Making this into a full sentence paragraph sort of affair today seemed like a daunting task with all the painting I'm trying to fit in. So here's a notes only version which may be partially incomprehensible, but I have a feeling if I leave it til it's all finished I'll take days and days.

I can't quite be marlo

but you have to have role models

colliers man (Lawson Wood)

wallop issue with quote

quote from white blog about things meeting up and me not feeling like that quite- or that things need to meet up in a different way altogether...

but maybe there has to be an awkward transition... or experiments with uncertain outcomes in order to discover the right territory

idea for pixie lunks coffee table book

but for that I'd have to do cute finished things


drawing is magic in its way, before I was seventeen all there really was to me was drawing

painting for my serious self?

becoming more awake generally to the 'whole thing' issue and the LIFe of the whole thing not just 'life' in texture and detail and self indulgence.... stepping back and looking at the whole thing requires non-trance... sacrificing the trance...

but why being away from wrestling can feel pointless

but that's a bit like saying there's no point in not eating this bar of chocolate right now because I'll eat it all eventually

(Should have made this clear: these are recent search queries that found this blog:)

rihana has imperfect legs

octopus skin

nude women posing on mustangs

Knightmare

beast lollity

cartoon pen drawings of sexy women

alison-goldfrapp poo

John cena vs bobby rashly

I was thinking: If I want to be a portrait painter, which portrait painters do I want to paint like?

(That was a painting by Saeid Dai, who also teaches and actually interviewed me for a foundation course at Bournemouth. He quite liked me I think, he said it would be a pleasure to teach me, but I didn't go there because Weymouth meant I could live at home and not have to pay rent. But it's one of those desisions I vaguely regretted. I did my life wrong! Anyway, I found his paintings on the Royal Society of Portrait Painters page, and I like them. they remind me of things I'd like to return to. I was liking Giotto when he interviewed me. I suspect he might like Giotto too.)

A problem I have a lot anyway is wanting simultaneously to do several different incompatible kinds of painting. And then actually pining for one sort when I'm doing another sort. 'I'm drawing and I could be painting! Oh think of the richness of that experience! This is so tenuous and flimsy, this drawing! I'm too earnest for all this cartoony stuff anyway! I shall never be able to invent all happy go lucky like a cartoonist!' Or: 'I'm painting and I could be drawing! Oh think of the drawings I could be thinking up with my fast wit brain! Think of the accellerated learning I could be doing! This oil painting is sucking all my energy, and for what?!' This is the silly nature of my anxious doubtings.

Gosh, when I write down some of the things I think, they sure do look stupid.

Perhaps that's a bit of what the blog's for. Getting in touch with my stupidity.

I feel like given the time I've had, I've been nowhere near productive enough, at least not of substantial exemplary masterworks. What I do is that.... even when I decide to focus on a certain kind of painting and a certain theme in the imagery, that ought to make a cohesive group of paintings (like other painters on myspace do so they have a strong brand identity and enough stuff for a themed exhibition).... but then the first painting I do in the 'series' isn't satisfactory to me...... and I've already had several ideas about the new approach that will go much better, and it's just not time efficient to paint slow mediocre paintings when there are so many bright shiny new things calling me. There's a bit of instinctive natural growth and improvement going on there, but I'm still ashamed of myself for not learning to be consistent. I'm just not very level-headed. I work hard, but not in a level way. I'm not efficient. I'm not saying I should be. I think this may be insurmountable.

Blogging encourages variety for its own sake. But building a 'brand' encourages the opposite. I guess part of the theory with my portrait painting plan is that I can be as flighty as I like with my 'fun work' once I have a line that's actually commercial. I mean a line of products, not those long thin things you draw. In fact maybe the whole process will make me less crazed and less desperate for the perfect answer.

That's John Singer Sargent... I'm thinking about him because he did alright out of portrait painting. Also he could do it all in one go more or less. I'm experimenting with painting a bit bit more in one go, or a least in four goes. I don't know how much I'd want to paint like him, I just know he was so good that if I could, I'd suddenly have a lot more options. I don't know how to make people be sumptuous. I've realised my shortcomings with light and colour lately... or at least how good some other people are at them.

I know that if I want to be a functional portrait painter I'l have to first paint some examples, people I know, not commissions. And I have freedom to decide what they'll be like; but even if I do experiment, I'll want to end up with a set of paintings that have a unifying style or feel or approach or SOMETHING. So wealthy people out art shopping can look at them and say 'I want one like that!'.

