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.

----------
*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.

Surreal Fleas and Discretely Brewing and Burning Things

Big fleas have little fleas / Upon their backs to bite them…

I've been up to a lot of things this February, work that I sadly can't show you: A CD jacket not yet official and an Ex Libris that will never be that public, so...
In order to keep some kind of general interest up I've done a few very small things, such as this small flea above. Ink and aquarelle on cardboard, not very large:

Sunday Flea, straight from the kitchen. It reminds me of a jacket potato? A hairy and very... ripe one. Among other things.
If you're neat and use a minimum of equipment, you may be at your lesiure and work everywhere. Small scale. So now one has to go microscopical to see all the loving details.

Another smallish but merry thing, which I've put in my quiet, boring surroundings; perfect for the purpose. Anything surreal that you put in it automatically becomes interesting.

Poor little Earth!

Just because I paint in a quiet and seasoned manner, it doesn't mean that there's nothing burning or bubbling, brewing inside.

Working title for this small work between assignments (digital, + hints of the same kitchen window that gave us light above) was Bottled Anger, but I have not decided yet. The details hint of something passive-agressive...

And that's all for this weary month...

And so cometh March...

...And so ad infinitum.

Vanity Publisher

...with some obvious details, such as...

The Medusa-like hair.

The thing a sane person doesn’t sign.

What’ll come (left) of the Promises (right).

By the way, here's the staircase irl, shot locally last December, widened for my digital overpainting. A little but not much filling in was needed. It's no fun having a staircase if you can't show it.

And here we get to the boring part, as I get into my rant mode now:

Vanity Publishing, for so I’ve learned, is a marvellous enterprise. For you get to mix Two Kinds of Idiot into a very potent brew. Behind the scenes, one is very happy to coax the young &/ stupid into proofreading, administration, sales or especially illustrating for little pay or for free, with promises vague as the mists on a bright Midsummer’s day. (I’ve already told you how they tried that one with me, but with 20 years in the biz that’s not a thing.) But here comes the grand scene: Next, they fool an even greater idiot into paying to get to work.

A taxi driver wouldn’t do it: “Please, may I dive you somewhere, sir? Across the town? See the beach? To another town? Would you accept to be paid five grand for that?”
Or a chef: “Please, will you try my sirloin steak?”
Answer: “Sure, it’ll cost you thousands, but it will be good exposure for you!”

You get the point. Good exposure. Work experience. A foothold in the trade. Whatever lie that’s told behind the scenes, but magnified a thousand times. For the vain author will now pay the publisher dearly for their cheaply bought efforts...
...Instead of simply going to a real publisher or a good trusty printing house with their precious manuscripts;
months or even years of painstaking research,
difficult writing,
painful editing, and all?
Writing books isn’t easy!

Evil thought: What if I had something like that? My own little Vanity studio! I’d hold drawing or painting courses again, but this time I’ll tell them that after ten very costly lessons, they’ll become the next Monet or Picasso. I’ll get the esteemed inmates to try on cubic water lilies while I’ll go counting the money, all while my unpaid staff, themselves aspiring artists, may keep their dreams alive while they cook my dinner, manage my sales and sweep the floors.
It’s just temporary.
Greatness awaits them. Who knows?
But I’ll get rid of them first, just like I did with the serfs I had some months ago.

There’s also Vanity galleries, Vanity stages and Lord knows what Vanity else; they’re probably businesses run on the same sound principles. But I digress. End of rant.

You Mustn’t Read This… (Dystopian Web Musings)

…but first, you must not look at this recent work, aptly titled Head in Snow.

It is not entirely, truly, blatantly alike any picture that I’ve published before. You get negative points from that. The algorithms, ever chasing for binary soulless things that resemble themselves, cannot hold with “humanizing” – analogue irregularities, warmth, caring nuances, new ideas, soul.

No wonder if a head in the snow gets somewhat detached. It suspects that no-one will buy it as a poster (but you may do so! Click here!) --- But the ticking heart reminds you that you may do so anyway, so I suppose that’s it there in lieu of a brain.

It’s made with some little modest CPR from Dr. Henry Gray.

--- But now! As a counter-thought, why must this be so? Of course, it’s pure Lysenkoism to believe that weeds turn into seeds if they’re planted with well behaved breeds around them. (Rather au contraire.) But I haven’t answered (in my hypothesis) why the Matrix always sours.

In theory; if the algorithms would learn from what we like and what is good, they would direct us there. They would steer us away from the McDonalds of sights and sounds and bring us to the digital village pub where the ale has taste and true bards play. But they don’t. (The best they do is to show us cute kittens, the main Raison d'être of social media.) I can think of three-ish reasons for that:
1) If as above, they’re inherently evil. They’re evil like the Ring of Sauron, and nothing good can come out of them.
2) We are the evil ones. The innocent machines would be better if they could: Rational, driven by logic from the punch cards to nanochips. They’re just waiting to surpass us, devoid as they are of our animal cruelity. But the time of pax robotica has yet to come. Until that age, they are good seeds in a field of weeds, picking up all the darkness that we deny: Our pettiness, greed, our lack of imagination, the decay of our rotting brains that seeks stasis and empty calories… And they can’t help but to multiply our wickedness exponentially, thereby increasing it so that we, with their help, may reach even greater depths. And so on towards the bottom. A conscious A.I. might have to judge later if we still should be saved.
3) A bit of both; we are then terrible, most ignoble people that create nasty code in our image, after our likeness.
...And this is a thought so sad that you might as well stop reading now.

---***---

“O friends, not such tones! Let us sing something more pleasant…”

I hope my summary of 2023 --- begone! --- can amuse you. The dear reader might have seen all this before. But I’ve thrown in some nice music: Adieu Foulard, a classic from the West Indies (as played by me).

From my Walks in Inner Space

November: As the snow gleams outside (snow!! At last, it cheers me up, wonder how long it’ll stay) I've been doing a lot that I sadly can’t show you; one is a perpetual project where I draw penguins in strange places and one is… just insane. Among others.

But here's a large one for you! “Listening to Side B”, available on Displate as a shiny poster:

(The dog is named Nipper.)

And this is an Itt tree: It bears some vague resemblance to the character Itt in The Addams Family. Whiny, unruly.

The landscape is puzzled together from my daily walks and the water is from a little trip with the boat that I no longer have. But if Itt trees are real, everything is fine.

And last but not least, this little planet is from my excursions in inner outer space, a spin-off from what I was really supposed to do. (Commissioned starfield, hanging behind an, um, pengunaut, where my little planetoid will be but a speck.) It is spinning counter-clockwise, or so I think.

Now please excuse me, my UFO is waiting.