Partially Accidental Wrestlers

It's hard to ignore wrestling entirely. After all, I hadn't even really got around to properly drawing LAST year's Wrestlemania.

Also, I rather like drawing things I've drawn lots of times before... it feels richer than faffing about with new novelties every week... It's building upon previous hours of gloriously pointless studying.

Because I have drawn them so much, wrestler-like entities crop up in my doodles without my really intending it. Accidental wrestlers account for at least 66% of my output.





I was rather inspired by a thread on UK Fan Forum called 'draw a wrestler in MS Paint'. The innocent efforts of internet wrestling fans spurred me on.



































































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Overturned Horse

This is a large painting I started in 2004...

Scary Ass Paintings from the Wrestling Phase

I just sort of... sort of finished this Ric Flair based painting, started a couple of years back. Feel ambivalent about it. Very weird perverse palette, with cadmium red purple and light kings blue. The face is good. I found it hard to make the rest harmonious. Maybe it was never meant to be.





And with similar raw wet on wet pinkness, here is a painting featuring Randy Orton and Chris Benoit, done before the unpleasant end of the latter. I was reluctant to even show this to anyone because of the kind of darkness it brings to mind.





On a more light and lovely note, I posted a myspace blog about the drawings of J.H. Dowd... click the picture for more...

Finished/ unfinished/ tidied up/ messed up.... it used to be a lot more yellow...

Van Gogh was a heavy advocate of yellow.

Here's an old painting that I started years ago, and sort of finished now. Though I'm not sure it's really finished. It might be called 'some men help Jesus'. It used to have a lot more stuff in it, some of which got painted out. I could always paint some different stuff back in.





And this is its previous appearance on this blog two years ago, 'bat flash jesus ghosts'.

Sports Entertainers with Garnish

Wrestlers. Hwur! What are they good for?










It was Xmas and I decorated this one with holly.

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.