Happy New Year!

For my Dear Readers. This year's Resolution is to try -- you can't but try -- to worry less, to care less about those who preach Life in Culture impossible. I've received the very good advice not to listen to people who do not help anyway. Happy New Year!

Grainy Finished Surreality, w. Physalis

Dear readers,

...thank you for following these artsy follies through 2015. Now there is an entire, weird year in the Archives; most popular, if Stats may be trusted, were "For Charlie Hebdo" (a poem in memoriam) and "My Hoovercraft is Full of Eels"... February and March were exceptional months too, full of odd twists and turns and surprises. I was surprised too. And now, anchors aweigh! New adventures ahead.

We're finished with the six-cornered thing. There's a Vernissage in February -- it has to be dry by then. And I have to lament my oils -- they might look good in real life, but as for photos, they are charming as passports. Something with the small details on coarse grain is making the eye of the camera bleed, especially if we have to shoot them in this lustreless, grey December. (I complained last winter, I will complain again...) Albeit grainy, for the record and hopefully still inspiring:

I've added some Japanese lanterns in the final hextangle (heptangle? they're seven fields) and all seven are sure to go in their own style. The lanterns don't have much patience to stay in Physalis shape for very long.

As for the meaning of the blue drop, I'm open for suggestions (as always). It might be a blue drop.

Merry Christmas!

The musician/painter wishes you a Merry Christmas -- I had fun designing the letters for this one.

Everything is built on the letter "O"...

Some were surprisingly difficult (I had to move everything about for "R") while others just knocked on the door and started to sing carols. Enjoy :)

Keeping-Calm-Helmet for Worried Times

We need a break before we finish that oil (see previous weeks) and to get calmer in general. For these are worried times -- economy, ecology and last but not least madmen of all colours exploding now and then, sort of everywhere. This sometimes leads to panicky decisions, and Panic is not a fine mood to make decisions in. So behold: The Keeping Calm Helmet, protecting us against ourselves.

It's in my standard ink'n'aqua, letter size. Now we go close to see the Greek helmet that inspired it in part

which I know by heart. And the frankly ugly modern helmet that I saw on a poster

with the one camera that prompted the Keeping Calm Helmet, regrettably not worn by them. The KC Helmet Mk.1 sports just any number of cameras and antennae and whatnot for taking in many views, which has a sobering effect. It also seems to give the poor head other chemistry (perhaps for saving it from fatal over-sobriety, balance is the thing) and I envision calming flowery music in the headphones. (Merely a suggestion. Interpret it ad. lib. Your own imagination is the helmet that fits you best.)

An old friend suggested that I shouldn't make so detailed little works in the winter, for then people will go so close and smear the glass with their runny noses... but I sort of like the mayhem of colours and lines that one sees upon resizing: Here you have the flowers...

And here is the visor.

Now keep calm :)

Impolite Desires and The Edvard Munch Choir

Desires are interesting, irksome but interesting. They are like babies. They refuse to behave, do not care for the socially acceptable or even excusable, they mess things up and trying to hush or put them to sleep invariably makes matters worse. It is impossible to reason with them:

"Come, now little body, there are other things in life; friendship, birdsong, sports and the music of J.S. Bach... Don't be silly. Let's go and have a cold bath, these things help, get your mind off it..."

And like all infants in need, the body answers by screaming louder.

With this in mind, work goes on. It is time for a sharp corner on the hexagonal canvas.

I have to shoot this a little from the sides, straight on the paint is glittering like this, mad and wet...

I immediately had to christen this band The Edvard Munch Choir, for reasons obvious. While you have the final say as usual, I have a feeling that they somehow represent some unfulfilled desires, as mentioned above.

Ps. Speaking of odd existences I found this Twinklebox, an invention by one Aaron Bradbury. The thingamajig is "...a music box caught in an infinite world, set to his own melody" and obviously has no other desire than to roll about and play its tune, quite uncaring about anything else.

I sort of envy it a little.

Calm Corners (before the Oily Storm?)

The miniaturesque work with my six cornered oil goes on, filling the mauve field with a desolate Northern landscape/seascape/icescape -- with a cabin or hut of sorts -- and the yellow field with a slightly careless interior.

Everything is improvised. The little cabin (which didn't want to be a pine grove or cliff) reminds me of a song by Swedish poet Dan Andersson about a charcoal burner who is waiting for his one true love that, rest assured, should show up some night here in the middle of nowhere just any year now, this dearest lady with eyes of blue. Whoever she is. (The subtext is rather saddening, dark as charcoal soot.)