(That's a portrait of David Dickinson by Andrew James. It was on that Rolf Harris programme.)

Also you'd have thought by now I'd understand all about painting.... often feel like I'm starting from scratch. And at this point our thoughts turn as they so often do to the example of misunderstood paragon of loveliness Randy Orton, and how it often feels sadly like he's starting from scratch with his big career push.... because he just isn't given enough, he's just NEVER been given a strong enough gimmick. Legend killer doesn't count. That's doing not being. That only work when there's legends, and even then it seems contrived. They just send him out there, a perfect lump of pristine plasticene man talent, in his little black trunks, and go 'Go and be special!'. And you just need more in wrestling than talent and intense little shark eyes and little black trunks. You need something silly. A costume. Plumage. A fantasy element. A piece of whimsy. Aids to collective memory. Kurt Angle and Shawn Michaels and Triple H are all allowed to be super camp super duper sequinned Viking versions of themselves. What could they do with just short hair and black microtrunks? Randy's done all these wonderful little graceful micro-moments and they don't seem to stick in the collective memory, because he looks like a doll in a pair of black underpants. And people think that physical perfection is boring now, it almost works against him. They take it for granted. But he is NOT soulless or shallow, anal professional wrestling journalist Wade Keller you FOOL, you just don't understand sophisticated things. You've got no vision. Somebody way back at the beginning made the mistake of thinking that Randy only needed to signify himself and that his gimmick should be minimal to the point of nonexistence, that he could just go out into the world like a perfect genetic generic hitler youth statue and people would go ooooooo like he was fireworks. And they did a bit, but that only goes so far. You need to be triple H or Vince McMahon to think like that, to be so dazzled by the body that you think you can just present it undressed and the people will drool, you forget there needs to be a readable pantomime persona animating it. Grarrrrhhhh! I reckon Randy's got a soul. But I have control over my career, theoretically, and I can't do naff all about his... So what have we learned... yeah... maybe I would do well to drink from the fount of gimmickery after all, since raw talent, even flair, even beauty, skill, presence, are things people find forgettable.

Or at least look at things from the point of view of the layman. The subtlety-challenged lunks on the street. Perhaps I should imagine my audience as mentally... vulgar as wrestling fans. Hee.. hmm.

Crikey at least if Randy was a generic pretty boy wrestler in the 80s he would have had fluorescent tassles and a feathered mullet.

I've always felt that Buddy Holly glasses and angel wings would be a good way forward.

Current ways of painting I'm torn between and have been for some time:

1. Smooth and acrylic on anded MDF with thin thin layers and carefulness like Ponderers

2. Multilayered and unpredictable on paper: advantage of this is something quite pleasing stacks up quite fast compared to oil layers

3. Just watercolour... I could do with the discipline. And looking at Mary Blair colours and rapid statements with appeal and meaning where design and colour are in communication

4. Delicate little coloured Edwardian fairylike drawings

5. Fast nearly all prima oil painting.... may actually be getting the hang at last. William Wray's a good influence for this

6. Trying to be like Rembrandt, perfect balance between layers and painterly flair... not easy.

There's an artist called Thomas Fluharty who I link to on my white blog, he's trained with a chap who's taught him an approximation of a Dutch portrait painting technique. Quite disciplined. Tone before colour. Actually saves time. I've never really done this, not in a proper old master way. Perhaps I need to study with a master too.

Anyway that'll do for now. I got in my lengthy Orton digression, I went over some of the basics. I expect there'll be more to say once the process is more underway. I'm going to paint my Dad. It's his birthday tomorrow.

I think it's good keeping up this blog actually, I've sort of remembered, it helps me feel I'm not stagnating in isolation. So... yay!.

I've been living without this grey blog.

I suppose I have had doubts about its actual usefulness at this point.

I've had doubts about my introspection and how much use that is.

It's probably natural to me to be introspective. But still, maybe I do have some freedom to choose. And it doesn't have to be relentless.

I've had doubts about my confections and my nonsense.

Actually I think confections and nonsense could be just the ticket with my drawing, but in writing, I am wary of adding to the shite culture web of over-interpretive poo. I think I know I've always striven for capital T Truth, but I'm not convinced that this is the way to get at it now.

