Well, it feels like the cork is off, and, um… to quote Count Arthur Strong (I think?), ‘the genius is out of the bottle.’
That may sound fatuous and vain. But you know what? Fuck it! I’ve had more than my fill of, up to this point, being timid and negative, and running myself down.
I recently heard – and very much enjoyed – Stephen Mangan, on BBC R4’s Desert Island Dicks. He came across extremely well, to my way of seeing and hearing things.
Amongst many other strands, all talked about with a very winning combination of humility, frankness, and both melancholy and joie de vivre, he mentioned succeeding as an actor in the US.
He talked about how the very clichéd British type of diffidence – with which I’ve always been appallingly afflicted (modesty, false or real) – will see you sink like a stone, out in the Wild West.
I’ve been a total twat, many a time. And I’ve pumped out crap of all sorts, from the literal stuff to the verbal kind, to the ‘creative’. But right now I’m determined to accord my creativity a greater degree of respect.
Partly on account of all the suffering I’ve been through; be that physical ailments or mental anguish. Be it self-inflicted, inherited, nature, nurture, whatever. Whether I’m a total pussy, or a psychic warrior, I giveth not an shit.
Teresa’s taken a few snaps of me at work recently. It’s nice for her, as well as me, to see me getting back into creativity. Hopefully she’ll start doing (more) art as well? She does lots of creative arty stuff at work. But I’m talking about her own personal ‘fine art’.
And here’s another, ‘via Matisse’, from earlier today:
Studying the greats is always good practice. Copy, borrow, steal… learn what there is to be learned from them.
For me, out of the three artworks of mine featured in the above portion of this post, the via Velazquez/Picasso is the best, or most promising. The other two, both via Matisse, show some promise. But they aren’t quite there, yet.
LATER
Some time later… a couple more from today:
My little sketchpads, which are ages old (and have some drawings in them going back well over a decade), are starting to fill up. And the content is quite varied.
From pencil sketch copies of heraldic stuff, to ‘background studies’, to copies of stuff by The Masters (old and new), and original stuff. In pencil, pen, pastel (oil and chalk), with acrylic, and all sorts.
And, to my great surprise and gratification, there are threads in all of this stuff that run way, way, way back, to my teens, in terms of ideas, approaches, motifs, techniques, and so on. My ‘crisis of artistic identity’ seems, to me right now, to be resolving itself.
I like the above picture. Based on a Thomas Weaver painting of a cow, or bull, called ‘Comet’! I think I’ll do a series in this line, maybe called ‘Prime Cuts o’ Beef’? I think the bovine itself needs a bit more abstractifying…
I also like, sometimes, to take pictures at various stages of execution, such as this little gallery:
… because sometimes I might prefer an earlier stage to the ‘completed’ end product. With the above, for example, I quite like the first, which has more white and less black in the overall composition.