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

But is it Art?

Well, here it is. Barring the odd tweak and shave this is pretty much it. So? Is it art?

If the definition of art is the end result of the urge that drives humans to scratch images on rocks or cave walls, then it is. But then the same is true of graffiti, some of which is viewed as art and some, well, not. Will it end up in the Guggenheim or Tate? Not likely.

The fact is though that something seemed fairly determined to express itself through me and I did what I'm able to give it expression within my current mastery of oils, and via the shape of my current visual preferences.

If I look at it from a longer perspective it seems both waif-like and wraith-like. It seems to be a portrait of a female consciousness dreaming deeply with a wildness and intensity bordering on madness. Perhaps it's an attempt by the battered and bewildered love in my own male consciousness to come to terms with the seemingly impenetrable mystery of the female principle, through the only aspect of life that's ever worked reliably for me - art. Whatever that might be. Visual media.

It struck me last night that there's a dominant arrow shape running through the head. I can't say how it got there, it just sort of happened and I took it for granted and worked with it. Looked at more closely it reminds me of a dark galaxy, and perhaps that's entirely appropriate as company for the moon.

Whatever the merits or lack of merit this piece might have something in me feels satisfied when I look at it. At least that's the state of things today. It's been known to change.

Dance with doubt

When I'm done painting for the day I hang whatever's in progress on the wall in the lounge so I can see it at odd moments, which often provides clues to what has to happen next.

So after watching a movie last night I got staring at this piece and it started looking horribly pretentious. Part of this was the 'chick art' thing still hanging about, but what was this romantic thing of running horses for flux sake? And this ridiculous imitation of cave art? How pretentious is that? About the only thing I liked was the moon. Simple, honest, unmodified authentic strokes.

Some years ago I read a rather excellent book called "The Bohemians" by Dan Franck, about Picasso and that gang and the birth of modern art. Somewhere in it he describes the production of a piece of art as a "dance with doubt". It could be equally called a dance with certainty, as it's some sort of inner knowing that gets the thing moving in the first place. But I know the space he's talking about and last night I was deep in that dance.

It was quite late by then but the thing couldn't wait. I jumped up and threw some pretty certain paint at the back of the head. This morning I looked at it and saw a goddess having a seriously bad hair day. Out with the scrubber again.

The problem with this piece is that it looks completely different under different lighting conditions. In good light the colours emerge and the magic of tone and texture is undeniable. In low light it goes into hiding and the chick art thing comes out to taunt me.

Well, there's probably a solution in there somewhere, so after the scrub I pushed some paint around to see what might arise, still working on the area behind the head. Here's the result of the morning's work. It still looks like a bad hair day but I like the texture that's emerged. The paint is rather sloppy at this point and changes at the slightest touch, so I'll leave it as it is for now and play with it further once it's dry.

And anyway, a nature goddess probably needs a dose of wild hair to make her day.

In the meantime I added some colour to the body and gave the animals a bit of a push. I'm fascinated by the Lascaux horse on the left. He or she seems to be having a grand day out, with a decided spring in his/her (hirs?) step. Also interesting is how the modeling of the hindquarters has found its way into the horse on the right.

As for the pretentious imitation of cave art, well, I like the feeling of it. Hell, even Picasso made his big breakthrough because of a fascination with African masks. I'm gonna hang with it and see what happens.

Get into trouble then dig myself out

Things don't always work out smoothly.

It's happened often enough that I'm not sure what's supposed to happen next in a painting, so I deliberately do something with calculated recklessness and then have to repair the mess. Most times when I do this something of value emerges at the end of it that I would not have found otherwise. It's part of the creative process, I've found out. Take risks.

But in this case it wasn't like that. I thought I knew what I was doing when I added a whole lot of burnt sienna to the bottom. At first it felt good. So I went out on errands and came back with fresh eyes. And it didn't look good no more.

One of the advantages of working in the digital age is the ability to easily keep a photographic record of work. Comparing what I had on canvas to the way it was before I preferred before. Seems I'd bollocksed it up a bit.

Fortunately oils are slow drying so there's always a chance to remove unwanted paint. It's very seldom a true undo as the layers beneath are often scraped away in the process, but this adds an element that takes things elsewhere. Sometimes I've scrubbed off paint that wasn't working only to find the core of what was eluding me in the residue left on the canvas.

So I got out the undo kit and began the rebuild. Along the way the animals got resketched over the background noise, and now some interesting stuff was starting to happen. The fresh brushtrokes I'd had to sacrifice at the start could now stay there. And once again the unexpected was happening. The left of the two lower figures repeats the unintentional Egyptian overtones with it's vaguely wolf-like head, while it's reddish companion is no longer horse-like but now generic beast. The ones behind are getting a look I like, a sense of movement in the marks with no attempt at realism.

The texture that emerged after the scrub was a bit harsh so I brushed a thin layer of white across it. It's likely to be mostly dry tomorrow and I can work some colour back into it. Who can say what surprises may await me there?

Overall though I'm happy with the look. There was an absence of depth before the burnt sienna was added, and with what remains of it now and the freshly sketched animals it's beginning to feel better balanced.

But now the blank space behind the head is beginning to niggle...