Today I’m mostly confined to bed. By my own decree. Teresa’s at work. And I am on Easter break. Although it may be a bigger hiatus? That’s partly why I’m in bed!
I woke when Teresa got up, at 5.30am (mad!). But most of the time between about 9am and 3pm I’ve been in a 50/50 mix of resting/dozing, and outright sleeping. Snooker, with Kieran Wilson thrashing Ali Carter, on the Tour Championship, is helping on all fronts with rest and sleep!
An ornery mule, with an artist’s soul.
But around 2pm, after a second long chat with the alphabet soup brigade (the bouillabaisse of acronyms for mental-health organisations), I felt I needed an injection of culture and inspiration. So I hoyked a few art books off the shelves.
Angst meets beauty, in mixed media on canvas.
Having resumed a long derelict interest in making art, I thought I’d also resume the act of feeding on the soul food that art can be. Hence getting these tomes offa the shelves. Turner and The Sea, Guston, and de Kooning. Endless hours of fun and nourishment!
Not so eyebrow, n’est ce pas!?
And to keep my furrowed brows at the correct elevation, something a bit ‘Felix’ lighter!
No-brow? Love the Tintin style cover!
And of course, Viz. Thanks to the Viz Team I nearly died laughing last night.
Having got the ‘art’ bug again, as well pursuing Abbie and Dan’s commission, I’m trying to pick up where I left off. Here I’m attempting to resume my Manolo series.
The left sketch is his face, melting ever further into abstraction. At right it’s the backdrop again. The cloudscape. This time the yellow is overstated. And some former parts of Manolo are introduced, via masking off the background.
Manolo, Spread#4, right, 2nd state.
One thing that bugs me about my methods, is how, in trying to superimpose layers, things often get too busy, and something breaks down. The above would be a case in point. Trying to combine the figural abstraction and the background, somehow neither seems right.
Manolo Spread #5, the ‘Silent Era’.
This frustration prompted me to further ‘worrit’ these ideas. But now in black and white only. It’s another way of trying to reduce and knock back the noise! Of the two I think the pastel effort, at left (and below) is the better.
There’s mileage in this’un. Less sure about this one.
Running the same ideas through all these iterations allows me to explore different ideas via varied mediums.
Ultimately I’ll probably explore these ideas further – or not, if I abandon a vein, thinking it a poor prospect – in one of two ways: black and white prints, or full colour paintings.
Esp’ with the latter, whether it’s going to be acrylics or oils, the opacity of the medium adds yet another different facet to the process. And I can of course do monochromatic paintings and colour prints.
Without checking back, I think this little series of sketches, again from a decade ago, started with looking at an El Greco painting.
He distorted his subjects a fair bit, in a series of ever more stylised manners, as his style evolved. Taking his distortions as a starting point, I have, from the get go, been distorting further.
Manolo, Spread #2.
In the second spread, at left, I went back to the source again, but this time with a slightly more cartoonish feel. The one on the right is devoted solely to the background, in particular the cloudy sky; extrapolating shapes and colours. The yellow in this image is lost a bit in the photograph.
Manolo, Spread #3.
The third spread combines further abstraction of ‘Manolo’, at left, and an homage to (or poss’ even a straight copy of) either Picasso or Braque. Picasso’s my main man. Braque much less so. Though having said that, I do like the latter’s work. Just not as much as Picasso’s!
This little series of miniature abstracts was born of spell of mental ill health. I hate that phrase, and I don’t think it really accurately captures what I was going through. But anyway, whatevs, as they say these days!
I was, rather amazingly, prescribed a short series of therapeutic art classes. As is so often the way with me, ornery curmudgeon that I am, I didn’t play by the rules – adopts Saxondale manner – this lone wolf rides to the tune of a different drummer (face-slap!).
My raison-ing was that, given I’m already a trained, even professional (occasionally!) artist, I didn’t need to do the ABC type stuff my group was doing. I just needed a quiet corner in which to pursue already established trajectories. Fortunately I was allowed to do just that.