But in an honest diary sort of a mode, here are some things that have happened since the last update:

I've found out my thyroid is probably slowing down.

Secret things have happened.

I've decided to paint portraits and very possibly make that the way I try to make a living. Starting with entering competitions and such. I am good at faces. I've even quite good at painting these days.

I had grown fed up with the whole art world fight being such an impenetrable puzzle for me. I felt I couldn't find the right moves. I suppose even the title and nature of this blog was a clue to the labyrinthine horrors of the whole thing for a sensitve gonk such as myself. The portrait thing looks like it could be wonderfully straightforward. I figured it out while reading Country Life magazine which is for rich people. it suddenly hit me. I can still do weird or funny or serious stuff if I like but without the pressure of making people like it... perhaps with a greater feeling of liberty.

(That was a gonk from the 1980s.)

I've been slow getting started. With the portraiture that is. My mum is spurring me on. Getting photos developed costs money. Don't have much. I will try and sell some stuff and get a digital SLR. I'm quite excited about that. Eyes on the prize. I'm learning about histograms and dynamic range.

I've been quite dizzy and my health hasn't been great. Arthritis and all that. The thyroid thing may be implicated but it's not clear yet.

WWE got a letter from congress about being alleged 'roid culture scumbags. poor old wrestling. Kind of. I thought about that last blog entry that mentioned Chris Benoit sitting here like a lemon. As they say. I'd been in two minds about bringing it up at all.

I have thought about this blog, but not quite known what to do about it.

I've been thinking about John Singer Sargent and fast alla prima painting and having flair, like Mary Blair had flair... and how people tend to respond to that kind of thing more readily than to slow encrusted paintings dense with introspection and many many microthoughts. Which are the kind of paintings I've done in the past. And the kind of lass I've been in the past. But I'm beginning to find my confidence with the flairy alla prima cocky kind of things, correlating to the fast sweepy swoopy economical drawings which I've found to my surprise that I'm capable of.

People like: one thought juicily stated. That's my new theory.

And perhaps I have the wherewithal to have a clear thought and the balls to state it juicily. Balls! Wherewithal!

That man in the picture just then was Roger Kimball. He is an American conservative cultural critic. Or people call him that. I am reading a book by him called The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art. I like reading it on benches. There's pleasant clarity in this book. There are apparently these things going on called culture wars. Mainly it's a term used in America, where these lefty righty things are more explicitly debated. I think if I wanted to get into these 'debates', I could write a lot about this. We might be getting close to the point here. I've found voices who are saying similar things to what I've struggled to say.... about why art is now a dense and discouraging thicket of nonsense, only they've said it better, and there are a few of them, and it seems that you'd call them conservatives.

I 've tended to feel when I talk about things that are amiss, that I sound like I'm making it up and making up demons that are out to hamper me. But books like this make me realise I'm not, and that the problem isn't just my problem. Privately, I'm getting more of a grip on what I need to engage with and what I can just dismiss. So things are clearer... privately.

But we might also be getting firmly into territory I won't want to blog about. I'm very wary about how divisive it might be to be seen to 'side' with people on the conservative 'side' or against The Lefties. Even though lazy radio four lefty comedians get on my bloody nerves. I'm not sure I can honestly feel certain enough about the productiveness of such a public 'affiliation' with all that that might imply, or that it might be assumed to imply. Besides, it hasn't been about my choosing an affiliation... it's rather boiled down to a question of who voices thought that support my existence, and who spews words that make my life difficult. Rather than being about whose cause I support, it's about who willingly supports my 'cause', which again I hope is not only my cause. Perhaps it's more about being chosen than it is about choosing. Or being enlisted, even. I've had comments on my white blog that say 'We need you in the fight' without specifying which fight, I still had a sense of what was meant. At the very least it's a skill vs. bollocks fight. (The cartoonists who comment on my blog are fairly apolitical I'd say). Cause: the thing this blog has been about, 'clearing a space' to paint (well) among the diseased prevailing bollocks-wind. Re Mr. Kimball: even if I'm not necessarily pro bow ties or against rock music, Kimball's one of the voices speaking eloquently against the (culturally dominant) dogmas that set me back, and for things that should be there (un-eclipsed and nutritious) to nourish me, and not just me, like civilization and Truth. He might not exactly be hip, but in a funny kind of way he may be helping the cause of hipness.

