Art and the elves, boys and girls

That hidden hand or mind or whatever has been at work once again in the latest piece in progress. After uploading the previous post I thought I'd better reshape things into a rough usable form before the paint got too dry, so I got to work and scraped, pushed and shoved until it seemed ready for me to get more focused the next day.

As usual I hung it up on my work-in-progress lounge wall and went about the evening's  routines. So it was only some time later that I realised it was already almost perfect.

Here's how it looked at the time, and below how it was after adding light and dark the next day.

Behind all that huffing and puffing the real creative process had been at work again without my normal conscious mind being aware of it.  The big long strokes and vigorous scrubs I'd intended as a guide to later work had already taken on the essential form of the finished piece, all I had to do was add depth following the shape already laid down.

And try not to bollocks it up.

This appears to be the way this other mind seems to prefer working. It likes it best when the thinking department is occupied with something other than a direct focus on how to apply or remove paint, as it was when scrubbing away. It's as if a space gets cleared somewhere in the creative warehouse because the well-meaning but rather plodding clerk-mind gets called away and the elusive mercurial genius-mind can take the gap and run with it.

Another thing that struck me about this latest piece is how similar it is to the previous one. That too had a stand-back-gobsmacked moment, the time the profile landed all by itself, gifting me with the core of the piece to dance the rest of the painting around.

Like this one, that piece also emerged at the last moment to bump off from the prepared canvas a different idea I'd been about to start work on.

What fascinates me also is that at the time I was obsessed about it being a chick painting and omigod how was I going to hold my head up in the world producing chick art?!? Well, this one's a bru painting. Parity has been found.



Another similarity of opposites is that the first is a woman-shaped gap through which is seen what seems to me like deep galactic space, whereas the second is a small but significant man-shape riding what looks like a wave of light rolling in from those same depths.

Are these two siblings? Are they lovers? Hopefully for painting genetics it's the latter, because already there's been cross-pollination from the Lightsurfer to the Earthen Moon. The coloring and strong free strokes of the surfer dude helped free up some of the angst-laden paintwork in the goddess. Following the momentum of that kinetic energy I reworked some areas, particularly the area behind the head, and at last I'm beginning to look at it with a sense that it feels right.

Now to loosen up those horses...

Ride the Wave

In another of those surprise moves that the creative process comes up with - and it does so more and more often now it seems - the canvas on which I'd planned to begin "Strange Pilot" got hijacked by an entirely different subject.

Part of it was that I've spent so much time finding my way through the last two paintings that I found the idea of a fast simple piece rather appealing, but perhaps more to the point is that this image caught my eye and was so immediately striking that I just had to go deeper into it.

Here's what happened. I was at a party with a mix of old hippies and young surfers where the video projection at the back of the stage was surf footage. I've dabbled in surfing over the years but it's hardly top of my mind, so when I hauled out my camera it was to take shots of the play of light around the silhouetted dancers. Scanning through the shots later I saw some interesting stuff but the background video in this particular shot for some reason jumped out, strongly.

So I culled it out, pushed pulled and so on and here's the result as a digital layout.

The extreme simplicity of it is somehow very appealing, but the suggestion of movement in the crashing wave devoid of detail also suits the big strong brushstrokes I've been exploring, so that was part of the attraction. It's interesting too that "Strange Pilot" was going to be an exercise in light emerging from dark, and that's happening here too.

But behind these more obvious motivations I suspect activity from that other mind that seems to have the final say in so much of what I do these days. A big wave, crashing hugely, a human form in the thick of it, riding that storm of natural energy? Why should this jump out and say "paint me"?

As a working hypothesis I'd say it's because that's the way my life seems to be at the moment, and along with mine the lives of many of those around me. Now I'm not gonna stick my head out too far here because humans have encountered challenging times repeatedly over our history, but it does rather seem that something pretty damn big is rolling in.

So. Note to myself. Priority one: Keep your balance. And if in doubt, paint it.

Anyway, here's the first paint as it landed on the canvas. As happened last time it's tempting to leave it like this as there's a freshness about it that's rather appealing, but I'm gonna press on with the plan and go high contrast. A bit too Turner-esque as it stands. There'll be plenty of opportunity later to land strong fresh strokes over dark background.

Meanwhile back on the back plate,the much agonised-over "Earthen Moon" and I seem to have made peace. The she-being has been given the dark mysterious core that seems to be her nature, and in doing so I've come to realise that what we have here is not an image of a woman but in fact a woman-shaped cutout looking onto something like galactic space.

This is in fact an unconscious realisation of what I'd thought to do when painting "3 Dreams", but at the time I didn't know how to do that without getting lost in the obvious and the corny. I'm not entirely convinced I'm in the clear as far as that goes, but I think - I hope - I'm out of the danger zone.

