Peeps

 

I've trawled through a handful of sketch and note books from the last couple of years and come up with these images, which seem to be either past by of preliminaries for something larger.

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Characters living behind a waterfall

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Family Portrait

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Face for the first Edge (based on Julian)

December 2012.

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Christmas Angel for Sean Tighe.

December 13.

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Initial drawing for a double wardrobe door. March 14 Erdington.

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24th Sept 13

Questions about: starting & finishing, perseverance, frustration, inertia & discipline.

Connected to correspondence with Ruth Parke.

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(Add "Janice")

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Don't put words into my mouth.

Following on from an aggressive T.V. interviewer - news night type of thing. I get tired of how they all seem to think that they have the right to constantly challenge, in a kind of interrogation type of technique.

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First drawing for a set of kitchen cabinet doors (re-started).

It was also my Facebook profile for a while.

June 12.

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First image for the "is painting dead" blog page.

http://chronologicallyours.blogspot.co.uk/p/the-worm-ouroboros.html

It has a large (unavoidable) empty space at the very start. The server on my machine is playing up, so I took the images to the library to upload, which seemingly presented me with a whole new set of problems!

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Children of the Deer

For Alan Morris.

CHILDREN of the DEER

The stimulation of taking the piss out of yourself.

In the mid 70s, when it was fashionably the thing to do, I read up on Eskimos. Many things grabbed and fascinated me, but one that stood out was in the form of a kind of Saturday night entertainment. Families would meet up and swap stories - with a difference.

They were not the tall stories I think of as "tall" they would be the type of tale that was more self depreciating, not ego building. Tales of mistake and things gone tragically wrong - BUT - with a comic slant.

I believe that you can build up a certain degree of mental and moral strength, not as a constant thing - but from time to time, picking yourself apart, especially in front of others!

This is not to say that I don't enjoy the odd spot of self degradation. Maybe to wind up people who seem decidedly self assured, maybe along the lines of "I couldn't possibly manage that" - - - - -

Stop the World x Blow your Mind

5-4-14

Thanks to Linda Sheppard for helping out with some images.

I'm going through this art thing at the moment, in terms of what is currently valid and what is not.

And does it matter two figs.





I always felt that (starting) in the late 60's creativity had a mind of it's own:
Happenings , Light-shows and generally the feeling that everyone was involved.(Nowadays performance art, installations)
Music (We seem at present to be reverting to the "do it yourself" freedom from the major record companies.) Santana offers himself as a shaman, rather than rock star.
Posters, actual pieces of work, that were affordable and very real - in your hand as it were.
All Kinds of paint application, (followed by Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1985 show with Andy Warhol. Collaboration works. If it doesn't move - paint on it.)

A lot of this stuff gets regurgitated and ownership gets re-claimed.
-a bit like Christians putting a church on top of a pagan mound.




Pics by Linda Sheppard





Anyway, the general feeling I get is that psychedelia is a thing of the past and it's a bit uncool to be involved with it.







The trouble is that this is a very valid, vibrant and dangerous form of expression. (ask Jung)
It is a form of art work with a very definite motive:
Stop the world and blow your mind!








How close it is to surreal , I do not know,
but it is very definitely a means to help you on your way,
on your way to possibly a better understanding of yourself.

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SURREAL IS COOL (REALLY)
Does the idea precede the mark?
I mean, the focus on this
If you think too hard about what you are
about to do
Everything pauses
and sometimes, everything goes (this is normal isn't it?)

Where is the line?
Between being weird
or living a weird edge

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Relatively recent paintings for a backdrop. I started from the middle, initially as a linear affair. Actually pretending it was a map to get lost in. Then added colour when I realised that it could quite comfortably take it.




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On the surreal angle:
I wrote this the day after Osama Bin Laden was shot:
In a lot of senses - I suppose that I have been following a " surrealist" path throughout my entire art life, since I was fifteen years old. Loads of it is brain to hand - immediate stuff before anything else gets in the way - any other thought that is.
But the subject matter is also directly about "unlocking" what was being thought, as oppose the what the thought process was about.

Hard fact is; I can!
I am wealthy enough to exist and be able to carry on producing art that is only relevant to my being and way of life. I can't fault it but do complain sometimes.
BUT, surreal is such a taboo. Is this mainly because of Dali?
Mind, Miro made another existence whereas Dali just explained it.

The Weird in the Temple

Two temple pictures from Tamil Nadu
Painted in 2018,
But originating in 1993

From the temple complex in Madurai, South India. I described it as a cosmic rugby pitch.

Thinking about the enormity of the images and the way the characters intertwine all at once introduced me to the term eidetic. A bit like "cop a load of this!"

Loads of L.P. sleeves were adorned with that kind of stuff in the late sixties - first one that springs to mind is the Stones, Satanic Majesties.

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Grayson and Charles

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ehpzb4ezg7vajw1/yeaWIvYI0m

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/Reith

Research c.o. Ruth Parke!

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/feb/23/change-life-helsinki-bus-station-theory



Spring Clean

A two month summery.

Studio
I finally left, and left quite a lot of stuff behind as well. I remember Ruth Claxton announcing that one has to "shed" stuff in order to move on.
Whatever, the place had lost its charm for me, was getting more and more difficult to get to. Also begging to get cluttered up again, which was inevitably going to lead to problems. Fire exits were beginning to get closed. It was bloody cold in the winter. And finally I had this cloud hanging over me of knowing I had been ripped off for rent once, with also a failed second attempt in the nearer past.

Death
My mother died on Christmas morning in hospital, following a fall in the home in which she had been placed (without my say)
I was expecting it, but we had had a lovely day with her, earlier in the year.
Then Jeannette, a close friend from Cardiff suddenly died. Followed two weeks later by the death of my dog - Toffee - also sudden.

There then followed a bust up with another old friend from Cardiff who objected to my Facebook etiquette, in a rather ghoul like way. He didn't like the way the deaths were reported on line. He possessed the voice of a troll.




I concentrated on the perennial paintings being bright and golden as a comment on December as a comment on my mother's passing instead of the grey, cold, bleak associations that can often be leveled at winter.
The above is as yet unfinished.

The Edge (unfinished)

Plans for the Hill:

 Studio/Gallery. Stove. Drive.

Shipping Hill looking more and more likely to come into play.
Practically, the two most important jobs that need to be taken on are: 
The drive which is almost impassable. Without it being fixed - I cant see other things being able to practically take place.
It's not a complete fix in one go job, it's going to take a puddle by puddle job.

A stove. The whole place feels damp. There is wood everywhere around. The present oil based heating system is far too expensive.
There is a small stove in the workshop which could be temporarily used.

And there is the promise of a fair sized studio which would be very capable of doubling as a kind of "at home" Gallery (by appointment only!)

The worm ouroboros.

A new page with Ruth Parke: How can painting be? (today)
Started following comments and facebook conversations with Ruth following an article I had read that was posted by Mathew and which I shared on my He He Band group.



One of three spider-graphs composed by Ruth as general response to the question as to how valid painting is in today's art scene.

Three Heads are better than One



 -by making something aren’t you inevitably communicating something to others – ‘this is who I am/ what I think/ how I feel’ – even if only as a by product?
Ruth Parke

 

 

What I think

 

 

 

 

How I feel

 

 

 

Who I am (as oppose to who am I?)

 

Well - the guy clutching the world to his breast wishes they would leave him alone. Bird Hands is the scout of the group and actually annoys the other two quite often - although he does hold a certain amount of empathy for the cat in the hat. Mind he thinks he's a bit of a weed, really ought to get it a bit more together.