloaf (on the set of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, I believe):





That one is a tiny tiny painting, it’s only ten centimetres across or something. It was painted in controversial combinations of acrylics and resins and varnishes and watercolours followed by oil glazes.

My Granny liked it but she asked my why I have to paint sad things.

I might even post some more drawings if I have done anything worth seeing by the end of today. And bring this thing bang up to date.

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