Pianola (with dancers)

The symbolism of the pianola is one that I like very much -- I have used it before for the feeling of life as a tune played, ad nauseam, pointlessly and mechanically for its own sake.

As you see it is surrounded by dancers, dressed (or undressed?) in style. In rags --- perhaps they dance to Ragtime?

Up close, we see that the keys are meaty and sort of runny. Schlorp! And as for the top of the thing, I don't even know. Early precursors of the pianoforte, such as virginals etc. often had beautiful landscapes painted on the lid, and I might subconsciously have thought of that.

So, there we are. Year 2020 is ahead, come what may. Play another tune for us!

Back to November

Yours Sincerely has begun showing some presence on Instagram (look here!) the proper place for sketches and lighter works. I never really liked putting half-baked stuff out here. So I never got around to making more images last November -- big deal, as Sweden lost a few blissful moments of December snow and is back to November again -- this is not natural. That's a big deal. To keep afloat in the rain and damp, I drew this (on top of photo evidence of how dreadful it all was/is):

It's not Fine Art. But it did have some interesting details, or so I thought.

On "Insta" you may find light stuff like this, works in progress and so on...

Dear readers -- Merry Xmas / Neutral Greetings! -- & A Happy New Year if I can't come up with something proper before that. This busy body is now planning a Christmas concert, new artworks and oodles of other things. Ciao!

Mock Game Cover Art (Eggstremely Silly)

Once upon a time, computer games were bought in cardboard boxes (the games themselves were somewhere in there, nesting inside something strikingly physical called Floppy Discs). And on the front, those boxes had some inspiring artwork that was almost, if not entirely, unlike the handful of pixels on the screen that were chasing each other, hitting each other, or (as this was before Year 2K) actually doing something intelligent. (Some were even based on writing text and did not use graphics at all! -- just imagine...)

Now, as I've done everything from book covers to CD jackets but haven't been involved with games very much, I thought that this might catch the eyes of a programmer or two. So I set upon the most silly thing that I could imagine at the moment; fragile little eggs hitting each other with tea spoons. For what I offer is imagery beyond the usually slanted; something eggstraordinary...

I thought that the background looked a little bare. So here you got a flying egg, other eggs... even the letters are Eggish in one way or another. Well eggsecuted, I thought. Without eggsaggeration...

And by this, I hope to get to work with a real eggspert.

Inktober Harvest

I couldn't make my way through all of Inktober this year, far from it. I'm too much of a perfectionist, and my life as a Jack of many trades in culture kept me busy. But I came up with a few pieces, including a pair of experimental ones not in the original concept. For instance, here's...

Rose.

Drawing negatively is fun but very challenging. You don't see what you get. Memento: The black ink is white! The white paper is black! You can't do shadings. But the shadings become "lightings". The final result, scanned and inverted, is quite rewarding though.

Logo.

The same inversion, sans the border, was used for this logo. (It sums up what I do pretty nicely.) You might note that a few notes were copied in order to get some balance in the work. Again, I had to keep in mind somehow that this...

...becomes this.

Ring.

A real Inktober drawing. These industrious Woodheads (or so I call them) would also look nice if you were to print them in a large format, thanks to the wonderful precision and flexibility of the classic steel pen nib:

You might note that there's a few gold dots in it too (in real life they're gleaming nicely) that make up the ring itself.

Mindless.

Vessel.

The title might refer both to the sailing and the drinking kind. In all works I make room for the slightly enigmatic and, hopefully, intriguing. I want to jog your imagination.

A Very Advanced Computer

("Dator" means Computer in Swedish.) I've done a lot in ink lately, and even picked up the old Perpetual Book Project again for a while. This piece of top-notch technology is intended for that story, replacing a drawing that's a bit old and no longer "me" enough. Some digital colouring has been added, and just a few electric shadings and enhancements too (I didn't want to ruin the original, and water is always risky).

Falltime, beautiful autumn days. Gone is the hay fever that started this this midsummer (and as the park management insisted on cutting grass well into September -- how much for keeping the illusions of Workfare intact -- my nostrils didn't stop suffering altogether until recently) and some of my depression too (the latter being a very, very long story, almost as long as this sentence, parentheses included). And while I'm jolly angry for reasons that I won't tell you, I still had fun inking these details:

Undergrounders

As I was searching through my digital debris for old works that one might print again, I stumbled across this:

It was published in 2014. I made it for a magazine named Ohana, and to the best of my knowledge it is no more, at least not in its old form. The article I wrote, called "Stockholm Underground", definitely isn't. It was about underground culture here, which I might consider myself a part of, so it was easy to write. I don't remember if this accompanying illustration was easy to draw. It probably was. Here they are, seeing daylight after five years:
The underground artists, emerging from their hideout...