The net results were this little serious of four mini-abstractions. They began life as an evolution from sketches of a stained glass window. In fact somewhere I’ve got an image I really like, showing how these little artworks evolved. I’ll stick that up here if I can find it!
To those with a bit of art or art history knowledge, some of my influences might be discernible? Perhaps ironically the single greatest influence on my own art isn’t really obvious in these series. That’d be Picasso. More on his influence to follow!
Some of the major influences on this approach, however, are Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and to a much lesser extent, some of Brice Marden’s linear stuff. There’s even a bit of Georg Baselitz in there (thanks to the influence of an old – and much missed – pal, Ben Carter). And then there are less obvious folk, like Turner, and even Caspar David Friedrich.
These aren’t the best photos. You can see the shadow of my head on them! It’d be nice to have much better lit and positioned photographs, but these’ll have to do for now!
Whilst doing the initial sketches for this recent commission from Abbie and Dan, yesterday, I came across some black and white ink drawings, or sketches, that are, rather shockingly, now a decade old. That’s what this post is comprised of.
The first spread is two images that I think are actually derived from the same source. The left hand one is, I think, better/stronger, compositionally. And I’ll come back to it later in the series. The right hand one is further explored in the next spread.
2nd Spread.
I’m not sure what’s going on with the left hand image, in this second spread I think it’s still derived from the same source, but possibly, flipped or rotated? Either way, it takes the whole thing in another direction.
Both of these belong to the more diffuse all over abstraction I’ve struggled with for years now. I somehow feel they have something. Something I like and don’t want to lose. But something I can’t quite put my finger on, and that’s all too easily lost amidst ‘too much information’.
3rd Spread.
Spread three sees two ‘new’ things: the left is inspired by the drawings of Tove ‘Moomin’ Jansson, whose work I love. And it’s much more obviously representational. The right hand image, on the udder hand, sees me successfully distilling some of the preceding stuff into a stronger more succinct image/composition.
I love the sixth image of this series, and intend to do a series of prints, using it as a starting point. It’s the most reductive and simplified image to have come out of a number of related series of ideas, some of which are black and white, others (to feature in another post soon) are full colour ‘miniature’ paintings.
4th Spread.
The fourth and final spread in this series is an exploration of a different source image. This one comes from the painting below, which belongs to but is also separate from the series alluded to above, that I’ll be posting about next.
These two share an imagery antecedent that is part head and shoulders ‘portrait’, part tree, part mountains, and simultaneously wholly abstract (pictured below). Once again, I think there might be grounds for or mileage in a print series coming out of this?
This one’s up on a wall at home.
For absolutely yonks – about ten years! – I’ve thought all this stuff was ok as ‘research’, but not good enough to share. Teresa has consistently said I ought to share it. I’m finally coming around to her way of thinking. So here it is!
Some of this stuff would up framed and on display, albeit only in our home(s). As of right now, only the image above is currently adorning our walls. Though I do plant I put up more original art around the house.
My sister Abbie and her husband Dan have commissioned me to paint an artwork for their home. That’s so lovely! Thanks, guys.
I’ve been given some photographic reference. I won’t say what that is, nor will I show it. For me the idea with the abstract side of my work is to work from the real world away, into something more dreamlike, and poetic; evocative yet imprecise, difficult to pin down.
Sketch#2, 1/4/23.
Sketch#1 was a first overall reaction to the photographic image. Whilst a lot is left out, it’s still quite dense and busy. So the next three sketches unpack certain elements.
Sketch#2 catches some of the organic green growth, a very small but visually potent or significant element in the overall scene.
Sketch#3, 1/4/23.
Sketch#3 is the lighter stuff, the air and the water, the sun making strange reflections. This view is probably a second layer, to be rendered over Sketch#4.
It seems odd in retrospect that I’m ending where one might have thought I should start, with the hard, solid architectural stuff; the landscape itself, and the straight lines of the man-made stuff.
