Listening to Bruckner "Mass nr 2 in E minor" and Signer's new album

o o o

Lying in bed and really enjoying looking at assorted works on the wall. The one in the middle is a oil-pastel work on paper by Daniel Phillips.

PARTIALLY RETICULATED, 2009

... done!

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

Partial reticulation

Doing, doing, ...

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.

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: