My bats and my boys get linear.

So here are some drawings of wrestlers and bats, those two great staples of great great art.





I’m sort of trying to refine them toward some kind of sort of design for a painting at this stage.

But I also had to draw some big heads, to get that big head thing out of my system. Here are Randy and Ric. They have ‘chemistry’, as they say in the trade. Or at least I think so.





Learning Ric Flair’s face would be like a ten year project. In the meantime I’m still preoccupied with Randy, cos I haven’t quite perfected whatever it is I’m doing with him yet. Getting this far and quitting would be both stupid and unforgivable!





That one absorbed some spillage. I wasn’t drooling with lust as you may have assumed, I merely toppled my beverage.





As you see here, the cheekbone was generous and as such, enabled some bat emergence. Also you see evidence of other brain damaged scribbles indicating an impatience to get on with some proper painting composed of elements and not exclusively heads.

With the wrestlers, I think I could take more notice of the variation in the bodies as they’re just as distinct and trademarky as the faces. Not just the shapes but the way they move may prove important. Important in post apocalyptic bat confrontations.





Because bats don’t mess about!





The end,

Love from Chloe.

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.

the Era of Too Many Rich Reds

Well since I seem to have quite a lot of pictures to show you, I might do the paintings first, pace myself a bit.

There’s a palette I’ve used for a lot of paintings over the past year or so. I’ve been trying to finish them so I can finish up this era.

‘The passionate controversies of one era are viewed as sterile preoccupations by another, for knowledge alters what we seek as well as what we find.’ -
Freda Adler

Lately I’ve been finding these colours problematically bright and sweetie-like. There are too many of them. (Though this also presents an interesting challenge…) In the paintings I’m planning, the colours will be more ‘limited’, one way or another. At least limited enough that I feel in control of the colour and that it doesn’t dominate the other formal aspects of the picture. And so that it doesn’t look horrible and make me want to be sick.

Let’s be thorough about this. Here are the colours I’m lumbered with:


Michael Harding Phthalocyanine Blue and Zinc White





Grumbacher Pre-Tested Oil Quinacridone Red





Grumbacher Pre-Tested Oil Cadmium Barium Yellow Deep





(I think I made the yellow big because yellows are tricky bastards.)

Grumbacher Ultramarine Violet





Old Holland Flesh Ochre





Mussini Burnt Umber



Later, when I came back to the palette and it all seemed a bit too warm and cosy, and I had just bought a MASSIVE tube of raw umber, I added that to the mix too.

It’s the size of the big tube here in front of the little tubes:





Only it’s this colour:





Wikipedia has this useful piece of info about Raw Umber:

Raw Umber is a color that resembles raw umber.

I have a brain that doesn’t like wastage. So when I have a great big tube of a colour, I mind less about using it liberally.

Some of the artist grade oil colours are very expensive, so I become quite… aware…of this when I use them.

The thing is, at the moment I’m veering more toward using acrylic and other waterbased media UNDERNEATH a final layer of oil glazes, rather than using oils alone.

This is because acrylic dries fast and flat, is pleasingly opaque and allows for a more dynamic ‘drawing’ process in which changes and adjustments can be made spontaneously. The combination of acrylic/ the other plethora (plethora!) of media compatible with acrylic/ and finally the richness of oil colour gives quite a lot of scope for intricate other-worldly finishes, and quite a lot of scope for the painting to develop a strong sense of purpose along the way.

So this is Shelby, she’s a lady I painted with just oils, and taking advantage of the blobs and crags that inevitably appear. Using the above palette, I should add. I don’t think she’s finished.





Here’s her face in closeup so you can better see the texture. She’s painted on a ceramic tile:





in contrast, here’s a tiny painting from a while back painted in this palette but with a drawn/ mixed media underpainting and quite a lot more sensitive detail. Of course, it all depends on how much you like sensitive things….





Now a peculiar half-breed… a painting that was getting on quite well being shiny and plasticky, but which has had a decisive opaque oil makeover in recent times. It’s another startled giraffe:









That’s all in the same palette. But I have been subduing it more, painting in flatter swathes with tertiary kind of mixtures, rather than being dictated to by the bossy primaries.






Now… this one’s got really weird. Bob said to me it’s funny that I should turn on a particular picture and call it weird when I’m always painting weird dog explosions and minotaur tantrums. But I’m finding this one tricky. It’s based on some of those old drawings, but it needs to evolve its own authority, it might need a radical change.

I think maybe it’s a transitional type of thing where I’m figuring out HOW I’m going to paint and using wilfully obscure combinations of subject matter and atmosphere.





And Kurt’s developed a bit of a tan.




Here’s another old one in the same palette. This one’s all in oils, but with the texture worked up to a fair old level of detail and teeny tiny brushstrokes and flourishes. There are lots of ways I like to paint, but I think this isn’t quite the way that’s right for Right Now.






