This week i shall be mostly doing quick sketches

Having gotten fed up with taking half a life-time to paint a basic picture i decided to knock out a few short sketch pieces, for practice really, as a way to get a capture of something pretty fast. Most of these took about an hour, tho really they took about 20 minutes each, cause i do pause constantly to check important things on the internet,  like for example: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fiction-no-211-william-gibson which is a really good interview with william gibson. Enjoy!!

Oh yeah, here are the pictures...

'M+M's'

'Blocks'

'Hmmmm'

'F**king hell it's hot!!'

'I am not just a duck!!'

'Audio'

'Limone'

It's London, isn't it?

Oh bloody hell i had a full blog written there and i've f#*king lost it!! AAAAGGGGHHH!!

Right i'm not going to write it out again (it wasnt very good anyway). Here's a pretty picture i painted of London in the fog, from a photo i took last november from Hampstead Heath looking towards the City. I really like the look of Tower Blocks but had never painted one, and i'm so f*@king slow i reckon they could build them quicker than i painted this one!! Lot's of stuff wrong with this piece but i is finished with it. Hope anybody likes it...?

'When do you think his commitment waned?'

Well i just finished a piece last night that i've been working on for i don't know how long. I'm trying to train myself to stick with what i started and not leave pieces half finished. So far i think i'm succeeding. Am i learning anything tho? Patience maybe... But it nearly drove me mad in the end! The hair took so long that i might not have put as much effort into the last section as i did in the earlier parts, hence the title to this post: 'When do you think his commitment waned?'. As any Father Ted fan can answer, 'towards the end' of course!!

Seeing it posted here makes it look a bit starker than it looks on the wacom monitor... but it will have to do!! Heres a link to the reference pic used from deviantart.com http://misstopazz.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d4bu0s0

Next week i think i'm gonna spend time doing quick sketches, before i knuckle down and do another long piece. May or may not post the results, may or may not actually do the sketches! Cause it's going to be a mental week in my 'other reality' ie my day-job. I expect there to be a lot of screaming and shouting tomorrow morning on the floor.. 

Since i last posted i was in London in merry old England to see a few friends and relatives and also to go see this great exhibition in the Tate Modern: Gerhard Richter, Panorama http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/gerhardrichter/default.shtm Really, really great works here and i would recommend anybody going to visit London in the next while to give it a look, the 'realist' works on display are particularly interesting (for me anyway, i like abstract work too but wasn't too taken with some of his abstract work). He calls it 'Capitalist Realism' which i think is a great way to describe it! 

Anywho, was trying to find a link there to the Father Ted episode i was alluding to, it's called 'And god created woman', it's the one where he meets a novel writer who is going to become a nun, 'Best of luck with the book' and all that. But youtube wont allow me to watch it without setting up a seperate channel so i can watch it on 4od or some such malarky so i'm not going through all that nonsense. 

Comments always welcome...

Non-Abandoned Work

Yay i've (more or less) finished a new piece!! Took a while tho...

There's still probably a little bit of work left in it but i gonna let it rest for a bit. I'll do a longer blog on it in a day or two but for now just wanted to throw it up there. 

Abandoned Work

I've just realised that i've lined this work up wrong! The houses on the left are supposed to be higher up than the ones on the right... Kind of annoyed. But i get so bored with measuring out where things should be that i always jump into things without making sure all is correct... Got to stop cutting corners!! Anyway here it is:

I think i was being a bit ambitious with it tho, i should maybe draw some individual houses etc and not a whole scene. 

Blue landscapes

Often times i tend to paint pictures based on somebody else's photos, so i went looking thru my holiday snaps to see if i could find some inspiration from some of my photos, and lo and behold it turns out that Italy is 'inspiring'.! I know, who'd of thunk it? So i painted this one of the mountains across Lake Garda looking west from Malcesine i think, or maybe it was a bit further to the south... Anyway, we stopped for Michelle and Dara to have a swim in the lake and i read my book on swarm intelligence and took a few photos and enjoyed the  evening sunshine. Sun-starved Irish people need as much sun as they can get!! 

It's not 100% accurate but it's more painted to convey a mood. The style is also new to me, a little less focused on 'realism' and a bit softer too. And painted pretty fast as well, over two nights or three. Also i don't recall painting a landscape before either. Or at least one that looks like the thing that it's supposed to look like anyway.

Motivation

I'm trying to get back into painting again after a lull during the summer. Summer was hectic really, work does go mad busy, and we went on a great holiday too, to Lake Garda, which was just fantastic. But now it's back to school time again, and i want to get painting but just can't seem to find the motivation.

So in the meantime i'm gonna post up a few bits that i've done in the recent past, mostly unfinished practice stuff, with a brief explanation.

This one is called 'Plastic Trouble', i can't remember why now. It was nearly the very last of a series of abstract circle based pieces i was doing around May/June of 2011. Some of the earlier pieces i've uploaded here already. The backround colour started as black and gradually got lighter as i went along.

Ha, this one is called 'Plastic Furbie', i think because i was watching or listening to something about how the Furbie toy mimics intelligence and 'learns' or mimics learning. It's nearly the last piece of the circles, looking at it now i'm not sure if i like it or not, one second it looks great, the next second it looks like pepperoni slices falling from the sky...

This is called 'Plastic Fade', and i like this one, tho it is the end of the series. Perhaps i'll go back this direction, they are very enjoyable to create, and look at too maybe?

Well the title on this one is 'Metalseries no smoking text', catchy eh? Anyway it is the text on a piece of a metal sign at a filling station warning people not to smoke etc.

The text above is to be written on this sign. At the time i was looking a lot at metal and rusting metal and signs and things like that. This is unfinished, and is really, looking at it now, not much more than a colour sketch.

'Wings'. This isn't quite finished either, it's a 'study' (hate that term) of the remains of a seagull i think, that i took a photo of down on Streedagh headland. I put it on a black backround, and i like the look of this one, abstract but solid.

It's funny, the name i have on this one is 'Kabuki-Style Sketch', and i think i called it that because i was trying to mimic the David Mack pen-and-ink style he sometimes does. But of course i'm really terrible at that kind of thing and i always end up doing tonnes of detail, hence it takes me bloody ages to get anything done!! And also i end up with a lot of unfinished bits...

Like this one, 'Practice Face'. The mouth and chin clearly need a lot of work, as does the hair and in fact the whole thing!! So i don't know where to re-start this autumn, a new piece (suggestions please), or tip away on something unfinished to get me moving? Answers on a postcard to tomnipresent... Your feedback is much appreciated.