He wrote a book about the sixties, Kimball did, called the Long March. I haven't read that. I was looking at some of the Amazon reviews yesterday. In that book he rips apart some of the intellectual whiffyness that was influential at the time and since. I'm sure he does a convincing job with it. But I find (quite apart from my nervousness about taking sides when that might not even be the point anyway) I can't go as far as some conservatives do, to dismiss rock music or the Beatles. At all. They lose me there, when they go there. Only a few do these days, probably. Even though I understand more now where that comes from. I read that 'The Menace of Beatlism' article by Paul Johnson from 1964 or so in the Faber Book of Pop when I was in the bath the other day, and despite loving the Beatles from almost every conceivable angle, I sympathised with it to a degree. Again I feel sandwiched onto a precarious but delicious knife edge with my paradoxical sympathies.

It's not that paradoxical really. It just seems like it is. I sounded like an idiot saying 'delicious'. I really don't feel very confident about writing these things lately. Or about my general competence at everything. But I'm going to try and finish this blog anyway. Oh why don't I just go and lie in a puddle and sneeze.

The thing is I do love the Beatles. I love their music. It's seemed since at least since I was a grownup that making sense of the 1960s would unlock some kind of knock-on cultural answers. It has seemed as if the sixties are the place our dominant values grew, or fell from. And liking the Beatles is one of the things I am surest of. it's a very visceral, joyful, heart and soul kind of liking. the Beatles seem to enrich the world. But what did people take from the Beatles, what did they deduce from them? So that certainty is an interesting point to extrapolate from.

I was thinking about that 'certainty' again watching one of the recent programmes about Elvis, I think it was 'Young Elvis in Colour' on ITV. Someone was talking about rock and roll in general, and how it made young people want to 'fight or screw'. And the people who were young considering that a good thing. And I was listening to the music and liking it so viscerally and being so grateful for its vitality and humanity and all of that. But it made me think, I'm culturally conditioned to allow myself totally to be swept up by visceral forces. We have James Blunt now, so that quality seems like a precious relic, tragically extinct. But what if there was a reason to resist that visceral music, even having admitted it's 'irresistable'. it's obvious historically that there was no use resisting it, no use demonizing it, because it was coming anyway. But the older people in the fifties were right to be scared of it as a force, because it did eclipse other things, their things, even their values. And thinking outside history and in the abstract, perhaps there is a personal advantage to be had from resisting the pull of the most 'visceral' the most sexual or animal sorts of cultural stuff, because that kind of stuff eclipses my patience for Bach and makes me a jiggly moron.

Some feelings are finer.

But sometimes being vivified by louder cruder popper things can feel quite wholesome too.

The point of saying 'knife edge' back there is that a knife edge is sharp, and I'm interested in being sharp, in having my wits about me, and not falling into stale habits of thinking, and certainly not stale habits prescribed by stupidity culture. My seeming fetish for being 'between things'... well I hope it's not about romanticising myself as an outsider 'never fitting'. And it's not about being indecisive or vague either. I hope. It's about not fully trusting, not fully buying into... about being cautious. Paul Morley bangs on about nonsense and isn't a conservative, he can be naughtily ambiguous about shit, but he's sharp. And being sharp is the thing. Seeing what's going on. Seeing. Having a good eye. Like with caricature. He gets at some kind of truth, or at least some kind of revealings, through looking intricately at culture as it's happening. And I like that... I like being between the no nonsense conservatism of Kimball and the non nonsense nonsense of Paul Morley.

Because another thing I cant do is dismiss our whole culture now because it's 'gone wrong' or 'gone rotten', even though I understand why people think that, and they're kinda right. I want to accept the flow of things and not stubbornly try to mark out a little world for myself that accepts no influence from after 1965 or whatever. I can't be permanently hostile to a neat now. I think perhaps part of that acceptance is seeing the limitations of culture itself. Simon Fuller does not need to destroy my happiness.

And I've realised again that I like engaging with some culture from now and seeing what there is to be seen in it, even if it's just wrestling. I find plenty in wrestling to keep me going. Solving the puzzle of Randy Orton and the trouble with his minimalist gimmick. But also computer games, I like new ones of those. I want to play Lord of the Rings Online. I'm interested in why people like hazy graphics and where your brain resides when you're being a demon lord. I sometimes think about drawing Big Brother contestants. I'm not wailing and lamenting when I'm thinking about those things, though they may all be poorer than Elvis.

