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.

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.

Bat Mess

Now, when I start trying to plan big ambitious complicated paintings, the first drawings ain’t that pretty, because if they were, all perfect, there’d be no process or growth or point in doing anything to them.

The ‘ambitiousness’ needs time and space to grow.





That was a tiny drawing from my sketchbook. In tiny drawings in little pencil boxes on a sketchbook page, I can be quite nuts and stream of consciousness about things.

On reflection, I think a lot of the swirls and scribbles come from looking at good etchings (Rembrandt, Goya, Picasso) and wanting to get some meaningful expressive line-business in there amongst my paint. I want it all!

Wanting it all may be a crucial part of making my new work good.

There is to be a large threatening bat encroaching on a post 2012 world in which wrestling has been declared the supreme means of human cultural expression.

There’s more to the setting and backstory, probably, but I’m not no storyteller.





I’m going to get my boy wrestlers in there and make them be meaningful with their shiny sweaty faces.

I want to find the humour in my pigheaded seriousnesses and the seriousness amongst the silly pleasures in my life and in my hands.





Sketchbook pages get quite ugly when you’re trying to think about which acrylic colours to choose and which oil colours to put over the tops of them.

I should clarify, possibly, in the light of my last blog about those particular colours and John K’s recent blogs about colour, that I listed the actual tubes of paint I had picked out to use exclusively, rather than the neat colours I would be using on the picture. I mix them up. And I glaze and mingle them and it’s all very confusing, but I’m getting less confused. Whether I mix them up well or put them down nicely is not for me to say.






There are the mere rudiments of a painting. There’ll be progress on this soon, as I’m all obsessed with bats and inserting them in pictures.