So it is that Sketch#4 might well constitute the basal architecture of this painting? It might be the first layer?
Sketch#4, 1/4/23.
Here are the same four images as two double-spreads…
Sketches #1 and #2 …… and #t3 and #4!
I like seeing these four images together… or should I be saying juxtaposed, for the cognoscenti? They are, after all, derived from the same source.
What might prove tricky – and it ought to be, frankly – is amalgamating (what a word that is!) all these extractions. Can it be done? Should it be done?
Anyway, these sketches are a first draft response to a recent commission. I’m hoping that this process will bring my art practice back to life. It felt good to be sketching again today!
‘Honest politics and Tory politics are contradictions in terms. Lying is a necessary part of a Tory’s political equipment, for it is essential for him to conceal his political intentions from the people. This is partly the reason for his success in keeping power.’
The founder of the NHS, and a chief builder of the post WW11 Welfare State, Nye Bevan, in 1944.
All these years later, after a period in which over 75% of the time has seen Tories in government (add New Labour’s Tory-Lite era, and it’s been an era of near as dammit total right wing dominance!), his words seem more apt than ever.
I hate Toryism, Conservatism*, Capitalism, and their rabid pooches, aka the right-wing media.
[* Small ‘c’ conservatism is fine. I’m all for preserving what is good. Ironically large ‘C’ Conservatism, far from conserving what is good, takes a wrecking ball to it.]
It is my firm and unshakeable belief, based on the evidence of just over fifty years on this planet, that the Tories have presided over (masterminded is just plain wrong, in such instances) a sustained campaign, not just of thievery – the ‘plunder of the commons’ that has always been the m.o. of any rapine ruling elite – but vulgarisation.
This is what passes for culture in Toryland.
Toryism not only takes from the many to enrich the few, it also seeks to destroy the very soul of any cultures not wholly compliant with or supportive of their base greediness. Modern mainstream TV and the commercial Muzak Industry are typical exemplars.
Some of the many other ways in which all of this is apparent are: the growing ubiquity of gambling, the wall to wall encroachment of advertising,* the disintegration – dismemberment is a more accurate term – of public institutions (be they councils, schools, the BBC or NHS), and the shifting of care off government shoulders on to those of the charity sector.
[* Sadly adturds.co.uk has stopped. That was always a good place to have a laugh about how ghastly contemporary ad culture has become.]
Scary. Ironically, I am myself a Lloyds customer.*
[* Orwellian times, indeed, when a soul-less parasitic money making machine spends millions (whose money are they spending on this, I wonder?) lying to its victims, er, sorry, customers, to persuade them they are our friends. Appalling!]
Descartes ‘I think, therefore I am’ has been replaced by ‘I shop, therefore I am’. Even healthcare has its own dedicated lottery. And of course more and more people are ever more reliant on charity, because our government clearly doesn’t give a f*ck.
Most government policies are nakedly self-interested. That’s the whole raison d’etre for Brexit; escape EU control, deregulate, and pillage.
And if it’s not brazen greediness, it’s pandering to their Daily Mail reading zombie supporters. Examples of this range from their attitude towards immigration and refugees, to protests, the homeless, and the recent introduction of ‘antisocial behaviour’ legislation to stop the recreational use of laughing gas.
Good God, Steve Bell is terrific.
Regarding Tory pandering to the gammonry, it’s blatantly clear they don’t care one jot about expert opinion – from the laughing gas ban to their ‘plans’ re energy and the environment – or the fact that their moronically myopic policies are far more likely to damage more lives than they’ll benefit.
It’s not just that no cost to the plebs is too great. It’s that naked self-serving egotism, elitism and greed are so central, so fundamental, to the Tory outlook (I nearly said mindset), that no cost to the masses will ever be enough.
With record numbers of millionaires alongside record levels of food bank usage, and declining life expectancy amongst the poorer, the sheer existence of billionaires, whose wealth is beyond obscene, shows us that ‘western man’, so to speak – at least in the ruling elites of the UK (and US) we’ve been subjected to since the ‘80s – is a morally bankrupt species.