Onwards. I didn't care much for straight angles in the yellow field. I sort of wanted to get done. With these two fields of relative harmony done after the lively green and blue and the quizzical (and inquisitive) grey centre we might now be ready for something really insane.

Surreal Oil with Six Corners (work in progress).

Every field on the canvas with six corners will bring a surprise, for the artist as well as the observer. (Now it reminds me a little of an advent calendar, coming to think of it, but not necessarily with a relieving Christmas in the bottom. It has no bottom. It has six.) The bird-plus-whatever is still glittering with wet oil.

The central shape -- central deformation -- is an eye of sorts. It bears various fishy, hairy amoeba connotations... what do you think?

The only set idea for this painting is that every field, underpainted and now dry, should have its own theme, speaking for itself... in a language that I do not know, the language that 90 percent of our brains speak. I don't even know if the seven parts of the painting understand each other. Or if the different parts of the brain do -- if not, that would explain much...

"When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained."

- Mark Twain, Notebook, 1898

Green Chili Nonsense

This one I made mostly to tease my dear friends a little. My head was no good place to be (I've spent ages looking for another, for rent if not for sale) and I complained that I didn't want to go too autobiographical; I mostly draw inspiration from rubbish stored in my subconscious, but for a long while the rubbish had been a sour kind of rubbish and not the happy, sprightly rubbish that one might want.

Why don't you draw Green Chili?, one said.

And it was true; we had just been enjoying some Thai, and I had a Red Chili Stew with a few melodic syllables in the name; it was somewhat less flammable than the Green Chili that I had on the session before (and was duly teased for having anyway) and as a good little surrealist I now had to draw it. You may hint that I didn't concentrate very much on the spice in question. As usual, I am sure that among the arbitrarily functioning junctions of the synapses there's a perfect explanation why green hot chili peppers turn into this:

And here's the face; very serene, considering. Half the chap it used to be but perhaps we let go of a lot of pressure that way.

The Music Remains

This little study, I realized during the progress, is heavily inspired by The Music in Me, a digital painting by fellow surrealist Ruth Sinden (the work is heavily copyrighted by her).

This one I call The Music Remains:

Whether you write poetry, music or paint, the aching reason for doing so shall one day disappear, leaving art alone. So we have to make good art.

You may note that the guitar decorations around the hole (obviously called a rosette in English) are reflected in the garland. (You hint a little of the keys chorusing too.) The heart looks rather torn, but Music is on her mind.

(Ink and aqua on letter-size paper.)

Burning Giraffe and Hot Music -- Dalírium

This friendly (?) flaming giraffe is now on my happily madly dancing CD Dalírium -- melting watches I found a bit too cliché and overused -- but a dalíric giraffe would do.

Through this link you may hear the whole of The Happy Machine, Raindrops and Crush Collision for free.

You're also very welcome to...



...the result of many surreal hours of cutting, twisting and pasting the most odd little sounds, live and imaginary.

I still can't decide about the expression of the giraffe. In what mood do you think it is?

Smile!

Smiles are attractive, smiles sell. In order to mantain our perkiness in a world that doesn't necessarily perk, I've invented and consider patenting this Invention, yet without name. The schematic description would go as follows:

Eyelids and eyebrows are kept high and positive and friendly with Hooks (A). The occasional tears that still might escape are caught before they can do any harm with little Sponges (B) fixed in a suitable position. The great smile, last but not least, is maintained with small but strong little Nibs (C).

Smile!

"I'm a Round Piece and I Don't Fit into Square Holes!"

There's not much more to say about this. Other than that our Dear Society as a whole has failed to pass a test that one should pass before age four or so. We know that round pieces don't fit into square holes. But we do try to fit everyone into square positions. The world is made for squares, enough said.

Daylight Savings, Without Savings...

Dear Readers,

Today is Swedish Daylight Savings Day, sort of. No actual plans for saving have yet been thought of, other than the one by Jonathan Swift; to conserve Daylight in pickled cucumbers, or whatever it was...

I'm to be back with you as soon as I can.

Demanding the Impossible

In Swedish -- I think that the expression is borrowed from a Baron Münchausen story -- lifting yourself by the hair is the same as lifting yourself by your English proverbial bootstraps -- i.e. quite impossible, and superiors, human or natural, couldn't care less.

