Celebrating the Simultaneous Week

I am still celebrating the Simultaneous Week. This kind of festivity is taking place whenever you squeeze seven entirely different days into one, and go on mistreating the days thus for seven days in a row...

...so I haven't had much time for City Lights. (I might change the final title to My Muse and I, it sounds a bit more human.) But the angel is finished, and we have a little paint on our accordionist.

But at last I finished this movie that I've been stuck with for ages! -- Here you see DNA, or The Tree of Life, a wry toast to the juices and limbs that keep the World a-spinning. In the middle, you see Life crawling up from the water and up in the trees, where busy, freshly evolved Homo Fauxiens immediately begin to fool each other, just as evolution intended in this fish-eat-fish world. In the top, there's a kind of beginning; the other end shows some kind of puzzled ending. 

I also finished the commissioned animation for the odd love ballad in Swedish that I mentioned, My Toaster and I. I add a link. It might work, It might not.

All this had to happen roughly in the same time, among other things that I might tell you next week -- if it's still Simultaneous Week by then. 

.

A Commerical Break

While I wanted to go on with my City Lights painting and other financially Quixotic endeavours (the large painting wants to be seen -- and I have to make my whole portfolio/presentation w. w. webbified, and so on, and so on) I got this interesting, quite absorbing commission -- an animated short movie for a cute ballade about a man who's in love with... an electric bread toaster. Surreal enough!

I'll get paid too. That's good. Stop-motion animation, make no mistake, is Hard Work. You draw, you move the thing a little. Draw again. While there are cute and neat little tricks and loops to speed up the progress a little, I can still be grateful to reach but fifty seconds a day, if the subject is simple. A still:

 

You saw flying toasters, a classic that can't be avoided in these circumstances. (An entire, flapping flock is Not Simple if your bare hands let them fly, frame by frame...) Here's another toaster, definitely turned on...

...and there's love in a cab, with a toaster. You get the idea.

The tragic and very electrical end of this fair tale of unorthodox love I must not divulge. 

Adverse effects of this assignment: Hands that hurt and an inexplicable longing for buttered, toasted bread. 

.

For Better and Worse

What I do is surreality. It is better than reality, worse than reality, more real than reality; by which I mean the tame and lame reality that we say that we live in and think that we control, despite all evidence to the contrary.

This week has found me spread out without any illusion of control. I am still painting on City Lights. 

There's a little on the bronze angel now, verdigris green and a little sky. One drop of paint every now and then, and I'll be done.  Or as my grandfather said: "Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but by persistence." He persistently told me so. (I learn today that it is Ovid, really; gutta cavat lapidem. There you are.)

I am also trying to complete a video with my best and largest painting available; below you get a bite-size detail from DNA, or The Tree of Life...

It is bristling with such details, made as it is to hang on a wall for years and decades of surprise and enjoyment, and this plethora can't be fitted into a few YouTube minutes really, but I'll do my best. I'll serve these hors d' oeuvres with music too, better and worse than real music, in accordance with what I said above...

(Last and perhaps least there's a little project named "Blues in Swedish", bringing this raw and hearty kind of entertainment to all too soft Scandinavian ears.) 

Next week, I am going to turn into an orderly, strict and businesslike person... No. It'll probably get worse. Cheers!    





. 

City Lights (work in progress)

Glimpses from a work in progress. I originally wanted to compete in Saatchi's "Showdown" named Bright Lights, Big City; but then I realised that the entry period was equal to the drying time alone, and let go. Might as well compete with myself. (The only truly worthy opponent that you'll ever have... is you. If you evolve and improve, then you win.)
 

 
Here I am replacing the pencil as usual with ink lines, less smudgy and elusive.
 

 
I strongly feel that this scene has a meaning. But only you can tell. 

So we add a little oil on the special gesso paper. (It is coated for paint, but very thinly so, hence the half eternity it takes before it's dry.) It doesn't look like very much right now, but I find it promising. We'll see.
 

Bird In, Bird Out

One of the questionable sides of a creative life is the need for impressions, or rather, the need to almost drown in them.

It's not easy to keep a good balance, I know few that ever succeed. As programmers said, it's Garbage In, Garbage Out, and this also go for the flapping and tweeting little Birds of Inspiration. How do we create good stuff out of the garbage that surrounds us? Po-tee-weet?

The birds flying out were drawn in "golden" ink which might disqualify this work as serious art, but it shines nicely on the paper. Incoming birds: Pessimistic hues of blue ink. Lastly a little water colour, et voilà.

---

You see all details resized here, the whole work is really a bit below standard paper size and this would turn the poor birdies into what I refer to as Pixel Porridge. Someday I have to write a line on how Internet affects our view on art; how some works become worse -- and a few actually better -- by not being seen as they are; how some brilliant works never get seen because they look poor as thumbnails etc. etc.