Meooow! I did this three-eyed little furry for a friend who kept such a good guard on one of my exhibitions (the one in a hotel lobby this fall) with all of her eyes.
On the assumption that cats will still be cats, even if they're from outer space (actually, it would explain a lot if cats were from outer space) I made a little box town for them. And in a box you feel safe and cosy and hidden, even if your wary ears can be seen. That's cat logic for you.
It's not very easy, but here I've tried to capture how the gold gleams in the original (my usual Ink'n'Aqua on paper). I used some gold colour for the eyes, claws etc. and some sort of collar trinket that just entered my imagination when I sketched that part -- I wonder what the symbol stands for. Perhaps you have to be a space cat if you're to know.
I've done a wee little reading on cats with three eyes. Those kitties are obviously Tantric symbols of some kind, representing the stage just between dreaming and gaining consciousness; perhaps they purrrr some message from the Otherworld. -- I'll blame those realms for my idea, then. Meeeeow! :-)
...old notes or even doodles, if they're good. The few tones that you played might be the beginning of a symphony, that odd little squiggle of a text is your bestseller in being, that causal meeting might be the beginning a great friendship... And I didn't throw this little thumbnail away, a one or two minute sketch, which I am working on now.
Where I am right now:
From this scrap of paper:
I've taken special care of the keys of Whatever-it-is. That's why I haven't got any further until it's time to call it a day, but as the Tao De Jing says:
Be as careful in the end as in the beginning, for a journey of a 1000 miles begins with one step.
Now, I don't live as I learn.
I've scrapped works before, promised the gentle reader that I'll finish next week etc. etc. and these things don't always happen. (Sorry!) Most sketches don't turn into masterworks (I'm happy if my sketches turn into works at all -- and that's better) and some don't turn into anything. You might get stuck, run out of time or energy, betray the work for another, whatever. Still...
This little piece was delayed by the November Melancholia suffered by Yours Sinc., but here goes:
This ink drawing was scanned in a few different modes.
First I made a dark rendering for the tree, etc. so that you may see the grain of the paper, adding some nice texture.
Next I made a light one for the birds, adding some light and contrast -- and, I would say, balance.
Finally I made the scan that you see the most of, just a few notches darker than the actual original.
All this was followed by some electronic scissorwork (Photoshop).
In the end, some colours were added -- sparingly. We don't have much energy. It's November, right?
A little eye painted with some body colours that were on Post-Halloween Sale (obviously there's such a thing). Other experiments were also done with the help of some good company -- I decided not to show them on this blog...
The little drawing that was made to run around notes at my exhibition (q.v.) has been recycled as an illuminated border. Now it's intended for my not-soon-to-be-done-manuscript. So I had fun colouring it, putting some smeared collage on it (from sources you'd never guess) and expanding on it. As I went from about postcard to letter size, I didn't want to simply resize the old drawing,* so I had to fill in with something. I added some kind of clarinet joint...
...and some kind of greenery and... I really don't know. Do you?
*Upon second thought, I could've done that too -- putting details in the enlarged structures. But it would probably feel like "More of The Same". I believe paintings may be guided by some kind of necessity. As for the rest of Life, I'm still of two minds.
And is Art mirroring Life?
And should it?
Etc., etc.
A little illustration for The Book that I'll Finish Someday. That page is vaugely about bananas (perhaps you don't want to know...) so we divide it in two with the fruit. -- According to my sister, bananas are not fruit -- they're technically berries. Berries schmerries! As long as the bananas know themselves, and are yellow and tasty, everything is fine. No need to go bananas.
Some people steal images in order to get seen on the web -- very bad practice; if someone didn't get paid, it's theft. I keep to stealing lines that someone might google on to get attention -- I found the phrase suitable as a title, and this might be found if you are interested in a old Sierra classic named Larry. It wasn't a game for children. Larry was looking for the meatier side of love, one might say. We teenagers broke the code quite quickly. (I was this odd teen who didn't use the shortcut -- I remember it was alt-X -- but actually learned the answers to the grown-up questions, receiving a slice of Americana too as I went along.)
I might get back to the thing I was working on before next week. There has been plenty to do in my other trades (right now I'm a proofreader and language consultant) -- and I also very much wanted to do this little ink drawing while the idea was fresh in my head. It might get even better with some colours on, who knows, but why overdo it? It's a little quirky and more than a little enigmatic and I think it'll do. If it jogs your imagination a little, I'm happy. One must take Imagination out for a walk now and then.
The poor creature of the last week, the one that's all eyes, now has company:
She is, despite herself, all ears.
A closer look at the jumble:
It might amuse you that the colour and a few remaining structures literally stem from a tree, shot by me and heavily tinted. Next it was quite distorted (it was a bit blurry to begin with) smeared and altered but I like that you may still hint some of the structures in the final result (see the first image).
What are those eyes that stare on us?
Until we break, they're surveilling us!
What is this nightmare in ink Japanese?
(It's digital, really, might as well be Chinese)
I won't tell you now, that prospect 's bleak
I might as well tell you
-- the next week.
