Some good flowers

I might try and get a better shot of the first one, cos that doesn't really do it justice.

I took the day off work

I couldn't be fucked going to the office. It was pouring with rain outside and all I could bring myself to do was loll around on the carpet with the Layla, paint, and sleep. So I had a word to my boss...





Nice to have a stack of annual leave up ones sleeve, what.

Chipping away

Parsnips, bone-in

Once upon a time, there was a drawing:


... which became an album cover.

It seems almost predetermined that it should come to this:

LET ME MAKE THIS REALLY SIMPLE FOR YOU, 2009

Let me make this really simple for you, 2009
oil on canvas
24.5 x 20 cm.
private collection

BLURT, 2009

Blurt, 2009

Oil on canvas

24.5 x 20 cm.
[Destroyed]

ARE ''FRIENDS'' ELECTRIC?, 2002

As per previous post. This is the completed work:

Are "friends" electric?, 2002
oil on canvas
64 x 99 cm.
private collection

Are ''Friends'' electric?

I found an old snapshot of a painting I made for the Spaceships Of The Mind series and exhibition in 2002. For a while there, it had a gantry tower in it:

This is how it ended up. (Sorry that the colours are so mismatched; for some reason this early shot was taken with a flash.)

PARTIALLY RETICULATED, 2009

... done!

Partially reticulated, 2009
oil on canvas
60 x 50 cm.

Smoke, tombstone

Often when I finish a work, I have some paint left over.

Partial reticulation

Doing, doing, ...

dolma tarifi...

Coming along...

Spin upheaval

Some work was performed on "Partially Reticulated" during the the small hours of the night:


I am exceedingly pleased at how one of the faux-collectivo is beginning to resemble a major human life-enabling body-organ. And a moon-hopper. And a dog-toy.

Blurt-2

Progressing:

God, my slideshow is shit, and I really need to do something about it

Another lovely weekend. Finished "Blurt" this afternoon. Pics soon (tmrrw?) Spent time with David, Rose, Kim Pieters, and S. Watched some of Kim's new films, one of which, Magnet, is set to my album The Green Morning from a couple of years ago. It's stunningly beautiful and I'm ecstatic at how it turned out.

David and Kim have been working on their pieces for the Wall Works show at the Adam, which is open to the public to experience the creation of the works IN REAL TIME WHILE IT HAPPENS. (what a great way to make socially awkward artists incredibly uncomfortable. Make 'em work it.. go 'on.. make 'em work for their peanuts.) Anyway, all of the work is looking really good. The "opening" / piss-up is later this week sometime.

Fiddling about on a Monday night

So I was fiddling about with the new painting last night, and added a few little touches here and there:


I know, I know, you can hardly tell at this resolution. You'll have to believe me.

o o o

While I was drawing the images which served as the basis for this painting, I was thinking about Swine Flu and weird undiscovered microbes and fungal spores and so on. When I was painting it the other night, though, I started remembering how when I was a kid I read some WWII war story or something which involved the torrid, insidious dangers of floating mines. I could clearly remember what I had imagined at the time that they looked like -- and that was something remarkably similar to my 'cluster' of 'microbes'. Of course, the real thing is more functional and less fantastic, but there you go.

BLURT

Oops, I completely forgot in my last post to upload the picture of the drawing upon which the painting is based. Here it is next to the painting which is based on the other drawing on the paper:


As you can see, it's very important for a serious artist to buy and use very expensive Visual Diaries made from high quality bleached paper and bound together in a hard-wearing cover of some description, as purveyed by your local purveyor of Expensive Art Products for Serious Artists... wait, no, that's not right at all. As you can see, you can make do with the back of a fucking phone bill. Sorry that you can't hardly see anything, though.

On the left is another little work I have been chipping away at in the background. It's named "Blurt".

New strategies for old problems

What a bloody brilliant weekend! Managed to get out yesterday for several hours of boozing in the sun with S. but aside from that, I worked on the new painting quite a bit. Really enjoying how it's coming along:


No title yet.

ps. The new strategy for the old problem? I've discovered that (fingers crossed knock on wood) Isopropyl Alcohol, in addition to its many uses from cleaning tape recorder mechanisms and LPs, to manufacturing cannabis oil (*cough* or so I've heard), it's marvelous at getting oil paint out of clothes and carpet. Seems to just break the stuff right down and destroy it. I gotta try cleaning a brush with it to see what happens.

PARTIALLY RETICULATED

One of the (two) canvases I didn't include in the pic in the previous post was something I started last year and then had to suddenly stop again in order to move house:



I decided that this was going to be the canvas that I worked on first, so as to gently ease myself back into painting again. After a day or so and some thinking and plotting, it turned into something like this:

And so it goes...

I had spent a few days stretching canvases on a number of stretchers that I had scattered around the place. This included ripping the canvas off a couple of shit paintings from last year, and also stretching over and gluing canvas to some wooden boards that also used to be (shit) paintings, from a looooong time ago.

I hate painting on board for some reason.

Anyhow, I just spent all weekend gessoing and prepping the canvases:


One, two, three layers of gesso on the face, two on the sides, and two sealing the back. On top of that, two layers of thin(nish) yellow (Cadmium Yellow Light) acrylic.

I now have 15 supports of various sizes. The largest must be a good 800mm square. Some of them already have random underpainting on them.