Merry Xmas!

On Vacation!

Yes, an actual vacation! My first enjoyable trip since... well, it's about years. But here we are. Going south soon (albeit not as far as the picture says).

I'm usually very methodical when I do digitals, making use of every shortcut that isn't too digital and cheap in its looks. Now I wasn't. I've made this (mostly) as I would do an oil, smearing electric paint about.

I hope to be back on Xmas Day, having had a fine rest and with plenty of new nice oddities in my bag. Ho-ho-ho.

His Master's Voice

This is what I've distilled from a tired pencil sketch from this summer, when I travelled a fearful lot with my half-portable piano. Sometimes I felt like some kind of pianola, churning out music without much soul left in it...

I've been gentle, only adding a few shadows and highlights and colour values to the scanned sheet, which came in various sad hues of grey.

-- I think it is playing old and scratchy Jazz, but you decide.

Towering Chess Problem of Separation

Being very tired but happy after my Vernissage (Larry's Corner, Stockholm, Sweden. Open two weeks from now) I made this little study in sepia. Enjoy!

Ballpoint Pen Jumble

Just some sort of sketch, rambling visually.

I made this one visiting a place in Stockholm name of Cosmopolitan something like a year ago (it isn't, but what's in a name...) and returning yesterday I thought that I might bring it up again. Up close we see that the thing is crosshatch and all, and everything that we thought made a clear figure is but lines, marks, blots. Life is the same.

Swedish Work Ethics (finished)

As I was preparing lines of extra peppery sulphur, my flaming speech, I was beginning to feel a little sorry for the participants. Alas, it's too late now. One should feel sad for the soul on the wheel too.



Once upon a time we had a Church to weigh people down with, lest we'd become Vikings again. You had to know thine catechesis, honour thy King and other things like that. After scaring an ample supply away to "Amerikat" in the late 19:th C. tactics were changed and the church was slowly drippling and melting anyway. But fear not. Just like the Lutheran Evangelism once turned from a teaching of liberty to something terribly grave and clad in black that forced everything that could breathe to church on Sundays, repent and fear hell, the Workers' movement turned from the International that would set us all free into something that gave the Swedish workers "liberties" provided that they stay chained to the oars. And all stern sentiments had already poisoned the True Workers down to their very roots. They began to worship their chains, confusing being chained with being safe.

True Work is nine-to-five. True Work has fixed salaries. Being quite pointless is also a sure sign of True Work. --- Art is not True Work. The True Worker may come to my exhibition, admire this, take a good look at that, have some snacks and wine, add a compliment to a third work and all is sugar and spice. Then the True Worker has to ask, with fusel oil distaste lurching beneath the Cognac of Compliments, can you make a Living out of that?



As in any good interrogation, the True Worker already knows the answer. T.W. simply has to feel at an advantage again, perhaps ward off some feeling of inferiority or pointlessness. That the chains are not true gold, or brass even. Then the Good Worker marches off without giving me a penny. If you don't perform True Work they don't have to pay you, not here or anywhere, and then you can't make a living and then it is not True Work, so they don't have to pay you...etc. I have a not-so-vague feeling that it is fear of loosing one's increasingly uncertain position that has True Workers bullying those who are outside the square. It won't help a bit.

(As a matter of fact, if a job of work is pointless enough, chances are that it is not too fun and thus made for money alone, proving it to be True Work. I am by no means immune to such looming feelings. Somewhere deep down the drain I feel unable to accept my efforts if they don't result in perfect self-sufficiency -- it's a terrible thing to demand of an artist, but that's how it is. Friends tell me that I am too harsh on myself. I blame my inner Swede.)

I started on this work 2015 and left it for quite a while, perhaps it depressed me. "Resistance is pointless!" -- and now I finish it mostly out of principle. (And my favourite printer has retired, so it'll take a while before it can adorn the walls of Good Workers and Bad ones alike). But here goes.

At press time, this is our dear Prime Minister.


