Oils, Inspirations and Visions

So I've recently been painting in oils. Water Miscible Oils, to be precise. They're made with safflower oil that has been chemically altered at the molecular level to be water-soluble. Paint and chemistry - together at last!

So it was important for  me to try and do some research on the subject, since I have no formal art training and I understand that oils are a highly technical medium. I want to do well right away. I read some online tutorials about the subject as preparation,  knowing, of course, that they wouldn't be quite enough. But at least I have a theoretical understanding of the very basics. I did some Googling around for these tutorials, scanned a few and discarded them, but there were two that stood out as being sufficiently nuts-and-bolts to help me - Jess Bates's website and Bill Martin's. There are, presumably, others that are technical in intention, but I'll have to get arounfdto them later.

It's also not enough to simply know how to do a thing - one also must know what to do with it. Sure I could be trying to do dry tonal exercises on spheres and cones, but to be honest that sucks boaby. I don't have the time or the canvases to spare on that, and little interest. I am aware that I'll probably have to do it to progress in the future, but right now I am focusing on having fun with the medium, mostly just figuring out for myself how the paint feels and works. The only problem is that to do anything other than dry technical exercises, it seems that one needs inspiration. And many days, I find that lacking.

Everyone has their own method of getting some inspiration together. When I feel like I need to do something, but don't have a clear idea of what I need to do, I generally round up my artbooks and leaf through them. I also do this with websites of artists whose books I don't own. So to present a very few of the colossal number artists whose work gives me ideas: dark-themed hyper-realist Michael Hussar, providing, if anything, a gruesome and insightful commentary through his symbolism (check out the piece entitles Vasoline), Scottish Colourist J D Fergusson who evidently delighted in the 'voluptuous delights of life', the expressive work of Chris Dingwell and the fantasy hyper-realism of Christophe Vacher, Paul Bonner and John Howe (I know, there's clearly something about me that loves highly detailed fantasy art). I might also suggest that one checks out the sculptorial/assemblage work of  Christopher Conte, which I discovered through the tattoo blog Needles and Sins. I love me some mechanisms and biomechanical stuff. Oddly not so much in tattoos, though.

Anyway, these are a few of the things that I am drawn to when languishing in the doldrums, or lost in need of direction. Like a dog that instinctively grubs for the roots and herbs that it somehow knows will cure it of its maladies, I return again and again to these people's work, most of all the sketches and preliminaries. There's more, of course, but that'll have to wait for another day.

So there you have it - a little technique, a little inspiration and a buttload of determination, and I'll go from here.

Atheists around the world indirectly donate to troops

Earlier this week I helped donate a care package to American troops serving in the middle east. It wasn't hard, and it was free, but I'll bet the people who received them didn't give a fuck that I and others didn't actually spend any money. I think they're glad to know that someone cares enough to spend thirty seconds typing a brief message into a box (seems somewhat sad that it's possible to imagine that thirty seconds of caring would be enough to brighten someone's day). I just regret to hell that I didn't tell more people about it. If anyone had asked me why I would want anything to be donated to soldiers, I would say the following:

Soldiers are people, in stressful positions, and people in stressful positions need to know that someone gives a fuck. Simple as that. I don't know much about war, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or the war there. I've never personally seen someone be killed, or have personally killed anyone. I've never endured great deprivation, or mortal terror. But I am willing to bet that these things add up rapidly to feeling alienated and weird. Imagine you knew something, had experienced something, so powerful - almost defining - and no-one could understand? You could tell people and they would hear your words but they just wouldn't get it? And would it not be a relief for someone to say: 'hey man, I know you're going through some shit that I don't get, but I'm sympathetic, and here's a token of that'

How it worked was like this: A company (Revision Military) and a charity (Any Soldier) that started it made up a number of care package boxes with magazines, some beef jerky, and some Sawfly military goggles that the company make (apparently they are a desirable item). They then invited people to put a message on them to send to the soldiers out there. Atheist-in-the-military Justin Griffiths made this post on his blog Rock Beyond Belief to let his readers know there was something tangible to do.

We atheists apparently did a lot of this.

I was a small part of something, and it felt good. I'll be looking for bigger parts in bigger things in the future.

Any suggestions?

More Darwin:In which, unsatisfied with my first study of Charles Darwin, I try again.

Hullo reader!

My painting time has been consumed by the triplet goblins of Regular Work, Other Things To Do and Minecraft. I am ashamed.

