Dali

Oil on canvas
9″ x 12″

Between prepping the canvas and sketching for the next piece, I knocked out another Alla Prima portrait in a couple of hours today.

Dali -in my opinion the greatest artist of the 20th century-has become so ubiquitous that the impact his surreal art had on me when I first encountered ‘The Death of Narcissus’ in a copy of Man, Myth and Magic in the 1970’s, seems almost neutered by its legacy into mono culture.

That mustache like an upturned curly bracket so synonymous, that the portrait didn’t resemble him, until the follicular finishing touch.

Still, the work remains utterly phenomenal and back then I was utterly obsessed, so I shan’t understate the influence he had on my own artistic quest.

In fact, I still read his wonderfully salacious ‘Unspeakable Confessions’ yearly, because the enigma of his work was made all the more profound by the fact that he was as mad as cheese.

Median Point

A work in progress of the piece currently on my easel-the Sycorax manifest as three sisters, or if you like, Shakespeare, Chekhov and Weishaupt in tow.There's a dinner party right there, and as good a piecemeal for what I have on my plate right now.

 I'm at the halfway point you see , the eye of the storm I suppose, the midway curse-too far to go back, the point of no return. I have Dali up the rear, because when it doubt, one of his crutches will always do-a bigger stick to beat me with. I'll save my thoughts on the mustachioed minstrel for another time.

You can't see, but the Sycorax is spewing a fetid,toxic, black river-a virulent paint slug warping and manifesting into a mishapen hound. Like the words and images that dog us throughout,  it's something that's vexed me of late-the legacy of what I do, the cause and effect, the imprint on the ether. If any.

We are all sinister architects in one form or another.

Art Booking Trend

Spent most of the day at Borders for research, flicking through the arts and culture sections,either immersed in magazines or trying to convince myself I don't need another sketchbook.

I think I may have a serious problem in that regard, since I caved and bought myself a pocket sized Moleskine-they were on sale.

I have around a dozen sketchbooks on my studio shelf already, at various stages of completion, much to my wife's bemusement.

Its an odd quirk I have, the need to start a new one before I've completed the last, as if I were having some sort of external reboot on my creativity, or capping a certain point in time.

The research was for my book, which is coming along nicely. It features around twenty of my most recent works, complimented by biographical anecdotes and annotations, and all being well, I'll have it done in time for Christmas. I wish I could post the cover, because it's awesome, but I'm wanting to keep it under wraps until it's available.
Writing biography is oddly disconcerting, a counterpoint to what I do with painting, using metaphor as camouflage-and I so don't want it to be down, more laden with irony, so I'm taking my cues from my dog eared stalwart-Salvador Dali, the unspeakable confessions of. I've read the book once a year, ever since discovering it when I was sixteen-it's eminently quotable, completely batty and salacious in the way every good biog should be, although my own shall probably have closer allusions to the parochial Alan Bennett.

I'm also working on rearranging my studio to maximize the space, lugging the monster office table that was here when we inherited the property and removing the massive closet doors that never worked. I realize its the wrong month for a spring clean, but as you can tell, I'm feeling like a fresh start.

Notes from an Easel-Part 52-Death of Winter

Having laid down a light wash, and distinguished the details, I started to work in the background because I feel that as with the Valley piece, the geography for this piece,carries the same weight as the message. Previous deaths head pieces have been more informed by the concept, the background seeming something of an afterthought, although not entirely.

Its a process I'm learning to embrace more and more, I think for the longest time-perhaps too long, I've held a general mistrust of the real, believing that feeding entirely from the subconscious was the purest form of expressing-that to draw from life somehow diluted the idea. I still think that's the case-certainly with someone like Dali, the more technically he drew from the real, the less his work seemed informed by the surreal, but for me it feels like the work is becoming more cohesive and focused, evolving a germ of an idea into an entirely different animal. Its hugely exciting, and I've even taken to carrying a sketchbook everywhere and sketching, which always felt like somehow an attempt to elevate the mundane, but its something I am enjoying again.