A little ink. A little aquarelle. A little thing whilst waiting for life to happen, if ever it does. But it's fall time. Leaves fall, bright and yellow and red. Illusions are falling too, what colours I do not know.
"So it goes", as Kurt said. While painting this I had to move several times, chased as I was by a shadow of a tree. It was cold.
Now and then Yours Sinc. writes songs. They are written (mostly in Swedish) not in order to make Instant Money but rather as a protest against this world where money is so sorely needed and all that; humoristic but bitter ditties that I intend to put out on the web with sounds and lyrics and all. And something to look at while you endure that. So this one I'll use for a song about a soul who wanted to be something and do something but does little else than to tend to three children all day long. Voilà:
The despair is soaring high...
...up to the celestial regions, where an odd Angel Band is chiming in happily. They seem to be of small discerning regarding music.
I intend to use that sheet for the title of the song.
(It won't sound like celestial music, I can promise you that.)
The title, of course, is stolen from Paul McCartney -- it fit so well.
And as usual I believe that the meaning, the truth -- if these things do not contradict each other -- is in the eye of the beholder. (You decide what it is.)
(No, meaning is not truth. We need to interpret, simplify, let the impressions sift thoroughly through the Synapse Labyrinth and what emerges in the other end is something we can understand and thus isn't true anymore. But I digress.)
And as it is well past midnight I had better stop there, finding nothing wiser to say. "Yesterday came suddenly"...
"I want a butterfly."
"A butterfly?"
"Yes. It is to be drawn in this position [he showed me the position and mailed it to me] and in this manner [I had to take a picture of the screen where various, very spluttery, runny aquarelles appeared, not my normal style but, all right then!] and in this colour scale..."
"Okay [said I, a couple of days later] -- here you go."
"This is not what we agreed about."
(Oh man, yet another obnoxious bastard.)
It was, but but it didn't look as he didn't imagine.
Let me explain:
Our trade is to work with our imagination for people who don't have any.
"I know perfectly what it looks like", they would say.
But can you draw it?
Can you do anything that even comes near it? No? Then you actually don't know. In this lies the problem. People without any imagination can't imagine that they have no imagination. They are wholly insatiable and I guess that normal people won't work with them. Then they come to me. Be it love or business, I should be very, very wary when people come to me voluntarily. But my imagination only serves me in the Arts.
"What doesn't kill us makes us stronger" -- How tired am I of this sentiment! Stupid little Nietzsche.
I'd say:
"What doesn't kill you now, kills you later."
As, by every lost illusion, by every lost little hope, we die.
We Die, Mr. Nietzsche!
Perhaps this was your wry little point.
Here it is, anyway.
And yes, this week we're green. You might recognize some patterns from the weary eye as you saw (or didn't see) last week.
This is an eye, a weary eye. For the artist is weary. He is, in fact, so weary that he even can't come across telling us why. So we let it be.
We're having a go at the old and well tried Dalinian trick of letting something turn into something else, textures and shapes come and go as they please. If they were sounds, they might go Schlurp, Schlop or even Meeeoww! -- You never know with the subconscious. The party is going on there in the cellar, and poor Forehead never was invited, R.S.V.P. (Moreover, you probably know that it is during these wild parties that our actual decisions are made. How much for rationality.) I also re-use my pattern from the work you haven't seen finished yet -- coming up next week, with all sound and fury! -- now you see it as the red, somewhere-between-circuits-and-veins below the sadly miscoloured whites of the eyes.
Last but not least -- guess for yourselves. Closing office soon, to join said party downstairs. Nighty-night!
Once in a while you get to meet people who have put so much soul into their Internet Persona -- see; we're beautiful, we're smart, we're dashing! -- that there is almost nothing left to be interesting about them if you would meet them in real life. Which I recently did. I'm afraid that my merciless eyes were quite quick at spotting some rather poor acting, or, at least, a stinging cognitive dissonance between whom Her Majesty were and what fraudulent pixels and words told one. As we're likely not to trouble each other again, here's a little memento. I'm down with a cold.* So this'll have to do to entertain you...
As for me, I'm not that interesting as a person. Well, I might create and say interesting things, but is that me?
-- Wouldn't think so. And next time I'd like to meet some who is smashingly boring on the web but exciting in real life.
*Sorry for the delay, Tuesday already! I aim for Sundays. Perhaps I have to put that practice down. We'll see.
This upcoming election in Sweden won't be as much about voting for something as voting against -- namely, the party called the Swedish Democrats or SD for short. They're as democratic as Hitler was and wish to come in the same way. In front, Jimmie Å. (that I've drawn before) who spearheads this Trojan horse. Behind, the woodheads of openly Nazi hooligans.
It is no coincidence that they become more numerous as the "civilized" Nazi party is gaining ground -- one might compare this relationship to the one between the NSDAP (that wanted support from respectable sources) and the SA (that wanted to beat your head in). I sense the same kind of "Good Cop / Bad Cop" setup now.
And after them, on this slippery slope, there'd be swastikas without any makeup covering at all.