Still. Dreams, it seems, will have their way. Dreams of she-beings. Dreams of waves.

In dealing with each - keep that balance.

Art and Darkness

Sunday was feeling rather creative and I thought I'd do some, y'know, painting, but I got sidetracked by the discovery of an e-book of John le Carre's classic "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" which I then proceeded to guzzle up on my smartphone book reader, another discovery that reveals how life is not all that bad, actually.

But here's the thing. Our John is rather fond of the fatally flawed hero and the bittersweet ending, and what with a painting on the back of my mind I began to chew absently on this thing in the Arts where happiness is not typically considered a good thing. As if it's not Art if it's not painful.

Pathos, I believe it's called. A quick google scan reveals pathos as an appeal to an audience's  emotions by identifying with the suffering of a character. It's an ancient thing going back to Greek tragedies, alive and well and living in us still. Look at any graphic novel.

So le Carre's greatest fictional character George Smiley is a sort of quietly tragic superman, or perhaps supermind. The dominant feature of his private life is estrangement from his beautiful and lascivious wife, condemning him to a life of quiet loneliness. Le Carre could just as easily have given him a happy home life with healthy bouncing children, it would have made no material difference to his role of spymaster, but he chose instead to paint him in shadowy shades of damp grey. Perhaps it's the English weather, but more likely it's an instinctive reach for the pathos button.

Another great author with an even meaner streak is John Steinbeck, who doesn't even bother with sweet and goes for straight for the bitter end, neat. Perhaps it's authors named John - just a quick ad-hoc hypothesis you understand - but both are quite happy to dish up a bleak end to a story.

Hollywood, by contrast, loves the happy ending. It's understandable. After spending all those millions producing a movie you can't have people leaving the theatre moaning about an awful end. Too risky.

But their preoccupation with artistic gravitas shows up in movies about the business of making movies like "The Player". The creative bunfight with the money men over the ending to the movie-within-the-movie is resolved in a in a send-up of of the Hollywood process - Bruce Willis arrives just in the nick of time to save Julia Roberts from the electric chair. "What kept you so long?" she asks as he carries her out of the execution chamber. He smirks that smirk of his and says "Traffic was a bitch".

Now I'm not flying at those heights. Back here in the African sticks things are rather more humble. But behind this lies a fact that is constantly fascinating to me - in essence what I do is make marks on a flat surface.  In an age when pictures move, talk, sing and live the richest of fantasy lives to fantastic soundtracks on any of a range of wizz-bang devices - even mimicking real 3d stereoscopic vision - some simple marks on a surface still have the power to move people to the depths of their being.

So the way I arrange my marks has the power to direct those depths this way or that, and for some reason darkness, whether in the colouring or the themes, is a way to do that.

Certainly a bright light is impossible to render on canvas without surrounding it with darkness, but in this  particular piece it's beginning to look as if the darkness itself is the light. This lass is not a sunny spring day, her beauty is that of the deep night when the moon is down and the stars have the night to themselves.

It's not pathos, thank pooch, but sometime last week looking at what was appearing on the canvas in front of me I felt a little scared. It's as if I'm watching something deep, powerful and rather awesome rise up from a deep and ancient slumber. I'm not entirely sure what it is, but it has a power that both both fascinates and evokes love.

Bittersweet love, like dark chocolate. Is that pathos? Could be.

God's stupid brother, beauty and being brutal

Via a certain Harry Emerson Fosdick comes an account of an unspecified East African tribe -

"They say," reports an observer, "that although God is good and wishes good for everybody, unfortunately he has a half-witted brother who is always interfering with what he does."

It seems this brother or maybe his geek son was at work last week interfering in the technology that is usually a reasonably well-behaved servant to the business of painting pictures. The week was spent having to completely re-install the OS and software on my rather new computer, a process that brought with it more juicy opportunities for his activities.

So the painting that got put on the back plate got joined by everything else while I grappled with this half-wit.

But here's an interesting thing - he may be annoying and sometimes downright infuriating, but in the bizarre way of things often ultimately helpful. As it turns out this dude - or his wicked little sister - is very well known in myth and folklore.  Crystalinks has this to say about one of his guises-

The trickster is an important archetype in the history of man. He is a god, yet he is not. He is the wise-fool. It is he, through his creations that destroy, points out the flaws in carefully constructed societies of man. He rebels against authority, pokes fun at the overly serious, creates convoluted schemes, that may or may not work, plays with the Laws of the Universe and is sometimes his own worst enemy. He exists to question, to cause us to question not accept things blindly. He appears when a way of thinking becomes outmoded needs to be torn down built anew. He is the Destroyer of Worlds at the same time the savior of us all.

Reading that I was a little perturbed to realise it's a pretty good description of, well,  me.