As the arm is impossible, shaped for fitting what is demanded without remorse from the image, I've thrust something like a ruler through it. The face is drawn somewhat coarsely, mostly on purpose. So is Life.

Watercolours, Electric Ink & Progress Quick and Slow

While I desperately want to give you finished works all the time, I'm sometimes into just too many things to make this possible. So I'll show you simply what's brewing:

This little sketch I did on the nicest spot that I could find nearby. I later used it as an example in class (I teach at times).

One of the points of it, apart from being nice, is to show conservation of time; it's a good thing that it was chilly and the autumn sun slowly setting, leaving no time to dilly about people or dotty details, one had to distil the landscape into its basics and I think it only got better for that. I let the water flow quite freely.

From one thing to another. This is a part of a pitch for a company that sells sound dampening screens with prints -- birds will be filled with birdlike colours. But I like the play of the lines. Digital is not aqua, and it will look better and stronger in print, but you loose the spontaneity of the water and the strength of the outlines (if you use outlines) after such vibrant electric colouring.

Progress on the latter has been a slow flight. Nothing got easier when my own computer suffered from a bug of sorts, and I had to borrow another.

I think that the real bug is less cute than this.

"Between Two Lives" -- CD Jacket Illustration

I'm quite happy with this hand that had to be done in zero time (standard time for rush jobs -- it's part of the professional pride to handle these sudden dashes) for a single, "Between Two Lives". Sophie's song (below) is about a soul that looses everything even faster than that; there's a sharp divide between Before and After, and it was irresistibly obvious to paint those fields white and black -- with outlines the other way round. I'm happy there are some colours too, they repeat on both sides of the great dividend, if yet irregularly so. They're not too opaque, and look very different on each background, as things do in life after a major change.

Body Part Confusion (& Other Confusions)

Poor girl. Something's wrong. We don't feel really fit for life. We Mismatch. This one I was about to send to one of those image banks that earn a few hundred dollars for every image sold, whereas the creator is rewarded with many, many cents. Upon seeing the other requirements -- you have to prove that analogue originals like this may exist without the aid of electricity, thus photographed from different angles and two witnesses have to testify that this is my work -- no. Just no.

I've had a lot of these Just No experiences lately. For instance, trying to find a good salesperson -- but not too good. One of them instantly tried to sell a homepage to me, another demanded 5000 SEK (that's close to 600 USD) in advance, the third one... you get the point. (Perhaps I should get a purchasing manager to sell my works?) Back to art. Please, let's think of art instead ---

One odd thing is that the sketch somehow had a charm that the finished "inkquarelle" hasn't. Don't know why. Or perhaps that's just me.

Paired Horses (Parhästar)

I was sort of inspired by seeing a couple walking -- which I did with the somewhat weary eyes of someone Too Single -- somehow they felt like a strange animal of four legs and one-and-a-half mind. Immediately, the Swedish word parhäst came to my mind: The word in itself means a paired horse as in a horse team but the idea is that of one who is jolly happy about being part of a twosomeness.

The horses in front aren't jolly happy. Perhaps those happy in the background will soon cry stylized crystal tears too, but that is more than I know. Or they might even heal, for better and worse, but how that is to happen without even more damage done is also more than I know.

Ink, watercolour, paper. And this double horse is one inch or so from nose to nose.

Ship of Despair

Made for quite personal reasons, it's an unhappy ship run by some sort of Mymbles.*
It'll do you no good to ask why.

Reactions to their wet dilemma range from blind optimism to utter despair.

Life is hard on the dissolving ship. I haven't bothered very much to give it details, perhaps adding to the uncertain dark mood.

I've deliberately kept the colour scale down to black, white and sepia plus red. Going digital, one can have any colour that one wants. There's some aesthetic point in not wanting rainbows then.

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*It was Tove Jansson who invented the Mymbles; Mymlor in Finnish Swedish. Q.v.

Portrait in Fragments

In the digital diaspora that followed the breakdown of my computer -- it has to do with two anti-virus programs attacking each other virally -- it takes a bit of sophisticated artificial stupidity to come up with such a thing -- I felt a bit broken myself, and I drew this one (whoopee that I got to borrow a digital pad while we wait) while waiting to see if Life wants us both back. I use blue background, black, white and crayfishy lobstertentackleish elements of forbidden seas. There's also some inspiration drawn from the Death Star (Star Wars) but in the progress it became fragmentation in general.