His Excellency Mr. Löfven.
...The steadfast champion of workfare, who bravely sends us out to find work quite regardless if there is any or not, is clad in / made up of / infested by / you choose / merrily ticking little cogwheels. Merrily merrily down the stream. Mr. Löfven is the leader of whatever remains of the Social Democrats. Their total dominance of Swedish politics is but a memory. As one begun to cut down on (next to) free health care, social security and dozens of other things from cradle to grave that the Swedes had got used to taking for granted, they rapidly lost power. The chains began to itch. The Liberal Conservatives (the 2:nd greatest party) soon got into their heads of declaring themselves "the New Worker's Party". The old one seemed to have resigned.

They are currently, as I write this, led by



Mrs. Kinberg Batra of the Neo-Liberal Conservatives.
You know a bit better where you stand with them, for worse. So now we had to choose between a party that had lost its ideals and one that didn't really have any (other than: Give the Market free reins and it'll sure canter somewhere nice). They need not uphold the illusion of the True Worker. If you don't work, you'll get homeless and die. (And you mustn't get very ill either.) This is called blackmail. It is also called normal.

Anyhow, this downslide in politics has us to introduce the meanest part of the machine, that Åkesson.



Mr. Åkesson fuming.
There's not much to say about this band of ill-concealed Nazis known as "Swedish Democrats". It is simply a movement that learned that nice shoes and suits and gibberish looks and sounds better than marching around screaming Heil, and you can get many votes by changing your wardrobe into something less Third Reich. To march around screaming is, alas, such an un-Swedish thing to do. We prefer nice and quiet. The most devilish things can be accepted as long as they are nice and quiet. Those old chains never rattled.

They don't work by words and sense, but they're good at picking up general anger and resentment. It might suffice to say that they are beginning to learn the Trump Game very well.

I hoped, by writing this, to understand my weird country a little bit better. But I don't. I still don't get any feeling that explains it, the riddles remain cold and bloodless. And I still don't know how to cope, as a soul or as someone trying to run a business uphill.

Remembering a Nightmare

I had fun doing this one. The background is some heavily tweaked footage of a thicket that I twisted into near-grey, and then I found out that it was funny to let the structure do some work on other parts too. From a distance, it looks like blood on the blade -- perfect pattern. The same matrix gives the bedclothes a bit of pattering too. The flooring was originally boards on a little bridge near home. And so on... 

I actually really don't remember the nightmare now. I woke up to face daymares.   

A Cure for November

...which I, sweetly put, abhor. 

It does some utterly interesting things to the psyche of Yours Sinc., who had to fight for days to get any Will to Paint back at all. 

Now you might sit with a sweet Australian November or a New Zeeland or Hawaiian one and wonder what the !"#¤%&/(yyy)=? I mean. Do stay where you are. Swedish November is Death in the shape of a month, no sun, all wet and sad, and it can't but affect you -- It would give Eeyore a sore throat. Amidst this gloom I decided to go a bit silly and psychedelic so that I wouldn't have to think. 

I thought that white contours would be nice. 

The butterflies have some features in common with that old Microsoft logo, I don't know why. Perhaps I felt that some colour would be fun. The trees are throwing their last yellows now, and if we want to see colours we have to make them up ourselves.  

Yellow Leaves

I might be done with outdoors painting for this season. I have a sort of mentor, name of Lennart Forsling (do check him up) who does this all year round -- in some of his aquarelles one may see the effect of frost cracking in the paint -- but this is as far as I go. 

A closer look as usual... The trick is to finish before you go entirely numb, if possible.

Psychedelic Swedish Coat of Arms

This one I made from a small badge that was printed in black and white on an envelope that I found the other day. I got it a while ago as I've chanced upon some dangerous people throughout this year.

First, the uniforms ask you questions. (One of my interviewers took most interest in the race of the offender, sad but true, and I did note some disappointment when I couldn't give him a pitch-black villain. -- I couldn't care less. I don't wish robbers who beat me next to unconscious to be in any particular colour. I'd like them burned at the stake, well done please, or shot or nicely hanged, but I have no say.)

Next, one can always trust our Protectors to write and inform you afterwards that you've taken a beating. (Deary me, you don't say?)

They also write yet a little bit later, usually telling you that they don't see very much that they can do about it. However;

I scanned and resized the little badge and then I took to smearing things about, adding free interpretations of the forms. This looks like a fish... and this... Next, I threw in some light collage (my own footage, no cheating) and colours.