And it’s a horrifically all pervasive and highly corrosive form of chemical cultural warfare that has long been being waged, not just via the murderous eugenics by neglect of things like ‘austerity’, but in allowing mainstream media to be nothing more than another opportunity for rapine commerce, dumbing everything down such that nowadays celebrities frequently take obvious pride in being pigsh*t ignorant. Even a modicum of intelligence is something to sneered at and derided.*
[* ‘This is the first period in my life where ignorance is something to be proud of’ said Mary Beard, in relation to Trump vs Hilary Clinton. For the hoi polloi this translates to celebrities on game shows revelling in their own vacuity.]
One of the biggest ironies in amongst all of this is that it’s Capitalism with a rod of iron for the lower orders, but Socialism for the best off. That’s what Tories and their ‘neo-liberal’ allies have done time and again: nationalise loss, and privatise profit.
Bail out the fat cats with public money, and let Tory MPs charge £10K a day for their privateering, whilst denying the sick and elderly due care, because ‘we can’t afford’ £7K per annum for those oldies, who worked all their lives propping up the ‘trickle down’ empire of their betters.
These entitled right wing parasites have been rubbing their hands with glee at Covid: more chances to steal from the public. And even better still, they can sit back and enjoy the ‘culling of elderly dependents.’ Hitler called such folk – the human cattle elites so happily consign to poverty, suffering and death – ‘useless eaters’. Our current day capitalo-fascists are cut from the same cloth as Nazis. That’s not hyperbole.
Nye Bevan, founder of the NHS was absolutely right when he said that Tories are ‘lower than vermin.’
FOOTNOTE(s)
A Guardian headline I saw recently seems apt for recording here: ‘In the post-Brexit wreckage, just one Tory strategy remains: the theatre of cruelty.’ The article (which I didn’t read in full, btw) appears to take issue with the current Tory efforts to deflect the public’s attention from their catastrophic misrule by kicking the helpless in the teeth. Nothing new there. Yet the Gammonry will fall for it. Again.
On a different yet related line… Quora seems like a cesspool of mainly right-wing dumb-shittery. But I did see one post, click-baitingly titled along the lines ‘Is the Left responsible for the decline of the UK’*, which was actually quite good. In it, someone going under the name Sage, says, quite rightly:
‘The British class system and anti intellectualism (my italics) are major reasons for Britain’s decline in the 20th century.
Take the example of Frank Whittle. He published a paper in 1929 outlining the design of the jet engine. No one took him or his idea seriously because he had not been to a public school (curiously this means a private, fee-paying school in the U.K.) and had been a mere RAF apprentice. Even when he produced a working prototype many years later, no one listened. (“Not our kind of chap…a bit of a one-off boffin”).
Eventually, when it was clear that the Germans had two flying jet planes about to enter service, the Ministry for Aircraft Production got the message and invested in Whittle’s idea. However they basically swindled Whittle out of his invention. The British post war aircraft industry could have been world beater but the Americans weren’t hampered in the same way. They didn’t mind Whittle one bit, and saw only his genius.’
Must read this!
I have a book I have yet to read, pictured above, about the intellectual lives of the British working classes. Must get around to reading that. Oh, and then there’s also The Plunder of The Commons to be read as well.
* What a preposterous idea! In a virtual one-party Tory state for the best part of 75 years, in which for Labour to get in they had to become ‘Tory-lite’ (under Blair) (before going beyond Tory, under ‘Broon’), such ideas are beyond risible. Out of reach even of satire.
Akin to the infamous oxymoronic (or rather just plain moronic) ‘left wing economic establishment’, such ‘ideas’ display so stunning a degree of obduracy to facts and intelligence one would have to conclude the Tories relentless dumbing-down had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. So much so that in a moment of mental or philosophical acid reflux they themselves are swallowing their own bile, and believing in it.
Bell, brilliant as evert.
