Frog Variations

Here's one I did myself



Now here's something a bit different, one I did in collaboration with Bob. I drew it, he painted the broad strokes, I went back and refined the faces. Much like Rubens and one of his minions (not really). It's a bit hit and miss but I think we should do this more. He paints in a way that I don't paint. We both have doubts about the colours, but we can work on that

2003, into 2004

2003, into 2004....

Beach Boys, Brighton, crusty painting, high faluting ideas, specific palettes...

Crusty etheriality...


Not long after I graduated, I discovered the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson, and I found this gave me a good deal more to believe in.

At the time I lived in Brighton, in a little terraced house on a steep road opposite a nice little church with seagulls on the roof. I was in the real world now, except I wasn't.













I was unabashed about being soft and having feelings.
(Goodness knows I always have to have something to be unabashed about. I'm pretty much abashed about everything else.)





Part of me finds these a bit namby pamby. Part of me accepts them as part of the past. Part of me quite likes the naive qualities and sometimes I think if you stick with naive qualities you attract people.










but it was all a bit fragile, breakable by unbelievers ... and by my self-doubt

and you can't sell your feelings and your sincerity very easily


though I remain unsure what you can sell very easily.

and the things you're sincere about change....

The First Three of the Past Ten Years

So here is (the first part of) my ten year (maybe 11 year) blog post... because I have had Iris the baby, I haven't been drawing much lately. I could have done, I've just about had time in the gaps between baby care. It's just a question of focusing, and wanting to enough. In the meantime, I thought it would be a good interval in which to review what the heck I've produced in the past ten years. Warning: this blog may have more writing in it than my usual sketch blogs. And more pictures than my old written blogs. And it might not make a lot of sense, because the things I do perhaps don't.

2000

In the year 2000, I was in my first and second year at art college in Canterbury. I was trying to get accustomed to the culture there. I was young and silly but had an overactive brain. It appeared to work quite well for me to continue keeping complex and convoluted sketchbooks full of analytical nonsense... words were what counted at art college. Just a constant flow of words, meaning was not really important. So I could do words, but secretly, I was looking for answers and meaning and I wanted to be able to paint well. So we had a bit of a secret conflict of interests, me and the art college.

First let it be noted: I was still in the throes of a mammoth Beatles phase, a big passionate learning process, and I particularly loved Paul, and particularly his smooth little face and the angles of his eyebrows. This was done very near the beginning of the first year, before my spirit had been squashed. They thought it was kitsch, little did they know that I really meant it. I kept these things mostly hidden.









I wanted to focus on cute things generally, and on noting the parallels between Britney and Pikachu, icons of the time. I think it was a reaction to the pressure to be sophisticated, and my attempt to keep myself feeling young among jaded narcissistic idiot baby boomer lecturers.




even then I was conceding a lot to the unbalanced focus on 'ideas'... not exactly what I hoped I was signing up for... scribbling scribbles and words in a book... but there didn't seem to be any other kind of art college. If I'd have known about the existence of the Atelier schools, I may have gone down a different path. But I didn't. Anyway. I have my weird history and wonky mistakes and mishaps are part of it. I'll try to look on it as funny rather than tragic.

So I became steadily surlier and more claustrophobic. I got obsessive over undeserving/bewildered boys. I was self absorbed and boring. Oh well!





I wasn't really given cause to consider the pros or cons of my drawing style. Not many people around me were drawing in any comparable way. I think I wanted it vaguely to be delicate and feminine. Looking at it now, I find it a bit cloudy and bitty, and it would have been good if I'd started being a bit more manly, structured, and learning specific skills sooner... but I can at least see what I was getting at, I've always been able to draw. It's a shame I wasn't actually taught. I was doing it, but doing it self-consciously and very underconfidently.





The first Harry Potter film came out, and I read the existing books. And Lord of the Rings. Those things and the Beatles were the kinds of things that were my touchstones. They were the things that animated me. In that specific timeframe. But because of humanity, not escapism. I think. Of course I might be bending it around in my memory.





I painted usually in acrylics. The one below is a detail of an oil painting. I think the colours on these were unfortunately 'turned up' at some point, so may be cruder even than the originals. I made my own rules and parameters, no one gave me any.





