Meet Mässie, the Sea Monster

Loch Ness has Nessie, Chesapeake Bay has Chessie and Lake Champlain wouldn't be the same without Champy, who prowls these waters between New York State, Vermont and Quebec, Canada. While Sweden has an old creature in Storsjön (Storsjöodjuret), great Lake Mälaren has hitherto been sadly neglected. So this month we see, for the first time, the probing proboscises, or mouth-eye tentacles, of Mässie, Hässie (as I saw it off Hässelby) and Lammie (as this particular part of the lake is named Lambarfjärden. Said glacial depression (filled with water) is also the deepest part of the entire enclosed archipelago (some 200 ft. deep) making the presence of lurching sea monsters and aquatic dragons all the more likely).

As there are eyes in their mouths, they're able to constantly glare judgingly at you and nag in the same time, and I can't possibly imagine anything more horrible. I who went a-rowing to evade such creatures!

It might perhaps amuse you to know that I only had time to draw a quickie sketch before the presence of Mässie & Friends got too overwhelming. (The colour was added later.) Ballpoint pen is good practice, though. There's no erasing or changing anything. You have to plan forward, save certain spaces and keep things in your head. Yes, you need to concentrate when you live near sea monsters!

(Not to mention, however, the odd things that you might encounter when you're ashore. Most of them have two legs.)

The Rites of Spring

Well, it's springtime here and the poor thing needed a name, right? Made quite ad hoc without wanting to paint anything really. And the piece by Stravinsky (my favourite rendering is the one by Bernstein, who had a feeling for its exquisite rawness) was the perfect thing to have in my ears while painting it; "Rites" is sort of my Angry Music. One prefers to paint out of happiness and joy, I suppose; sugar spice and all things nice. If one can't, one has to paint rather like greeting cards from the Dark Side. We have no choice.

Aforesaid unwillingness might have caused the bloodied scalpel in the top of the "flower" (here as seen during work, you can see that the rest was only planned in coarse outlines):

The leaves were, in the midst of this painter's anhedonia, allowed to take on whatever weird shape that they wanted, as long as they were there.

Further down, one might also note that the ash-brown leaf doesn't bother to go all the way down into the glass really. It still worked with the image (the glass turned out rather well, don't you think?) and honestly, would you notice this if I had not told you so? There you are.

Finally, I made that little ground reflection from the glass that you see in the first picture (overview, top). I could not be bothered with a background, so that would have to do to save the object from floating in space. Voilà, yet another painting from Mr. Ceder...

Calming Corona Mask

Dear readers; I advise you very strongly: Don't have a personal crisis while there's a pandemic going on. You'll get no help at all. I presently am suffering from some sort of occupational burnout and seem unable to draw on commission. This one I did before the burnout truly hit me; a Calming Mask for these troubled Corona times. Cheers!

February Harvest

I'm still more active on Instagram these days. On the upside, you get more feedback. On the downside, "Insta" is quite jealous, it really doesn't want you to link anywhere else. (It grudgingly allows you one link, but that's it, Buster!)

So, what do we have for this mostly grey and windy month?

My Soul is Rainy

Digital work with my photos -- and my shoes :)

"Stop!"

I also reworked an old image, from 2015 or so (might be found on this blog, look in the archives!).
Those blood red hues do something to your instincts and feelings, don't they? Look at the original:

But I did draw the original with all colours inside me, that's for sure.

Hopes and Promises

This little thing might be a brother or sister to my previous work. I've (most ambiguously) decided to call it Hopes and Promises. You see little of trust in either.

Some things of what this lady says might be taken lightly. There are things amiss.

But I don't trust that quixiotic knight either. I wonder what crumbling hopes do to his morals.

(Of course our gallant knight would never get the idea to test one of those ropes...)

Parting with Illusions

Do not part with your illusions, said Mark Twain:
"When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live."
Still, I've sort of half resolved to do that this year.
Even if it might be a little painful.
Even if it cuts the chains that keep my feet down on this poor little planet.

A closer look. Splattery-splash! I didn't say that being true to yourself doesn't hurt.

On a more philosophical note, what do we mean by "live"? I keep returning to that stupid Nietzschean maxime of "What doesn't kill you", etc. but I do feel it does, slowly. And is it really a bad thing?

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.

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* 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.

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*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.