Details that I am happy with: The wildlife in the crown. The matrix-like nonsense in the Swedish Blue. The typewriters that protect us... Odd subversive little things and stuff.



The peaceful Swedes are not allowed to defend themselves by any material means. So if you don't happen to wear a black belt or -- even better -- a Sumo wrestler's body you're sort of screwed. We all have to make the choice whether we prefer to be legal or alive.

 

By the way, here's the original badge. 

Don Quixote Sketch

'Look! I'm tired today after heavy rowing in rough seas, but I've just made a sketch of the greatest hero of all times, Don Quixote de la Mancha.'
'Don Quixote? Wasn't he the madman who attacked windmills, believing they were giants? Absurd! Quixotic!'
'Precisely! And that's what is so heroic. It wouldn't be heroic at all if they really were giants. Then they would've called for the Don at once. How many other active giantfighters did they have in la Mancha? Not very many.'
'But he lost! He got hurt! He could not win!'
'See what I mean. And he did it anyway. -- Mind, It would be equally heroic to claim that giants are windmills if everyone else believed windmills to be giants. Such an obnoxious person would get in trouble with Society, and in one way or another they'd hurt our hero just as much.'
'But how did that stupid action make Don Q. a hero? I don't understand!'
'And you never will. You're a safe nine-to-fiver. If you live in a democracy, you go to work. If you live in a Soviet state or in the Third Reich, you go to work. You hold brave little speeches of accepting reality and growing up and being normal. You are not brave.'
'But we make society work! We sacrify our days, our freedom!'
'You sacrify nothing. You are windmills, you were made for this and really can't think of anything else than producing very standard flour. Is there any love in your work? Or do you just grind sad wheat for cheap white bread without soul? -- No, it takes a hero to question you, to endure the constant beating of your wings. One definitely has to be mad if one is to question reality. You need quixotic madness if the world is to change for something better. You need madness if any world is to remain. This includes windmills.'

Meeting in Wonderland

For Susanne, who requested owls --

This is the kind of meeting that could end just any way. Owls turn into something else. Those other Somethings do look a bit shady, but one never knows...

There are rabbits too. And they happen to be blue. It's a very normal Wonderland Rabbit colour.

Post no. 200 of Paintstakingly

Dear readers,

With heartfelt thanks for following these serious follies I give you post no. 200, a movie with flashbacks and a little piano by Yours Sincerely; you might recognize the song sometimes after a while... And sometimes not. It is sort of surreal music, thus, to go with sort of surreal imagery.



Enjoy!

Autumn Alla Prima

This quick little experiment was made with a lot more water than usual, just to see what would happen. (Normally, I'm quite a coward.) I found that the rough splashes contrasted nicely with the even Art Noveau lines of the stems. And there really were two cute children there to make the little thing more interesting.

The trick, of course, is to add the reds to the greens precisely in time. Too late, and it goes dry and boring. Too early, and it goes smudgy and boring. On the top of that, I was a bit worried about whether the paper would accept this much water. But it did. It was very well glued around the edges, so it didn't go accordion despite being a little too thin really. Some soak and stretch the paper before starting. But they usually use larger sheets -- and more patience. I was born without patience.

Electric Beetles

Dear readers,
This week gives us Electric Beetles...

The speckled background I made quite a while ago without having a clue what to do with it. It came in handy now. I use it straight, inverted and so on, saving the image from being too flat.

Ah, the electric beetles! I met some sort of beetle the other day. It took a break from whatever beetles do to crawl on my arm. Hello, Mr. Beetle. A fine day, isn't it? Warm for being September, I'd say...
It had an odd square on its back; a pattern of pointed little orange strands resembling the nodes (wossname?) of a microchip or so. It didn't look much like my beetles do now, but an idea was born and newborn ideas have to be nursed carefully. What do you think of the result? (You're very welcome to write a comment below.) I wish that Mr. Beetle knew about it.

Hummingbirds, Colouring Experiment

Having done digital smudge for quite a while (see, for instance, my Rucksack of Life) I decided that I wanted to try some vastly different means of colouring. So here I used different kinds of lines.