2001

Second year of art college... kind of a torturous time in my brain. Let's focus on the silly pictures.


















Despite the fact I wasn't obsessed with Paul McCartney any more, I still embarked upon a series of paintings on the subject of beating up Jane Asher.









2002

Final year of art college.. and beyond... regained a smattering of sanity.

Got interested in computer game imagery as I worked up to my degree show. The degree was ultimately a bit of a farce, but having that apparent goal did make me focus a little more than usual. I was quite excited for some of the time... I'm only pessimistic in retrospect, if you see what I mean. I was excited in my own little world.









Started playing Everquest and liked the way the corpses lay. Looked for poignant things, I spose. If I found them in pop culture, it seemed like part of the communication was already successful. But it wasn't about 'pop art' or plasticness, I was looking for authenticity.









Got very into Fleischer cartoons too.





And Buffy.

Wanted a perfect smooth dreamy finish. Wanted to communicate stuff from my innermost mind. May have failed. Still tried.













But after I left, got a bit angry, but also had a sense of liberty, and painted Hopeful Hannie, which I still like.





After that, of course, things changed.

Sloppy Pale Tiger

I painted a watercolour picture.

I'm not sure either Ruskin or John K would approve of it, but I am sort of excited on my own behalf about watercolour at the moment, and sometimes you have to do things on your own behalf, even if they don't fit with anything else.






It's based on an old postcard I had of an ancient Greek mosaic, which I've always come back to.

Mystery bear and Baby Girl

We had our detailed scan. The baby is fine despite some early worries, and she is a girl.





This is my favourite one of the back of her head, she was behaving like a shy person. Like me, in fact.

Pick of the Pops

My deviantart top 5

Deviantart has a feature where if you 'browse' a gallery and then arrange the items by popularity, I can get a sort of a hit parade of my most popular images according to how many views and favourites and comments they've got. I'm sorta fascinated by which of my pictures end up where in popularity. I never quite would have predicted they would end up in the order they're in. Maybe the Deviantart crowd are a very specific demographic.

Here's the chart rundown from 5 to 1. (Click on the images to get the the corresponding deviantart page including comments.)

5. Gypsy Chaos Goat





-I put up this one and the other goat, and I really always thought the other one 'Softie Goat' was better. But this has only been up for a week and it's already top 5. Maybe it's more rough and rugged than the other one. Or has a more sexy title. It has computer game mage hijinks or something appealing the the WoW addicts of the world.

4.Three Teenage Moons





- I kind of understand why this is top 5. It has detail and it's all emotional and soft and warm.

3. Empathetic Minotaur





- This old chestnut... this is always popular on the internet. The original was tiny. I must have hit on something good with chaotic mix of delicate little mediums. The original was tiny. But the internet isn't fully cognizant of that.

2. Kids in the Forest





- I would not have expected this to be number 2. It must be the cuteness of the theme or the multiracial niceness or something. It's all vague, like some of my stuff of that era was, and quite primitive in its shapes. It was from an obscure movie photo or lobby card or something.

1. (By some distance): Orton Flair Three





- And it's funny because it's not mainly wrestling fans who like it. It's people who don't know who they are. But comments say things like 'moving' . I can't quite put myself in their shoes and see what they see. It is the third version of this image I did, and it's the closest of all my images to straight 'fan art'. I never really thought of it as part of the main flow of my oeuvre. No way! I think in the end a hardwired conservative part of people likes convincing heads and likenesses, but also pretty people and simple things.

The whole of the top twenty on Deviantart are all paintings. You have to go to 21 to get the first drawing. People like colour. It's more real to them or something. My favourite way out drawings tend to be less popular. Or maybe people just don't know what to say about them. Maybe they're less comfortable and more radical in a good way.

Make it come true

I'm now trying to paint some 'beautiful paintings' that combine together all the best things I've learned from drawing lately. The kind of paintings that would be self-justifying, even if I never wrote blogs or tried to be clever. I have to think the word 'beautiful' to myself to make it come true.

