Painter in Chains

As I am working on a huge project (that I'm not even at liberty to discuss openly) and said project is rather demanding this is what you get...

A green hand from a work in progress:

Matters are not improved by that I am very methodical about it (put the paint on, smear it about! And repeat) :

And I sort of feel like this:

...I hope to have some more energy next month. And more to show.

Delayed Lily

"Lilium martagon, the martagon lily or Turk's cap lily, is a[n] Eurasian species of lily. It has a widespread native region extending from Portugal east through Europe and Asia as far east as Mongolia [...]" according to Wikipedia.

I made it earlier last month, since then its flowers have gone, but new are on their way. I hope that there will bumble bees left to make it happy.
I'm lucky to find this piece --- time has just gone by, and I'm too busy with comissions to paint anything that I'm allowed to show.
Also, it's not July anymore, and the artist is not otherwise happy. You won't be told why.

Gentle June Breakdowns

This month, my PC didn't break down, as seen here -- the PC isn't shown on this little cardboard drawing with ballpoint and electric paint, but the feeling is: You're slowly falling apart while waiting for the computer to get well or to die, perhaps screaming your modest little screams at that spinning symbol or whatever they have to accentuate your madness. Here goes! Scary PC Recovery.

And even if your computer doesn't become a smoldering piece of rubbish, you might feel quite like waste yourself. Behold of these Suburban Tentacles

I have a great advantage. It's so utterly boring where I live, this nice and quiet Suburbia, so anything that your imagination paints on these dull vistas may explode in your zombie mind as well needed fireworks.

How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure...

--- Oliver Goldsmith

What I think that I mean with this quote is: This goes for tech too. Which brings us to Exhibit C, Message Not Sent.

You can now send texts in no time -- finding the right words might take forever.

Imagine if we did not have cell phones. But when my messenger pigeon is ready, my perfect words are there. And when the poor bird finally arrives, you shall have understood me completely, as if the long flying time didn't exist.

But we are humans, with shortcomings, pretty much like fish washed up on the shore in many respects. And thus we invent those equally imperfect machines, stranded like us, as if they could help their masters.

Sax Bug

I missed a beat the other month — no publishing got done — and the world couldn't have cared less.
One might actually say that Life Out-Surrealed me.
And while this Saxophone Bug is trying to get back on track musically, you can see for yourself what an awfully difficult walk that is.

Details; Ink and watercolour on cardboard + a secret ingredient; you probably see it larger than 1:1 if you are using a PC to browse.

I discovered quite late that I forgot to give the poor fellow a nose; but the sax might also act as a snout? Behind, you may see the hands acting feet: They are where I began — I don't take any conscious responsibility for the rest!

Set in Stone

(As explained on Bluesky:)
A surrealist may get to see a lot of things, even on daily walks through the most boring of Suburbias. Today we spotted — as yours sinc. feels a bit stuck in life — the same feeling suddenly manifesting itself in stone.
"Lemme out!"

Ordinary people without talent for such observations may just see this:

Samovar

Intended for the last of February, but my kettle has been slow to boil. I'm a little teapot, short and squat... but this is anyhow, as I described it on my Bluesky page:

"I call this little piece Samovar, for short. Worried feelings about what'll happen to Ukraine (i.e., all of us) somehow got blended in my mind into this hot brew, served with ink and watercolours on cardboard."

If things were fair, I'd get to post this on February 31:st, which is what our Third of March actually is. And here we go microscopic and take a look at the feet of this beast - - -

- - - Poor fellows.
Help Ukraine if you can. Before it's too late.
The sea-bird in tatters is harder to explain, but assuredly part of the general angst. Even closer up:

- - - as the miniature isn't even letter size. I sort of like the miniature part of miniature painting, the only time when I feel that anything is small and manageable enough, not overwhelming, not underwhelming (the picky parts are excitingly tricky) but simply ...whelming, just whelming enough.

Bored Hospital Sketch

So it goes. Yours sincerely was allowed some kind of Conté pen and watercolours. The motif might speak for itself.

Happy New Year?

Well, I have my misgivings. The year is heading off to a shaky start, internationally and also in my own little world... so my rockets don't look very jubilant yet. Keep fingers crossed for a better 2025.

Detail.

Contact

Since life is sort of stressful in all possible ways right now, I'll keep my blabber down and send you this image; let's call it "Contact" for short.
(You may buy it, limited edition, through this link.)

One might see some Michelangelo in it, true. We were never told, in his "Creation of Adam", what happened the second after the fingers almoust touch between Creator and Creation. It's really only possible in the moment.

As for me? Contact with some peace of mind, warm and permanent, would be nice.

Cali Heart (Desktop Backdrop for Sale)

Since life, in all its perverted glory, is vastly more into trick than treat, this (as I’ve said so many times before) inavoidably affects the heart of the honest artist.