"... points out the flaws in carefully constructed societies of man" ? Check. 
"... rebels against authority" ? Double check.
"... is sometimes his own worst enemy" ? Um. Errr . . . Check.
 "He exists to question, to cause us to question not accept things blindly."  Right on. Etc.

Now it's rather interesting that the painting I'd intended to take off the back plate last week featured this character, a street person in a group gathered on the pavement to listen to a band playing. This guy and his woman were by far the poorest people there but also by far the most immersed in the event. I'd wanted to call the piece 'The Fool and His Wife' but I doubted it would be understood as a reference to The Fool in the Tarot pack - one of the guises of said trickster - and instead as a slur on street people.

It was his vitality and intelligence that turned him into a subject for the piece, and as usual the painting transformed subject into something else. The beanie he was wearing I'd at first thought to make into one of those pointy hats worn by king's jesters of old, but that didn't work so it became colourful without the baubles and ended up rather like a jolly crown. His blue windbreaker became the burgundy robes of royalty, and even the collar of his shirt took on the feel of a chain of office.

So he became 'King of Streets' but I'd also toyed with titles like 'The Alchemist' and 'Magus', and again according to Crystalinks "The trickster is an alchemist, a magician, creating realities in the duality of time and illusion." That's a pretty good description of the function of the Artist too.

So obviously this guy's important to me. I related to the subject well enough to devote 3 months of agonised tweaking in search of a solution. Probably it's a sort of self-portrait but then that's true of pretty much every painting. Come to think of it the fact that it turned into such a mission makes sense, given his role.

But to get back to what was supposed to be on the back plate and my struggle with "chick art". I realised on returning to it what my dilemma was. The head had been originally laid out as dark, almost black, but along the way its colour and texture became so beautiful that I fell in love with it. I was so afraid of losing the beauty that I became creatively crippled, the painting as a whole suffered, and I ended up hating it too. Sounds like a typical love affair doesn't it?

Also sounds like a job for the trickster.  Kill that holy cow for the sake of what lies beyond. Hell, I'm still in love with it, but I realised rather grimly that I just had to get brutal and move things on.

So I got to work with some sandpaper, some inky dark paint and a rather large brush, and here's where things stand at the moment. Much as I mourn the loss of the delicate beauty of before I must admit I'm far happier with the piece as a whole.

There are many metaphors and lessons that come to mind in this exercise for life, love and being human in general, but I'll leave those aside for the moment. Probably they'll come up again.

Meanwhile there's work to do. The show must go on.

No no no it's gotta go

Having had a few days off from staring at the same piece intensely for two weeks I realised I can't live with it. It's just too damn, well, obvious? cute? cliched? There's something or some things about it that really appeal to my glance although it's hard to say what they are. So it's not ready to be scrapped just yet, but something major needs to happen, and I'm not yet sure what that something is. Here's what's on my mind as a first thought, and no, I didn't go mad with a huge brush over the canvas, it's done digitally.

It returns my mind to the question that came up when I started this blog - If this piece originated as a sort of love song to the goddess, why is that simple idealistic hopefulness less satisfying than the complexities that always follow the honeymoon?

I know it's not just me. The definitive case in point is a piece I did last year, 3 Dreams, based on this figure. Believe it or not this girl was dancing at the time but not even she can say why her pose was so closed in on itself. As soon as I saw the pic it fascinated me and I knew there was a painting there. But when I finally got it done and out in the public gaze I was pretty sure it would be too dark, too scary for people. And indeed words like 'twisted', 'alone' or 'lost' were used by viewers to describe it.

But these were good things. It was a hugely popular piece, and not just to gothic young women out of The Adams Family. Middle aged middle class businesswomen were equally drawn to it, and not a few men.

So what's going on here?

It seems we humans are drawn to drama. The fact is that no compelling story is one of simple happiness, something so well known in Hollywood that empires are based on it. Storytelling is based on conflict. Every hero needs a villain. It's embedded in our reality system. We want the happy ending, but not before a whole lot of bad news goes down. Perhaps it has something to do with evolutionary processes, something for consciousness to push against while it whiles away eternity. I don't know. I wasn't there at the design stage as far as I recall so I just work with what's put in front of me.

But whatever.  I'm gonna put this one on was on the backplate to boil down and swap it out with what I put there when it got started - and just maybe finally finish a piece that is still not done after about 4 months - King of Streets. What needs attention is the bottom left, an area that got painted out when my previous cert for a solution turned out a dud.

Meanwhile bubbling up to the surface is another image that's been intriguing me for a while which even already has a title - Strange Pilot. This is the digital layout as a quick sketch - the trail of fossily things is likely to change before we go live. Interesting how that primal art thing is now cropping up everywhere.

Originally I'd seen it as the figure in dark over a light background as per my usual style, but it just sort of came up the other way round. I find it much harder to make a piece work coming out of darkness but this might just be a case where it gets easier. Sort of feels that way. Wish me luck