However, I now publish my second study of Charles Darwin - unfortunately I'm having trouble getting the picture manager to work, so I'll have to describe these things a bit.

The Underdrawing - soft pencil on watercolour paper

 Rookie mistake here - I got carried away with drawing him and didn't measure it out properly - now he has an unnecessarily large beard. I always make this mistake out of sheer enthusiasm.

More after the jump!

Turkey, Camels, and Unfailing Politeness

I saw Michael Palin go to Turkey on TV today. Turkey is interested in joining the EU, and that seems like a cool thing to me; for one, Turkey has long been a buffer between the eastern portions of the EU and the Middle East, and the idea that the Middle East might be just a little culturally closer bears some thinking about. For another, it's always nice to find out about the country that might soon be a neighbour. Finally, Turkey is a tobacco producing region, producing, unsurprisingly, Turkish Tobacco. I like a pipe, and I love a cigar. The possibility that a tobacco producing region nearby, and within our easy-international-trading area, seemed like an interesting one. It's far fetched to imagine that tobacco products will grow cheaper, or more varied, or easier to find, but it was an amusing fantasy.

But that wasn't the coolest thing on that program. There were things that I saw that amazed me a great deal. For example, I wouldn't have thought that it would snow in Turkey, which lies between the EU and the Middle East. I would have thought that it would be, almost entirely, a warm place - if not outright hot. But there was Michael Palin, standing proud and cheerful in the snow amid some truly bizarre volcanic geological formations called 'fairy chimneys' in a place called Cappadocia- and yes, you can go and stay in one. They're made by wind and precipitation weathering of soft rock (is soft volcanic rock a common or uncommon thing? I would love for a geogeek to tell me).

Another thing that Michael Palin went to see was an event called the 25th Annual All-Turkey Camel-Wrestling Championship (I may have taken some licence there, but that is about what I saw on a banner).

A hot, coppery sun glares down on a bowl of dusty sand, as a heavy, balding man swaggers into the demarcated arena. His skin is oiled and slick, and he spits the dust from his mouth as he sizes up his opponent. Fuelled by chilli sauce and kebabs, and absolutely hammered, the man takes off his hat and places it ceremonially on the ground to his side. He is the champion. In this arena, he is God. He will not lose. He must not lose. Not to some obstreporous quadruped.

After all... he's got a reputation to maintain.
That didn't really happen. Instead, Micheal Palin sat in a crowd that watched starved, randy camels wrestle each other whilst the locals consumed raki and kebabs. It was rather sad, and smacked a little more than faintly of traditional animal cruelty crudely disguised as a cultural rite. Michael was unflaggingly and immaculately polite, as ever.

If it had been the former version of events, I would be the first to give Turkey the fist-bump that welcomes them into the EU.

Darwin, Rationality and Renaissance

I've been away from keyboard for a few days. I actually felt guilty about neglecting this blog.  In the time I've been able to snatch inbetween doing gainful employment, I've managed to produce a portrait of Charles Darwin.

One of the sites I love to  visit and revisit is Freethought Blogs, and my favourites there, Pharyngula, En Tequila Es Verdad and Blue Collar Atheist (this is not to suggest that these are the only blogs there, or the objectively best, or that the others are somehow unworthy. These are just my favourite three of a large group that I like immensely. I strongly suggest that anyone go to see if there's anything that catches their eye there). I wanted to show them how much I appreciate their words, which entertain and inform me so well and the idea came to me all of a sudden. A long term project was born (and I'm really going to stick to it this time) . It might take me a while, but I'm going to do them each a painting.

I thought I'd start with Charles Darwin. Central to a lot of debate, he's a famous figure in science politics, as the Theory of Evolution that he proposed was received poorly in his own time (and it still seems to have some resistance even today) and is pretty fundamental to basically every biological discipline.

So, taking up some peculiarly dense watercolour paper I had found, I got stuck right in doing some pencils for a study for it. The image is taken from an old photo, rather a famous one I think, and I basically mentally cropped it. I must say that the intense tonal contrasts in his face are extraordinary - Darwin was a craggy-looking fellow. I found it really interesting to work on all his myriad crevices and wrinkles. What a life of thinking and pondering and worrying he had - no wonder! 

I agonized long and hard about whether or not to do it in monochrome, like the old photo was, or whether it should be a colour study. As you can see, this is after the first couple of layers of watercolour, and it is indeed in colour. I thought that since the reference material was in monochrome, it would be an interesting challenge to try to render it in colour. It sure was.

 More pictures of my progress on this one after the fold.