Fruity Kiwi Surrealism

"OMG! It's so delightfully...pointless!" -- somebody would say. "Just like life!"
"Thank you", I would answer, feeling just a bit more alive.

The idea for this little scene came as a natural thing; I shot this fruit -- half a fruit -- from a few angles, with an inkling that some inspiration might appear. And voilà. I call the image Kiwi Conversation:

For some reason (I might've said this before) mere photoshopping as an end in itself doesn't really appeal to me. So I keep those partly coarse black lines, they somehow contrast nicely with the realism we could've had as the kiwis grow perfectly hairy legs.
"No artist tolerates reality", as Nietzsche said.

Last but not least: Some kind of ladyfrog. Why not? We're by the lakeside -- Lake Mälaren, W. Stockholm -- while the grass was shot in the southern suburbs. Ribbit.

From Transylvania with Love

The illustrator had fun sketching this little book cover. Our beloved Count Dracula biting the flag of the European Union was the author's brilliant idea.

(The treatise is about Romanian relationships with the European Union, economics, politics and other tasty stuff. There's also a Romanian version out there somewhere, so that the Count can read it.)

As soon as I stopped laughing -- of course I fell in love with the idea -- I hurried to put together this, with a looming castle, Transylvanian bats and the works.

Yummy! Served with a fresh glass of something red, I suppose.

Angry Oil Company Bears

Once upon a time there was a quaint little seaside town in W. Sweden known as Lysekil.

And all too near the town (on the same planet, actually) there was a huge oil refinery run by a company named "Preem". They had a yellow logo with a friendly bear, drawn in round, childishly wide green outlines. (Every Swede has seen it.) And under the sign of this friendly totem animal they wanted to double the size of the plant...

Fortunately, the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency said No. The relatively rare Natterer's bat [Myotis nattereri] happened to live nearby. Next, the Court said No, and that's where we stand at publishing time. So, hooray for bats. (More about this here.)

Sorry, Lysekil. To turn your coat of arms into something more toxic (for that is what oil refineries do; they refine poison) was sort of irresistible...

...but my main target was that idiotic yellow Preem Bear. (You can see it, for instance, on their homepage where they tell you things as true as yellow bears are.*) So, here you get two angry ones (as if the one present wasn't bad enough) as some sort of heraldic supporters (sometimes known as Attendants, the Wiki says).

I took great care to make them as un-friendly as at all possible, and possibly a bit wicked at that.

One sometimes feels insufficient as an artist; what I can do is visual comments. The real battle, insofar it has been won (and don't say it's over yet) has been won by others. But one hopes to put light on stuff, or perhaps to inspire somehow. Someone has to blow the bugle.

---

* I believe that healthy bears tend to be white, black or brown? These poor yellow teddies (the green patches look a bit too chemical too) will suffer from preem-ature death, I'm sure...

Hommage à Delia, Finished

So I finished it at last. (I'm already a good way through a sticky oil, but more of that later someday.) Here it is, Hommage à Delia Derbyshire, the propagator of electronic music, master of cutting tapes beyond all recognition, hats off. I described the other week (q.v.) why she's surrounded by wine and Bach. (You can listen to the tune on YouTube.)

She sits here with a spoon and glass in her hands; all sounds that they wanted to turn inside out had to be recorded at the studio. No internet to browse through; no easily carried devices to do field recordings with. No DAW's*, no automatisation worth mentioning. She really was at the frontier. Let's rub a glass... cheers to the pioneer.

---

*Note for non-soundies: A Digital Audio Workstation is a computer program which does everything that Delia's BBC studio did, and a lot of things that those rooms crammed with tech couldn't. Some claim it's too easy nowadays, less of an art. I claim that there's no end of other ways to make the simple complicated (something which I'm good at) but that's another story.