When I said 'hipness' back there it might have been a bit cheeky and I didn't make it clear what it meant... the meaning of hipness in my brain is stuck as a Brian Wilson thing. During my Beach Boys phase I read a passage in one of the Beach Boys books about how in the mid sixties everyone wanted to be around Brian because he seemed to have special knowledge, and it was a special knowledge in tune with that time, in tune with the best part of what was happening. And even vulgar ordinary people could sense it radiating from him, or to him. Like an antenna. It's that kind of hipness that I think really has some substance to it, a being in tune with... perhaps the archetypal currents that underlie the things that are happening. And being in tune in a way that's creatively productive, of course. So it's a kind of transcending the ephemera of the time but being in touch with the truth of the time. The things that are being revealed in a bigger deeper narrative.

Having said tht, I like a bit of ephemera. Perhaps I could have used a more judgemental word like 'trash'. Transcending the trash. Or perhaps just not assigning it too much importance. Or perhaps not asssigning the whole GAME too much importance, and seeing through or via the trash to some kind of beauty, and some kind of truth.

Or maybe my drawing culture from now is an attempt to be Bruegel drawing beggars or Bosch painting demons.

sharp, humbling, mindbending, restorative, curative

I listen to a lot of Old Time Radio, even more now, while I'm painting. I find it really stimulating. I listen to The Whistler and Suspense a lot, and the New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and the Jack Benny Programme and Dragnet. I have a special fondness for Dragnet. Dragnet's a police drama from the fifties. It has Joe Friday in it. The main characters are decent and softly spoken. The people caught up in the crimes are often quite sympathetic and well acted. The values in Dragnet are nice. On the side of the law. No moral ambiguity. Dragnet is mindbending. In my Myspace world of lists of cool influences and clunking wads of cultural/moral relativism, Dragnet's really interesting... it's a real actual contrast. It's radical. It challenges that world. Backwards. Challenges its very foundations. It does the things that art baddies say art should do, and it does them in my mind, only really and not pretend. In some ways 'conservative' things and things from 'uptight' eras are the most exciting to me just now. Because though the self appointed cool kids might not see it, they had richness in other ways.

I'll go with the flow, but where's Tintoretto? He's impossible.

I was going to say something about integralism and that I think they're onto something but I'm still wary of being too embracing and forgiving of all of everything. But I've written quite a lot I think.

Spare words:

culture not be all end all anyway

vital men dig my wallop drawings

I think I quite fancy an Olympus camera. the Digital SLR geeks make out like getting an olympus says something about you, it says that you're a free-thinking rebel unwilling to follow the square old Canon Nikon herd. I mainly quite like the design and the fact the that E-410 is brand new and teeny tiny. But maybe I do have an unconscious smidge of needing to be slightly non obvious. I've always had that. I used to want a not blonde Sindy. That seemed important. But it isn't.

At the end of Monday, I had a notion that I would write a blog about Monday. It felt like I wanted a more intimate diaristic kind of a focus rather than trying to force grand abstractions. I felt there was more to be learned from noting how the day flowed than by trying to detach myself from days. When I'm finishing paintings, it's less about thoughts about 'rules' and more about very specific thoughts that have little to do with deduction.

Hello Monday, you seem nice

Monday's less fresh in my mind now, but I had a list of things about Monday and the things I did that I'd still like to mention.

I painted this minotaur painting.

In between, I played Heroes of Might and Magic V. It is a turned-based strategy game for the PC. It has very absorbing gameplay where you make armies of griffins and marksmen and gallop around a big map finding crystals and geting extra luck points from fairies. I know that playing computer games is one of the less cool things that I do. I know it's the ultimate antisocial loner kind of activity. But I find that particularly on days when I am painting a lot, it actually helps me to be in the right frame of mind.

Playing games can be very absorbing.. it very much absorbs your thought into the particularly well-measured challenges inside it. It can make you forgetful about the external world... I can really see why games are sometimes used as 'distraction therapy' for cancer patients going through chemotherapy and things like that. There can be something almost (probably quasi) spiritual about forgetting yourself in that way. I've written about that before in reference to wrestling and other things, although games do it in a unique way.