The most corrosive form of Tory Rot really set in and bit deep with Thatcher. An appalling excuse for a human being, whose two key achievements, in the words of Reuters were that ‘she crushed the unions and privatised large swathes of industry.’
A farce far worse than any black comedy.If only this had been true!
Thatcher’s legacy, again, acc. to Reuters: ‘The woman who became known simply as “Maggie” transferred big chunks of the economy from state hands into private ownership.’ That’s Plunder of The Commons, right there.
Brilliant! Smell the sulphurous stench of Modern Toryism. Spot on, as ever.
To my mind, the short answer to the question posed in the title of this post is a short and resounding yes!
However, apparently much of the science says otherwise: ‘Fundamentally, the idea of a general addictive personality is a myth. Research finds no universal character traits that are common to all addicted people.’ [1]
Anyway, I’ve suddenly collapsed into a near vegetative state of depression, over the last few months. Some of the reasons are perennial (lack of money), others more singular (least said, soonest mended).
Amidst all of this, I’ve relapsed into few behaviours (I’m sounding like an amateur naturist, er… naturalist, now) that seem, outwardly, very aulde. One of the common denominators to all these behaviours, is addiction.
And some of the things that characterise the kind of addiction I’m talking about: firstly they compel one to act in ways one knows are foolish and high risk, and two, there’s a kind of hollow joylessness to whatever the indulgence might me.
On that latter point, it has to be said that things aren’t really as cut and dried as that idea might imply. Pleasure can be and is taken in the addictive behaviours. But there’s an underlying sense, sometimes even when unquestionably enjoying the addictive behaviour, that one is acting foolishly.
Why should it be this way? And what makes certain things so compelling that they hijack one’s better judgement? This post isn’t an attempt to really answer such questions. In truth it’s more the sudden realisation that I’ve got some possible addiction ‘issues’ I need to acknowledge and work on.
Looking at all the textual images in this post, which I pulled from the Google image search results for ‘addictive personality’, they almost all apply. Perhaps unsurprisingly?
I’d say that for me there are two or three chief drivers when it comes to most of my addictions: pleasure, relaxation and escape. And the leaning into these behaviours is exacerbated in times of high stress – such as presently – by the desire to reduce or mitigate it.
I like to use my blog as a somewhat candid journal. But it’s neither an outright confessional, nor the best place to air dirty laundry that might best be addressed professionally.
On this last topic, however, I feel I’m being let down in a pretty big way, by the alphabet soup of acronym-heavy mental-health organisations I’ve been alerted to. It’s all pillar to post Groundhog Day assessments, and nary any actual support!
Whisky…
Having inferred above that here is not the place to go into the gory details of specific addictions, I will use one relatively innocuous seeming but actually very insidious example, namely spending.
My re-formulation of Descartes famous dictum, for our times, runs thus ‘I spend therefore I am’. One of histories’ greatest dictators, the unholy axis of capitalism and materialism, has marched into and annexed almost every conceivable aspect of modern life.
And I will often attempt to spend my way out of obscurity and depression with anything from a Gregg’s pizza slice to a book, CD, clothes or shoes.
Be prepared to be shocked and amazed as Count Arthur channels the spirits (not the ones he keeps in his dunks cabinet, mind). Mind-blowing psychic powers! Just be sure to have a tissue handy, in case nan’s pesky parrot threatens to mess on your sailor suit!
Disturbingly hilarious!
Learn all about Clean Queerpatra, and the sarsosagoose of Gordon Rameses. Just be careful the camels don’t get your potted meat sarnies.
And just in nut-case you wrongly surprise that The Count is some kind of Stegosaurus Rex, here’s proof he can move with the rimes:
And, far from resting on his impervious laurels (hardy millennials that they indubitabubbly are), he’s continued to hone his ventrilaquastick, er, ventricle-elastic… um, sod it, the art of squeaking with you mouth shut. Don’t believe me? Let The Count and his little red-hatted friend testifry:
