This is all that I had time to do in oil this week; bluebells with a pair of even smaller ballet shoes. (Don't ask me why they're hanging there. I suppose they merely want a rest?) Hereby we're done with the Calm Dept. -- let's go see the wild part...
...which is excerpts from a movie for Karin the Poet, which I am right now trying to finish. (Animation, as I might've told you before, is Hard Work.) I stick to the spirit and words of her poetry, and those words happen to be delightfully sticky in spirit.
The poem is about ice cream. And it is definitely not about ice cream.
-- Don't look below. You didn't even see this...
I and the Poet might soon have a lovely time blaming each other.
This week brings us both oil and digital. As for the former, we have (with the paint still glittering, I'm impatient as usual) a subway train and bluebells still waiting for oily bloom. I prefer sketches. They're promising -- still waiting for blossom -- yet no disappointment or the emptiness that fulfilment would bring, sakura. We have, however, a curious subway train with insect genes dominant, creepy-crawly;
...what happens when subway trains turn into butterflies?
This one is close to cocooning, anyway. The microscopical letters SL stand for Stockholms Lokaltrafik, the institution that brings us these larvae. They're blue nowadays, they were green when I grew up. Sign of ripening?
...and the bluebells are waiting to chime.
It has been an interesting week and we need some fresh O2. But our poor lungs are infected by the beautiful stanzas of my friend Ms. Lampa the Poet, and thus look like this...
...they're holding their increasingly pulmonary breath for some more animation and music; we'll have a little movie eventually. All in good time.
You are born in a certain way and Life treats you accordingly. This is no sermon for coaches, your self proclaimed saviours or the bestselling author of Control thy Life. But the older you get, the more obvious it is that things happen for little reason at all, paths on the journey were taken quite randomly albeit irrevocably and whatever patterns that you may see are seen in hindsight, invented afterwards. Still we become what we are. (We need not necessarily like it.) And soon we are no more.
As we drag along, we might leave traces, like the slime after a snail. Some leave genes, others good deeds or a name in a book or -- very common -- nothing. I think that, for better and worse, there'll be little left behind me but a few paintings. Some details of this week were painted feeling hope and through some I felt pain -- it already doesn't matter which was when. Only art might remain. And I was born that way.
The biological clock -- or whatever it is -- is finished and funnier with colours on. This week also brings us a dragonfly or damselfly -- and rose painted during perfect distraction, thoughts and petals wandering strange ways -- a dear friend thought that it looked like it wanted to eat her -- nibble, munch and bite -- well, my thoughts were consumed already, and it was thus her turn...
Right before my eyes -- a butterfly! At once I had to add it to the surprised canvas. I didn't see it for very long. So this transient, fluttering memory had to become something stylized; I remembered spots -- let us have spots -- why not on the body too -- and this red band on its wings -- let us have a reddish band. Let us make it small, on a par with the real butterfly.
Now, what were we doing...? Ah yes, the angel with the golden orange hair. Now finished at last. I find myself working at snail pace in the heat; hope the next week will see work at all, perhaps more by accident and whim, perhaps even a little beautiful. One should take care of beautiful accidents.
With a lot of other things going on, one has not had too much time for the Oil -- for an Oil follows a different pace than Today does; a technique invented slightly before the Renaissance. It doesn't want to hurry. It wants to lie idling like the angel on the Station Clock, still outlined in ink. (Or perhaps it is a little exhausted too.)
We also have a creepy-crawlie-subway-train going on.
A closer look at the angel. I tried to see that the shadings in the wings somehow corresponded a little to the dark blue sky and the light shining field above it; I often try to let certain hues come back in a kind of rhythm across the painting for the sake of balance.
I also note that angels have orange, just next to golden hair. So now you know that.