We who are true lovers run into strange capers; but as all is mortal in nature, so is all nature in love mortal in folly...

...now shut up, William. So: What the artist in such a predicament can do is to make the therapeutic odiousness somewhat more artsy. We already had Californian hills, sharp, untamed and green, as along the Pacific Drive (I will never forget them). And as for the heart, I intended something more Swiss cheesy. But Lo! The holes turned into eye sockets! It became a bit too grim and fatalistic really. So I thought, let’s add some gold, in order to add some mystery, some uncertainty to all our unanswered questions, into our existence. Some art.
And we’ll leave it at that.
Have a treat.

The first image (1:1 detail below) is made to fit as your very own desktop background. There's plenty of low-key space around the red for your icons etc.
You may buy the full resolution image as a file here:
https://ko-fi.com/s/9ba3967c94
Take care.

The Tale of the Hand in A Pit

Once upon a time there was a hand That got to see a fair, exotic land It was lavishly treated, until that fateful day After beautiful nights, the hand asked to stay And everything was brusquely Taken away... The hand was placed in gaol, a dark and lonely pit Because it dared to grasp for more, and that might well be it It still can do what hands can do For a few more weary years, 'hope just two And this was the tale of the hand in a pit And if it was nonsense, I don't care a bit.

Piano Frenzy (and Other Frenzies)

This month has seen me tapping the piano keys (and other keys) with intensity…

…as I have a show coming up, out in a forgotten corner of Stockholm, capitol of that country that isn’t Switzerland on a pale blue dot far, far away. September 7:th, save the date.

Every now and then I’ve taken a break to draw silly little stuff, as this Reluctant Piano (it might not be a piano)

I’ve also invented the Life Lesson Mug. This educational cup has numerous handles that you may choose from, but they all have their sharp teeth so that you'll learn about “choices”.

And this little piece might have just a whiff of reluctance concerning that country which isn’t Switzerland on the whole.

And this… is just a sleepless doodle. All this frantic activity might make one sleepless.

Grackles and Other Nuisances

This late in the month, the assaults by the Global Warming Sheiks on their Flaming Oil Camels* don’t come as frequently as in July, Gaia Bless, but I’ve had other battles to fight, as I’ve had to deal with computer breakdowns great and small.

As always, things took interesting shapes.

The birds happened to be Brazilian Grackles (Gralha-de-nuca-azul, cyanocorax heilprini).

Being in a state of constant digital emergency or vigilance had me suffering quite vigilant nights too, and I sometimes found myself drawing oddities beyond my usual oeuvres.

But we are soon back to business as usual, come and see, do Come And See:

When Life gives you lemons, try to sell them!

I’ve also finished a very complex oil painting. I might get back to that next month; come and see, come and see.

---

*One of the many things that I could paint, if I wanted to; don’t tempt me.

Bubbles for Breakfast

Well, on the web I encountered this couple going from Scotland to Holland, and wisely decided to have Prosecco for breakfast -- they sent us weblings an image with the bottle and two glasses to tell us so.
And I couldn't resist penning this little poem, verse, or whatever:

Bubbles for breakfast! I am all for it But toxic flying for dessert? I cannot adore it I salute the choice of morning champagne But it could as well be had on a train.

It just might amuse you that the clouds, grass and tarmac are all stitched from different views that I've shot in my nice but boring neighbourhood. And often, as I live close to an airport, those pesky, fuming things passed above. I am quite intent on staying on the ground.

Half a Fish in Oil, w. Thoughts

I am back into painting oils, knock wood, after a five year hiatus from the sticky yucky slimy slowy-as-snails progress. It is a way to restore your humanity (or at least to see if there’s anything left).

While painting on this, I made a little note:

How different isn’t the trad. painter’s mindset from the industrial one! “We have All Day and we’ll go on ‘til this is looking Good.”

One can hardly imagine a sentiment less compatible with the world that we live in.

If you really want to enslave a people, kill their imagination, remove their leisure calm and creativity. They will then always regress into what was before, tyrannise themselves.

Parenthesis: Involuntarily, my mind returns to this poor little country where actual work, meaningful and fulfilling, might even get regarded with suspicion due to those qualities. (The psychology behind this is all too easy to unmask.) This is what comes of freeing slaves but letting the chains in their minds remain. I am now referring to the main colony that Sweden ever had: Sweden itself. But I digress. Go out and enjoy the summer, stop thinking. End.

Is there any way out? Asking not only for Sweden: Can we all rise? I don’t think that an elite of intellectuals or certain workers or whatevers will do; not in a society that hitherto has made a habit of elevating the least original, the trite, the worst…

This time, there can be no castes. *
With this, I’ll go back to my sticky yucky slimy slowy-as-snails progress, not feeling as industrious as my friendly companions in the garden; the happily buzzing bees.

