Seb Palmer

7 April 20238 April 2023

MUSiC: Epiphanies

I think I might’ve posted this video before. Regardless, I’d be happy to post it many more times. How many more times? As Led Zep once asked! Who knows?

Anyone reading my recent posts will know I’ve been having a tough time. Amidst such travails, a blissful musical epiphany is a welcome and unexpected thing. But, whatever (or why-ever, or ‘wherefore’ as Shakey’s Romeo puts it), it happened!

I’ve had a few over the years. And what I’m calling an epiphany some might call some form of meltdown, perhaps? I had a very memorable one dancing around a pal’s living room to Santana and McLaughlin’s Life Divine, way back, in my mid to late teens.

This one came over me whilst drumming to Scary Pockets’ amazing re-envisioning of Tears For Fears greatest track, Everybody Wants To Rule The World. It was partly a spliff, taking my consciousness out of its usual ruts. But it was more the act of drumming, and freely and passionately, that really popped the lid off.

Just as with my pogoing-round-the-lounge to Devadip and Mahavishnu, it was very largely purely eargasmic; a response to music that mainlines to my pysche. But it’s also partly loosening the shackles on some part or parts of myself.

And on both of these occasions I wept like a gale! What I feel this tells me is that I have a lot of feeling(s) within me, that need to find proper outlets. This kind of moment reconnects me with that feeling of freedom and transcendence that great art can sometimes provide.

And with music, as a collective thing, there is sometimes that blissful synergy that can make one feel so connected to others, spiritually. Which, in a world so relentlessly materialist it frequently grinds one’s soul to ashes and dust, is refreshing.

6 April 20237 April 2023

RANT: NHS 111 is a Sick Joke, NHS 111 option 2 is Fuckin’ Beyond Execrable!!!

I’m having a mental health crisis. not because I’m some kind of lame ass wuss who cannae tek’ the pressure. But because nobody can take pressure past a certain point.

I’m well past that point. And I’m looking for help. Naturally I’m trying via my GP. But it’s a month – to the frickin’ day – since I hit a meltdown crisis point. And despite trying a whole alphabet soup of organisations, I’m not getting any help.

A whole FUCKING MONTH!!! And nothing has been done. Despite repeated calls to my GP, NHS 111 (option 2*), and a host of other organisations.

* As I type this I’ve passed twenty minutes in a queue. What does this daily experience teach me? That I am utterly worthless in the eyes of society. And why am I utterly worthless – along with all the other schmucks subjected to this living hell – because I’ve already been taxed to oblivion, and overcharged beyond credulity, and there’s nothing left for the vultures.

I’m beyond despair. Entering into the territory of rage.

I finally passed the 40 minutes mark, and hung up. I’m growing ever more certain that people will have topped themselves in that queue! It’s beyond fucking unbelievable.

4 April 20236 April 2023

TECH: iPhone Apps are Doing My Head In!

Gaaah!!!

So, not only do I have some weird conflict between WordPress and Jetpack, that’s stopping me from posting here as I normally would. I also have issues with apps on my iPhone.

What happened was that I wanted several apps that were in folders just out on ‘the desktop’, so to speak. I used the ‘remove folder‘ function. This appeared to suggest that the folder would go but the apps would stay.

Uh-uh. Both folder and apps (or at least app icons) disappeared. So I re-downloaded one of these apps, an FTP thing. But although it shows here:

… it doesn’t show on any of the several screens worth of what I’m calling my ‘desktop’:

If anybody should chance upon this post who knows what’s gannin’ on, leek, could they enlighten me… pretty please!?

4 April 20234 April 2023

ART: Josep Palau i Fabre & Picasso

I posted about this dude and his passion for Picasso quite a while ago (read that here if interested). And I find myself wanting to post about this pairing again.

As per my previous post, I have three of the four ‘whoppers’ i Fabre published. And I really want to get hold of any more there might be. I’m aware of just one more, as things stand. Which, alas, seems both rarer, and consequently more expensive.

This is one version of the book I don’t yet have.

I’ve learned, thanks to my search for the cheapest way to buy this book, that it can be bought brand new, for €150! From Poligrafa, the Spanish publishers responsible for all these fabulous books. And in English (or Catalan!), as well as Spanish.

Second-hand editions of this title are all more expensive. But sadly anything at all, let alone say £20-30 (roughly what I paid for the third volume in this series), is way too expensive for me right now.

I exchanged some emails with a chap called Carlos at Poligrafa today, thereby learning of the newer/cheaper buying option. But thanks to me not speaking Spanish, or quite following all his English, I’m none the wiser as to whether any more posthumous (to i Fabre’s passing, that is) volumes are in the pipeline.

3 April 20233 April 2023

ART/HEALTH & WELLBEING: Home Alone, Bed- & Book-bound

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!

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!

And to keep my furrowed brows at the correct elevation, something a bit ‘Felix’ lighter!

And of course, Viz. Thanks to the Viz Team I nearly died laughing last night.

3 April 20233 April 2023

ART: Riffing On An Old Idea

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.

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.

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.

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.

The permutations are endless!

2 April 20233 April 2023

ART: More Aulde Stuffe

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.

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.

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!

2 April 20233 April 2023

ART: Another Old Series…

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!

2 April 202311 April 2023

ART: Some Old Designs

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.

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’.

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.

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?

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.

1 April 20233 April 2023

ART: Back In The Saddle

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#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 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?

Here are the same four images as two double-spreads…

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!