I like the blend of cute (hummingbirds) and not cute (sipping and sapping the strength out of our poor fellow). I am also happy that we don't do this in any kind of realistic manner (not to mention photorealistic) as if reality had any kind of inherent appeal. One might as well try to be a little decorative instead. Let's look closer, almost by the pixel:

The Word Puzzler

This one I made for dear friend Sophie, who runs ordpusslaren.se

It is in Swedish, with quirks, and about writing in this wonderfully quirky language too.

Sad Apple Tree

A little ink-and-aqua from a garden with an apple tree. It is somewhat sad, despite being a fine specimen of Transparent blanche.

The proper yellowish green, typical for this variety, was gained through light underpainting with indigo blue, later followed by lemon yellow on top.

Up close; the ladybug was on the chair that I intended to sit on when I started, so I let it have its time and a good place in the work. Spots of red was precisely what it needed, save but for the red tear. It adds balance to the composition, not happiness. Perhaps you can't have both.

Second Hand Love, Finished w. Colours

It does look better with colours. At first I felt that the petals should be some lilac-tannish, but thought the better of it. No -- we put those hues around instead. The same with the hands: I had every impossible Not A Hand Hue underpainted before adding skin and rosiness. And then I made care not to overwork but to finish before I was done...

...how appealing isn't the aquarelle to a surrealist then! You paint by not painting. You add the wrong colours to build up the right feeling. And you finish by not finishing. A Taoist might find this pleasing too; a Nothing that creates Everything.

Second Hand Love, Work in Progress

Yours Sincerely has been quite busy with music, including some commissioned for a little movie and whatnot, and finds little time for art -- but this is what's brewing... Ink on aquarelle paper, with colours whenever I can. And the working title is Second Hand Love.

(I've also done some work done on the Dalí ABC mentioned a few weeks ago but don't deem it ready to fly yet. There's a serious streak of perfectionism. Patience is a virtue. You're very virtuous.)

Mandala of Sorts

I just finished this (so perhaps we're running a few minutes late) and it is, as the title says, a Mandala of some kind.



I suppose that it is made up of... well, what it has to be made up of. Fragments of desire, I suppose. Hands, Octopus stuff, and so on. But I really don't know. It is a fractal, somehow, with some seriously flawed mathematics in it. And so, I feel, is Life.



Some would call it a dreamcatcher. As long as one is free from nightmares, daily and nightly, I'm fine.

Green Subway Heart

This vision emerged from my subaquatic states of mind among other sea monsters; they were not as nice, so here goes...

The Stockholm Sub is nowadays more streamlined -- and less often green. But I grew up with white stripes on green, and in my heart they're still green and boxy somehow. So I give you this heart... Welcome to our little corner of the seas, sort of.

Swedish Turducken; a Sketch.

It is thanks to the National Geographic that I know the odd concept of the Turducken, i.e. a turkey stuffed with a duck which in its turn is stuffed with chicken. It is sort of kinky. And as I've been very busy with music this week I've had much to say (the world now being a perfect terroristic madhouse) but little time to say this visually. But I bring you the very Swedish, middleclassy concept of vovve-villa-volvo; the alliterations translate as doggy-housey-volvo (the Volvo was a popular car brand) and were a Turducken in its own right. Some people think that this odd roll of meats is all that one wants in Life.

And I have so much to say about Sweden and Turduckenish mentality, on being safe-and-sorry, but presently I refrain.

Kittymathical Music

Meow. This week, Yours Sincerely taught himself to play some of the sometimes beautiful but rather abstruse music by Paul Dessau; he wrote the score for The Good Person of Szechwan. My piano fingers are to support the singer through the often beautiful but labyrinthine tunes onstage quite soon, and we don't get much time at all to practice... (One might say that I'm in the department of Emergency Music.) While struggling to follow the tunes (they are floating in a most peculiar way from harmony to atonality and back again) I came to this conclusion: This music is written by a cat, walking on the keys... No. It is written by two purring furries: One who walked on the keys. And another who tried to write it down with paws dipped in ink. I find no other explanation.

The paper that I found is rather old -- 50's, actually, and has yellowed -- gone tan, even, quite nicely. A little pencil, a little ink, and there goes. Meow.