Spinal Knot (He Paid Me Not)

There must be some special kind of dementia lingering among a certain few of those who come to me for illustrations. Particularily the area of logotypes, for reasons unknown, is afflicted. Dumbo of the day (or night, we had our bickering done in the middle of the night) was a Naprapath -- this is at least the first time I've been had by a naprapath. Now, what did he want? Well, he wanted a spine, tied in a Valknut knot. He wanted to pay for it, too, reluctantly, if he was pleased. Did I have some kind of guarantee?

I tried to explain that I'd rather not send an endless amount of sketches until he eventually was pleased. Not if he wasn't going to pay. (I know by experience that some people are essentially insatiable. Don't even try.) The customer-to-be was very understanding. Of course you need to get paid. But one sketch and five seconds later we were at it again.

So. He got a sketch of a spine, the embryo of what you see now, tied in a Valknut. And at once rejected his brainchild. Now when he could see it, he no longer wanted it.
"It looks like if the spine is broken."
"But you wanted..."
We discussed other possibilities, as if we had time (we had not, it was a rush job on his behalf). And within said five seconds, I had to explain yet again that artists, as well as naprapaths, need to get paid from the first vertebra. (This went on for a while.) And so the clock struck midnight. Mr. Bones went to bed. The Artist went up in flames. And happily stole the idea of a delightfully twisted spine of sorts, which is now yours to see. I might sell it as a poster someday. I imagine that it might get very popular among all other naprapaths, chiropractors etc who
1) might appreciate twisted art better and
2) are less knotty when it comes to payment.

Braking Instead of Breaking Down

For a pro, only working for fun is not funny. So I might keep this blog as a showpiece but don’t expect any regularity from me. I feel through with that. To get plenty of readers you have to update weekly, which I did for many years. So there is plenty to look at in the archives. But there is no reason to strain adding to the pile if there is little money in it and already much to see.

Look: Last time I had ads, people fled.
An appeal for donors led to even less (namely, nothing).
I am right now represented in a well visited web shop elsewhere – no result so far, so having one here (if I knew how to do it) would be silly. And lead me closer to the burnout that I already feel scorching me a bit. So there’s health considerations in slowing down too.

This one I do on commission; a portrait of Delia Derbyshire, electronic music pioneer, yet in ink only. There also has to be a lot of glasses, as the ones she painstakingly copied the sound of in her rendering of Bach’s Air. (It is said that she also needed lots of glasses for Lord-knows-what she tried to drown.)

I am still trying to find the energy -- not to mention the ounce of inspiration -- to finish it. Contrary to what some people say you need at least some little. You might call it "Spiritual Honesty" toward your work…

Black Heart

Made for a freshly created Twitter Account, we'll see if I'll use it. I once thought that a black heart would be cool on a flag, somehow. It's a simple symbol, and I loved the ambivalence, blue skies and here one is hanging, dark and moody...

I've often wondered how to find a balance between the salt and sugar of life in my art. Perhaps I shouldn't. Too complicated. Why not just let them hang there, side by side? It'll look impossible, but it'll look like Life.

PS. They don't let me add a Dislocation, so here you'll have a hearty, manual one.

Turning Flies Into Angels

Here we learn that if you have right card, you can turn angels into fl... no, the other way round.
(For a book.)

Detail.

Granada, Analogue Dream

This little piece doesn't have very much to do with Granada, Spain. It's the name of a bittersweet romance by Isaac Albéniz. It was stuck in my head while I painted this and I'm sure that it must have affected the outcome, with longing hands and dandelions (both are weeds) stretching for the unreachable.

Perhaps the silly (if not tragic) situation called Dating also was on my mind; far from impossible: One side to be constantly rejected and to get desperate and insane; the other side to deal, like Penelope, with this horde of suitors gone mad. And no Ulysses in sight.

The weather has been beautiful; Swedish summer before it gets too hot. And the urge to sit in front of a laptop has been absolutely nil. So here's my first draft for the little rant above (with the same pen) omissions and mistakes now replaced with other errors and lapsi calami. Voilà.

Extra Naïve Landscape with a Sailing Cup of...

...Coffee? Tea? Chocolate perhaps. Childish enough. Your choice for this simple pencil sketch (w. modest Photoshop embellishments).

My own thoughts were far from the ones of a 12 year old. But we'll save them for some other day. Look! Stars! Wonder what's up there.

Something with Fish In It

I really don't have any explanation for this ink-with-aqua. You're free to add your own.

The hall does have some fishy beings in it.

...and some really small details; the original is in the size of A4 (roughly letter size) and was made while I was waiting for other paint to dry.