I have more painted stuff to show, but I will save it for an imminent follow-up, since it’s all in different colours and generally it’s got a lot more to do with bats. Then there will be some drawings too.

Scientific progress in fluff, bunnies and glistening boymen

Uuuuaaaaarhhh!

(Kurt says that)

(It signifies intensity)

Here are some drawings and paintings that reflect my thought processes, but are still part of a build-up to something more big and whole.

I began this painting of a rabbit in some specific fluffy vegetation and being overseen by an evil Ortonish sneaky manboy.

It feels like a condensed exercise in figuring out the mechanics of how my next paintings will be constructed. It’s in acrylics which allow for quick changes.





Here’s the fluffy plant that visually interested me so. I took the photo on the way home from the gym, my buttocks still warm from their herculean efforts.





And now here’s the painting in its current state, a little bit cleverer and more advanced:





(I did the last session while I was watching the end of season 2 of Lost. I think I missed a couple of visual plot clues because of it.)

I keep meaning to come up with some mindblowingly cute self-portrait to use as a new avatar and myspace picture. But then every time I draw myself I end up looking like a deranged hag. And also I’m not nearly as interesting as lumpy testosterone charged glistening boymen.






In a phone conversation with my friend Scott, I came up with the insightful gem of a statement: ‘I like faces, but I like arses too.’





And here’s how the rest of that page grew:





Oh Randy, you throw yourself about so beautifully, but where are your eyeballs?

Speaking of Scott, I did a couple of initial Bob and Scott studies just to get a feeling for how easy they were going to be. Scott was surprisingly easy. His eyebrows are the key to him.

He’s the one with the dinky bow tie.





I can’t pretend I haven’t drawn any wrestlers though. I’m afraid I have.





John Cena: what was God thinking when he forgot to finish whittling you?

When we fed Cena’s head into the genetic celebrity face-match finder, there were no matches. It’s because he looks like an action figure more than a human.

He is inexplicably worshipped in India.






Sometimes when I’m trying to plan way-out paintings with plant life and punching, it all gets a bit scribbly.


In this next one I made Randy look like Sloth from the Goonies. By accident. I’m not sure I’d show him this if he came round for tea.





In my sketchbook I do loose limbed doodles by which I try to think. You have to start somewhere. Humble beginnings.





I wanted to paint Randy looking scrunched next to some holly to see how my acrylic technique has evolved. Everything I do is like an anal little experiment at the moment. But I think I needed this phase after many a long day getting swallowed up in the haze of relentless painting slog.









Here’s the painting a little bit further along.

Bob said it was turning into a Vice Reeves Elvis. This was not intentional. I’ll show you what a Vic Reeves Elvis looks like in a sec.





It’s interesting painting in acrylics again. I’m very aware now of the strengths and specific qualities of acrylic as opposed to other kinds of paint. It’s great for fast opaque changes and adjustments in drawing along the way. The opacity feels a bit ugly compared to my oil and watercolour paintings, but you have to milk the strengths of each one for all it’s worth, and something good will emerge.



Vic Reeves was a favourite comedian of mine during my adolescence. He also draws and paints. He only ever seems to do anything to amuse himself primarily, which can make him a bit complacent and lazy, but I still have a soft spot for him and sometimes I feel I could get a little bit more complacent and lazy myself occasionally.

When people prefer my phone doodles to the paintings I have spent hours of thought and labour on, that’s really…ggghgg… annoying.

And I know John K would disapprove of aspiring to draw like people who draw in a deliberately naïve cheeky sort of a way. Mmm, frictions.





Bye bye for now, kind blog readers.

I hope you’ve seen something that’s been worth stopping for.

windy snowy night time reading

Hello. I have been a little bit ill. I’ve been posting frivolous and feverish piffle-blogs on my myspace. There you can read about my fevered brain, sneezing and bland superman Dean Cain. And lots about how a big part of me guiltily likes being ill.

When I was ill I finished reading a book called Letters From a Lost Uncle by Mervyn Peake. I was quite taken with it in the end.

I don’t think it was ever intended to be published, and the drawings are quite rough in some ways, but they have a quality about them that attracts me.






I like drawings that make stillness in the midst of stories. This book had been can’t get to sleep reading for me.






I also like the naturalness of the invention.






I’m not personally much cop at writing stories. My sister might write ones that I can illustrate one day.

I’ve been going through childhood things. I used to start ‘epic’ stories that I never finished. Her stories had beginnings middles and ends. She was less pretentious.






I like it when my work appeals to children. Children have tended to write the best and least idiotic things in my comments books when I have had exhibitions.

Here is an actual page from a past comments book at my foundation show:






I’ll do you a proper entry with drawings soon. Maybe more than one!

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.