But the point is that the periods of game playing break up the painting so I can return with fresh eyes, and already in a state of mind where I want to become absorbed, and it becomes practical to forget about my body, social urges, life stuff. It becomes practical to my purposes to dwell in something like a plane of pure imagination, which the game has helped my brain towards in some indefinable way.

'When we discover that the imagination really is the ground of being, then it will be as if man had discovered fire for the second time. The imagination is to be the golden pathway to a new cultural hyperspace' - Terence McKenna

On the Sims the Sim people have a 'social meter' which needs to be kept from dropping below a certain level if they're to stay happy and functional. Also if it goes down to zero the Social Bunny turns up, and that's a bit creepy. I think we all have that social meter thingy and for good reason, but sometimes it is useful for my work for me to find ways of making it shut up. I've heard and read that people with autism or aspergers' syndrome tend not to have a social meter in the same way... they can absorb themselves in solitary hobby type activity or creative stuff for hours and days, without needing to be 'topped up' with company or affection or validation from other humans. Sometimes that sounds quite enviable to me. What kind of needy beasts are we anyway?

Also on Monday I listened to a supernatural story called 'The Willows' on BBC7. it's by Algernon Blackwood. And for some reason only part three and four are available now. Anyway it was a nice little well written story about uncanny things and otherness and dread and willows and the Danube and two men on a boat. Oh look! the full text of it is online.

And I listened to an episode of the Jack Benny programme in which Jack has a dream about murdering his barbershop quartet, and Mary says 'chiss sweeze sandwich' by mistake. I love the Jack Benny programme. or I suppose 'program' since it is American. It is whimsical and has multiple layers of reality. It's decent and gentle like things from that time tend to be, but those are not wimpy weak dated qualities.

And also I thought about Chris Benoit and the horror of that whole thing really lingered with me, though monday was not a day when I sought out information about it. I wasn't going to mention it because it just feels tasteless one way or another. But it began to get to me a little bit on Monday. It was not settling with me. If you're not a wrestling fan or you don't know who Chris Benoit was, it's just another horrific news story, but I feel slightly more connected to it than that. not least because I painted him a few times. In fact I still have a couple of unfinished painting that he's in. He was in my category of wrestlers with big pale expressive eyes. And he's a hard person to explain, his talents are hard to explain to people who don't 'get' wrestling. I don't know what more I can say about it.

With this next one I always felt like the backdrop was weak and wussy compared to the lion. But I don't think I'm prepared to tamper with it now. I don't think. Maybe I'm still meant to.

Today I keep experiencing waves of nausea so I might have left something out. But never mind. It's not healthy to just live in your mind, it's not balanced, but at some times it's a sacrifice I make. Often when I've got my period, and can't do much healthy rosy cheeked gym going and such anyway, if that's not too graphic for all you men out there.

Also on Monday I cooked some rhubarb. Then I realised that I put too much water in so I shoved some millet grain in to absorb some of the water. I have learned to live with my decision.

I had a bit of an attack of insecurity last night after that subscriber dropoff incomprehension incident. As a rule I'm inclined to think that insecurity is no use to anyone, and indulging in insecurity and self-doubt are the most ego-bound and tiresome things I do.

But there may be a sense in which some kind of quite crude, slightly forced second-guessing about 'what people might want' and even 'how not to look like a maniac' helps to keep me on my toes. To the extent that I am here out in the interworld exposing my thoughts, for some reason.

I said to Marlo in an instant message the other day that I thought 'being out in the open makes you raise your game'... so did I mean that? What did I mean? I was talking about picture-blogging. My whole experience with blogging my pictures has been one of opening out and becoming more transparent, and more straightforward. And more instant, spontaneous, from drawing the drawing to exposing it without fear.I suppose it's been living only half in the mystical not of this world flippy flappy art butterfly lady art mist. And half in this bawdy bouncy American opinion cartoonist let it all hang out place. Being in that latter... place... involves a certain amount of... well firstly I suppose showing off. Showing off the range of my talents. Like doing different kinds of juggling or something. The range of my talents... indeed the VARIETY of them. There's an aspect of blogging where it's like a variety show, or a circus, if you don't like that you might like this, and if you don't like this it doesn't matter because there'll be something new tomorrow.

