Sexy Nature Boys

So I'll do like in the early days and post lots of drawings that are mainly based on wrestlers. But this time it's wrestlers Ric and Shawn, oak matured and aromatic.





Ric retired in March of course. Much emotion oozed from faces.









I like desert flowers and their manly shapes, spiky and wiggly simultaneously.





Then there is Shawn the wrestler. He wears a cowboy hat that makes a shadow over his eyes.










Although he kind of has eyes that make a shadow over his eyes.















My next work is likely to be simpler, more cuddly things.

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.

All about the Pexies

This is my 100th blog post! Bloody hell.

Let's call these an experiment. It's over now.






Bob can't figure out what the heck's going on this picture. Ah well.

'Roaming the beautiful downs of Dorset is the mischievous goblin colt with flaming red eyes called the 'Colepexy'. He enjoys nothing more than to mislead domesticated horses and travellers, but his favourite prank is luring unsuspecting people to ride him, and once mounted he takes them on a wild ride across the wettest and thorniest country before eventually throwing them into a ditch or stream.'

'In Hampshire and Dorset the name colepexy (= coltpixy) is given to a mischievous fairy appearing in the form of a horse. The fossils known as belemnites are called cole pixies’ fingers and fossil sea-urchins cole pixies’ heads.'


"In Dorset also, the Pixy-lore still lingers. The being is called Pexy and Colepexy; the fossil belemnitos are named Colepexies'-fingers; and the fossil echini, Colepexies'-heads. The children, when naughty, are also threatened with the Pexy, who is supposed to haunt woods and coppices. [a]
"In Hampshire," says Captain Grose, "they give the name of Colt-Pixy to a supposed spirit or fairy, which in the shape of a horse wickers, i. e. neighs, and misleads horses into bogs, etc."

Moo. Mooooooo!

It's all about the cowfolk. One has to think of the cattlekind when planning minotaurs.

Actually this is me saying 'moo'. And a man cow facing the other way.









My face has some peculiar angles from underneath.









This messy minotaur has borrowed Ric Flair's trunks. He is wrestling with a flower.









My thought process seems to involve a whole lotta scribblin' these days.





Self with unsettlingly large infant forehead and crazy person eyes (plus gentle innocent cattle person):




These two cows live two gardens away from our house. They are my neighbours. They know me and Bob. They can see me when I'm in the bathroom brushing my teeth. they say 'moo!' at me. The black and white one seems kind of agitated lately. The brown one has a deeper more melifluous moo. But she is a lady not a man cow.

Elvis Looms In the Centre of Things

In this doodle you can kind of discern me trying to combine the sad leopards with the jumping boys.

Also in the middle perhaps you can spot Elvis, who's popped up to give me clues about how man faces and decorative beauty can be combined.





It's mixing things up in the right order that provides half the challenge...

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.

Man-Head-Crevice Sproutage

So here are some recent scribblings.

I’m trying to evolve myself in a forward direction as usual. Everything feels all urgent and dynamic in my head. I don’t know if that’s what it looks like. Probably just looks like more boring old wrestler drawings to the layman.

I am trying to make my drawings and paintings be ultimately of one purpose, and that’s a technical challenge but it’s also about sort of overcoming the compartmentalised technical challenges of my various media and giving myself a feeling of a unified vision.

It’s also about getting man-meat and flowers in the same pictures.





That was a page from my sketch book. Note the instruction to ‘be more erumpent’.

I’m painting a painting with a rabbit in it. So those were some drawings of the rabbit.





I started trying to give equal weight to flower studies and man-head studies. But Randy was getting a little bit habitual here so I did some biro scribblings to loosen myself up. Biro is good for the soul.





So there they are.

Also good for the soul, I think, is working on cheap paper… helps to loosen me up and get over my uptighteries. I start these drawings as if they are purely for my own loosening and for no other external purpose, not for showing or anything. But that makes them more betterer in a way.





That was a painting that’s still not exactly finished. It has existed through several of my recent micro-phases and has been bashed about from pillar to post by them, as by a storm at sea.

It has a problematic Jesus figure in the middle. He’s a bit weedy.





Some more thumbnail sketches there… I hit on the revolutionary idea of drawing the man-heads of the men in my life, rather than the men in the magical ring of meat grappling… I thought I might draw my friends Bob and Scott in a similar spirit to the way I draw Randy and Kurt together. Bob and Scott have never actually met, but in my mind they could potentially have comedic chemistry.

‘Whilst intangibles intensity radiates all over the place’ I seem to have written that.





That one was mostly done whilst watching a reality show called ‘How do you Solve a Problem like Maria’ where Andrew Lloyd Weber looks for Marias for the Sound of Music.

Lots of biro ink was spilled on this one. Actually, it never spills, that’s the beauty of the invention. Yes Randy has sprouted flowers out of his lug holes. I feel I’m moving a bit further away from cartoony concerns with these, my drawings and paintings are kind of in a retarded way beginning to coalesce… is this what I want? What have I learned? Hmmm.

Dreamboats and portals

Time for some actual new bits.

That was one.

Not finished.



Well I told the wrestler Gregory Helms I was going to draw him. Then he seemed quite keen on the idea, so I thought… OK I’d better make it look a little bit like a MySpace profile picture.

But that might mean it needs to be a bit boring and flattering…

He proved tricky because he looks more like a real human being than the lumpen hypergrapplers I normally favour doodling.





I wanted to do like an otter with Gregory’s face to accessorise him, never quite got round to it…

Could make his likeness more weird and interesting if I found the energy…

Maybe I’ll work on it before sending any of this crap his way.

Here’s Gregory and his wooden brother, but which is which?






I’m not quite sure what to say about this next one….








But my favourite’s still the endlessly lovely Randy.

Now there’s a face with funlumps.

I took it upon myself the other week to begin the process of cross breeding him with some holly.

Here’s how we began:




I saw the potential for holly-derived lines in Randy’s facial contours. I picked some actual holly on my way back from the gym, and found the actual leaves were a right old pain in the bottom to draw… I dispensed temporarily with the actual leaves, but retained some of their prickly influence.





Randy moves his smug boyman face in an artfully loathsome fashion.

I love drawing him… his face seems like some kind of portal to way-outness.





Sigh… isn’t he dreamy?

Now… remember this old chestnut?






It’s still not finished. But I seem to be making a tradition out of posting its progress.


There’ll be more to say or more to see soon…

I want to return to one of the original stated purposes of this blog, and condense some of my big thoughts into digestible form here.

When I was talking to Marlo about blogs and blog performance anxiety, I theorised to her that it’s good to update regularly because it helps people to feel like they’re in touch with you (more relevant to her since she actually has fans)… but I need to take my own advice.

Cartoon people teach me lessons about eloquent & concise little lumps of communication…

So stay tuned while I redefine my purpose in front of your very eyes!