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*It’s something that one can hear during certain demos; “Nobody is Free Until Everybody’s Free”, but if you then look behind and see who is allowed to be “everybody” and who isn’t, you realise…

Post Turtle

My favourite English proverb: “When you see a turtle balanced on a fence post,
you know that it didn’t get there by itself.”

I made the mistake of watching two documentaries yesterday (or “yesternight”; couldn’t sleep) and both were about musicians/artists that made it very well in this world. As it would happen, these very two cases deserved all success that they could get… but that’s not quite the point! Correlation does not imply causation. Not even deserved correlation. These two people were humble enough to be forgiven; one tries to hate the system rather than people. They’re such fine turtles!
(Cont. below)

But now, if we’re not to hate people with the “unearned luck” (as Puch put it) (the success was earned, the luck to succeed was not! See the difference?) who are we then to blame?

“Perhaps genius is by no means so rare: but rather the five hundred hands which it requires in order to tyrannize over the ‘the right time’ —in order to seize the moment!” --- quoth the philosopher.* Or in other words, as they say in movies:
“Make it look like an accident.”
The victorious just happened to fall downstairs into fame…
It would be funny someday to see those who arrange such little neat accidents, the professional turtle posters worldwide. See how they reason, how they decide who ‘s to elevate and who ‘s to fail. By what means they justify playing God together.
Not that it would change things in the slightest - - -

The other day I had the opportunity to talk to a fellow cultural worker in even greater despair than me. He does not understand why he isn’t getting anywhere with his poetry (which is at best average, but that’s still not the point!) won’t get that the world is inherently unfair.

Every day when we creatives manage to be creative despite the lay of the land is a victory!
- - - That was all that I could give him as an answer.
And I realised: There is but one thing worse than understanding how terrible this world is. And that is, not understanding it… but suffering in it anyway.
There truly are degrees in Hell.

---

*Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §274.

PS. I didn’t get anything posted at the end of last month, as I wanted. Boohoo. It was quite exhausting. I made two CD-jackets, taxation (end report for 2023, building on debit and credit down to the last comma) and dealing with the abyss of life in general… I hope that May will be nicer to me. But now I thought that I had rather wait until I actually had something to say. Peace.

20 Years As An Artist (On This Day)

I had my first exhibition exactly 20 years ago, April 1:st, 2004.
I had my first oil painting sale in less than 20 minutes into it, which was no coincidence:
This was due to careful planning, back in a world where I could exist.
Please have some coffee before I tell you about what the March of Time can do to you...

Before the exhibition, I had sent oodles of "vernissage letters", which were physical letters that you sent by mail to prospective customers, friends and all. It cost me quite a bit, but even if I had not had the oil sold, the rapid sales of lesser works during the day was harvest enough for what I had sown, it was postage well spent.

In those days, we in Sweden had billboards dedicated to events like mine, and yes, did I shower those billboards all around the area with my posters. Vernissage! Come and See. Freshly Painted.

And last but by no means least, in those days the local rag had a special section where you could try your luck and send your local event for free. And this first time, I got them to publish this little thing, with the efficient results that I mentioned above.

All this worked twenty years ago.
And ten years ago.

Somewhere after that, this stopped working.

I'm an Xennial; my habitat was the shoreline between analogue and digital. I can clean and put a Vinyl on the spinner with no hesitation. I can find music on the web with the same ease (and the music of mine that you find there is an analogue-digital animal too). But I'll try to keep my tale short, as Xennial is now quite worn out.

The first thing that happened was the advent of "social media", a billboard where it's dog-eat-dog and where you have to pay too much to get seen enough (this has been very carefully seen to). People started looking down on their smartphones instead. Our physical billboards-for-culture are still standing up, proud remnants of an ancient civilization and are sometimes graced by posters for local church concerts and messages about lost cats.

The second thing that happened was that people that rather look at paintings than at smartphones grew increasingly rare. I originally had a list of, say, 60 people. When I stopped many years later, down at five, they had moved / moved to heaven / simply were too old. An e-mail list is not the same, and on the whole any transition to the digital cloud world could not be done.

At last the Pandemic came, making everything that was difficult (in the fields of arts, illustration, music and all that I've worked with) ---- impossible. This killed the local rag. No local events announced anymore, virus, virus! But in the paper world, not communicating with your readers means suicide, and I haven't seen it for ages. They obviously didn't care to resurrect it afterwards.

No, what happened at last, really, was that this artist of many trades, all of them vanishing in similar ways, had a jolly breakdown.
I don't know if this is an obituary of sorts; how long I'll hang on.
I no longer have the means, time or energy for oils in my struggles: While I haven't let go of watercolours, I've resorted to my illustrator's digital for art, accnowledging a world where I really don't fit in.