So it forces me into a mentality where I'm (at least secretly) eager to please in a very dumb obvious way, which I didn't think was natural to me. I mean banal thoughts like 'I've done too many wrestler drawing posts lately. Must shove in a few minotaurs before people get bored or run out of new comments to make about them'... that is banal, but the banality of it serves a purpose. I need some kind of self-regulation. Or indeed, imaginary regulation from imaginary clusters of 'audience'. Or... the danger is that I take it all too seriously and get in a stew. 'But where am I GOING with these draing of John Cena dressed as Liono, Lord of the Thundercats? How will this motif be rendered mind-blowing and ground breaking in order to augment my glorious legacy? Oh deary me!' not taking things too seriously is important. Important to my not getting in a flap.

Having the courage of my very silly convictions

But...even as in that little imaginary Liono anxiety in quotes back there... not taking my seriousness too seriously. Or... taking my sillyness quite seriously. Following through. Giving it legs to run with. What if I really did set myself such challenges, which are both elaborately absurd and authentically challenging to my mechanical prowess.

In fact, that might be what painting IS for me at the moment. Having the courage and the humour to take deep leaps into the territory of pure imagination. Leaps which also require some sophisticated and realistic knowledge of the mechanical processes likely to be involved.

I beleive in vision. I am not prepared to TALK about it in great depth. That's not my job. I may lose sight of the 'target' sometimes. But it is present for me. I blunder and reach for it.

Working up a vision beyond mechanics

One of the things that struck me reading the slightly dry introduction to the Samuel Palmer book was the idea that Palmer was not a natural visionary in the way that William Blake was, no face of God in the upstairs window or anything like that. But he believed in the idea of vision and worked himself up into a state. Speaking of things that are a little bit forced, unmagical, but that serve productive creative ends, as I have been... I thought this fits.

'Yet Palmer was not a visionary in the sense that Blake was. Vision appears to have come to Blake as a natural, intuitive process. Though highly imaginative, Palmer did not experience vision in this way. he had to simulate the process through an effort of will. Much of the enthusiastic writing in his drawings and sketches - particularly those in his remarkable sketchbook of 1824 - show him trying to work himself up to see phenomena such as trees becoming princesses or moons standing tiptoe on the hills. Similarly, when visually aiming to communicate such experiences, he is constantly testing and experimenting with ways of achieving the sense of visionary transformation. This might make him less of a genuine visionary, but it does not make him less of an artist. On the contrary, it is what gives his work its fascination, sensitivity and richness.'

So the quality or authenticity of the 'vision' does not correlate directly to the quality of the painting. To put this very crudely. but putting things crudely seems part of today's theme. To force it is allowable; with sufficient conviction and imagination you can get away with it bigtime.

And I suppose what I'm saying is that as-close-to-perfect-as-possible painting ends sometimes need to be acheived by imperfect, even clumsy, blundering means. Acts of will... are often acts of guesswork, or they feel like they are. Not illuminated by archangels or anything like that.

Paintings very much exist in the gross material realm even if they can channel and radiate finer grades of energy. I mean... it's fairly amazing when you just think that globs of greasy paint can be arranged in such a way that they radiate optical light, or even make the illusion of a shiny metal hat.The interplay of grease and light. Good greasy sorcery by us blundering grease sorcerers.

Drips of Paint wrote this in a comment on my richness/stillness blog:

'You have an interesting way of talking out loud to yourself. I almost could not catch up but then I am always slow with word. Your talking is like your drawing, line and thoughts flying everywhere at once and eventually arriving to making sense out of chaos.'

As long as the making sense bit takes place, I'm not too offended at the idea of being a purveyor of chaos in word and line.

Duties?

I suppose the central thrusting point of this entry is a sort of a reaction to some guilt-tinged idea I have harboured that I am obliged to live in an unsoiled integrity haze. Whatever that is. A sort of guilt at my own artistic freedom. I have been granted this freedom... so I must always do the purest and noblest and rightest and most angel-lit thing. But obviously now I draw these ideas out and put them to bed, and I ponder the best way to excercise the freedom I have. And perhaps it's OK to work myself up forcefully into a quasi visionary wobble, and to not have deep esoteric understanding of all the toys I'm playing with... stomping and blundering is OK... to make my free will the freeest of all willies...

In fact, becoming more comfortable with forcings and strivings and blunderings may be the route to the most radiant possible integrity-haze of a finished artefact.