Some days I feel like Carl from Up, guess it might be the never ending march of time, but other days I feel like some spring chick who has boundless energy. Today on this spectrum I am well towards Carl! Anyway it has given me the time to make some sketches/drawings so a bit of a silver lining?
Man flu is a curse of the man of leisure and at the moment I am cursed. yesterday was a bit of a false dawn as today I feel worse. Much as I feel a bit shit at the moment I know in a day or so I’ll be back to myself again – god help my long suffering wife.
Yesterday I posted a about Abba and Wendy Kate, a follow of my blog, made a comment that made me start to think – should I make some Abba art works? As with most of my greats ideas it will no doubt come to nothing but late last night I made this quick sketch of Agnetha Faltskog who, like an awful lot of men of my generation, I had a bit of a crush on her.
Anyway, enough of reminiscence of a lost youth. The rest of yesterday found me sitting around just doing a bit of doodling of things that I came across. Just the usual eclectic bunch of stuff me thinks.
Abba are one of those bands that seem to divide opinion. Back in the 1970’s I thought they were a great pop band and I still do. The closest I ever got to the band was that I was almost run over by a limo in which they were travelling – but that is a whole different story in a whole different world. My friend has always hated Abba for reasons I have never understood – something to do with a lack of guitars or something like that. I have never understood that argument but we are all entitled to our opinion.
You might think that there is some connection to the drawings but there really isn’t other than I am listening to Abba as I write this. But I guess when all is said and done I have a dream that this is the name of the game because the winner takes it all.
Ha ha.
Fallen Woman
Good start to the New Year – a head cold and dickie hip. Still could be worse – much much worse. So have I any New Year’s resolutions? No not really as over the years I have come to realise they only get broken very quickly – that doesn’t say too much for my will power does it but at least it is truthful.
I keep looking at Fallen Woman and wonder where she came from ? It certainly is not the drawing it was based on but I suspect the answer may lie somewhere in the forth drawing of the back of a young woman – this was based on an Egon Schiele drawing. How certain artists influence us is strange and wonderful but a little frightening. Actually it looks more like Walter Sickert in his Camden phase or perhaps Toulouse-Lautrec or perhaps the head cold is just dulling my brain. Probably the latter.
Sniff Sniff.
Well it looks like we’ve managed not to blow the world up for another year which in itself is a real achievement. However, we do seem set on buggering up the climate so perhaps things are not so rosy. Traditionally New Year’s Eve is a time of reflection on the previous 12 months but nowadays we don’t even have to make much of an effort as Facebook will do that for you so that is alright then.
I guess this reflects what many people’s lives have been reduced to, a series of incoherent events in a man made construct, a year. Just incase you were wondering, I’m sure you weren’t, there is no reason why the 1st of January should be the New Year, indeed in many cultures it isn’t, so I have never really got too excited about such an artifice. But again we are dragooned into feeling we must by popular culture and expectation. Ba humbug to the lot of it.
To Sharpie the Cat
….an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one….
Need I say anymore?
Tis the season for coming down with ailments…as the song may have gone. All around me my friends have got a variation of the lurgy and I appear to have pulled a muscle in my leg. Anyway this didn’t stop me nipping over to may friend for a chat, cup of tea and then to use his ageing but rather good large format printer.
This has allowed me to tick another task on my to do list as complete. There is something rather satisfying when you get the chance to do that…very satisfying indeed.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
– Hamlet (1.5.167-8),
Oh this brings back memories, plotting out workflow models and then using them to optimise the process. Hours and hours of fun I had making ever more complicated diagrams which were totally dismissed because some senior manager didn’t like how they contradicted how he, and it usually was a he, thought something was/should work. I am so glad I am shot of that whole aspect of my life.
The problem was I was examining this afternoon is whether Lightroom Mobile can be used to streamline a digital workflow for a photographer who spends a lot of time in the field away from his lap top but could use an iPad instead as it is much lighter and easier to use. The conclusion I have come to at the moment is that it wouldn’t be advisable as it is far from clear as to where the digital image he has captured sits, either on his iPad or the Creative Cloud or sync’d laptop. In short the complexities introduced into the system would seem to suggest that the costs of any confusion caused would seem to out weight any gains.
This is a shame really because Lightroom Mobile is a rather nice piece of software if you have a creative cloud account and a good Wifi signal. The interface is simple to use and actually looks someone took sometime to produce it – which is not always the case with some apps. However, I am not certain it is the way froward for my friend.
This is a digital portrait I am working on at the moment – in real world terms this is an oil sketch – not sure whether this is a creative col de sac – time will tell.
I think it is far to say that my portrait painting has hit a bit of a crises – somewhere along the way I seem to have lost my sense of adventure and reversed into something I am not and as usual the painting never lies. These three paintings I made back in 2012 have more power and immediacy than the work I am producing at the moment.
Again the digital work from 2013 has a passion and interest that is also missing from the latest paintings. So what to do? Is there something wrong with what I am now making or is it just a case of too much Christmas fare has made me just a little maudlin about what I do?
So what to do about all this? Why have I started making some really boring works? It really is a recent thing and I am not sure how to get out of this funk. I guess the only way is just to knuckle down and paint my way out of things. “Oh the pain Will Robinson..the pain the pain.”