But in the meantime here's a lady with awkward composition. I don't think she minds. Except she's lacking one of her eyes.

I think I unintentionally made her look a bit more like some of the female members of my immediate family than she oughta.

Lion Voyage

I'm trying to focus my attention on how I am going to do paintings that feel like they do justice to all I've learned lately. This has led me to draw in slightly odd, fluffy bluffy ways. This is drawing towards painting more than drawing for its own sake. Whatever that might mean. I'm veering a little further away from 'cartoony' again, if you want to picture that continuum. Also I wasn't quite comfortable leaving up the last blog full of noncommittal wrestler scrawlings for days when that's not really where my head is at.





These oddballs I drew whilst watching Now Voyager:





These are just really experiments and doodles. I was looking at strange anthropomorphic lion statues and at well designed cartoon lions and just seeing whether I could hybridise them, what that might look like, and whether this whole nutty process might help me figure out what my painted lions will be up to.





I'm still taking lines and rhythms from wrestler sketches.





Here's a slightly creepy night sky type sleeping foetal lion. I'm not sure how satisfying it is as a drawing but I have a feeling I can take it forward. This is kind of what I was saying about 'drawing for painting'. It actually isn't a process I've blogged about much. It's quite elusive. Quite slippery. Etherial. Wraith-like. Eelish.





Of course there's no real reason to abandon 'cartoony' in paintings. Secretly I want to achieve everything all in the same place. But sometimes, I realise I have to concentrate on doing one thing in one place whilst doing the other thing properly in a completely different place. Like, some of the detail of my caricature observation has to have its own stage to evolve for its own sake, it can't just all be subsumed to a larger floaty lion oil painting artsy fartsy cause. See it's really not very simple at all. I have a lot of time on my hands you see.

In case it passed you by, here's that leopard and flower combo I sketch-painted recently... it might give the vaguest whiffs about where my painting is headed.

Three Teenage Moons

Before I bombard you with the next set of scribbly abdominal stretches and athletic kitties, I'll just post this one painting and some words about it.

I really am producing a lot of drawings at the moment, and I don't want them all to melt into a homogenised sludge on the blog.... so here's a greatly oversaturated peculiarity of a 2005 thingy:





In 2005 I had a brief to produce twenty perfectly square paintings for a gallery that sold only square pictures. The gallery has gone out of business now, but the methodical and goal-oriented way this forced me to work was quite useful, in hindsight.

This picture was produced in a hurry... it wasn't invested with any individual significance, in a way. It was organic and 'accidental', like a lot of things I've done. I don't even know how many media are 'mixed' in it now... some watercolour, oil pastel, probably acrylic, coloured pencil... in a lot of ways it's a bit if a mess, and my current sensibility finds the colour a bit garish and thoughtless. It would have been done quite 'quickly' (by my standards of the time), and alongside several others of the same size.

But there are aspects of it that I like, and that remind me of things I can do that I haven't tried to do for a while. The 'moons' are the best part.

The other bit's wrestlers, of course. It's Shawn Michaels cradling Randy Orton's head, which here resembles a large bruised fruit.





I've discovered a joyous freedom lately not only in 'loosening up' in my drawings, but also in actively sharpening my eyes and my skills. I'm giving more attention to fundamental mechanical principles of picture-making that I'd unwittingly neglected for many years while I searched for meaning in slow blobby paintings.

But I wanted to create a balance on this blog, since the drawings... well not only are they very probably building TOWARDS some decisively new painting project, they also come... have emerged... FROM something... these old paintings are kind of part of the story, maybe it would be more honest to include them in the... erm... story.

Sometimes I feel like a pretentious art twat staying in the guest bedroom of the wholesome cartoonist community and borrowing its pencils.

But I'm perverse and I'm never happy unless I feel caught in a tension between two things. Or more than two!

Like silly billies before me, I fantasise about being a misfit renegade.

When I google image searched 'misfit renegade' I found this picture of Brian May from Queen.



Practical thoughts: important bit: I want my future paintings to have more... obvious self-justifying purpose...

Less blobs. Less mess.

and more joy and dynamism of their own... going to go and write a writing blog now.

I'm transgressing the purpose of this one...