Omnipresent Inanity

Consternations

Uneasy Chair

Whorls and windrift

Sharp Thorn Rose

I have won a prize on Big Gay Dragon blog - hurrah, it's pens! Looks like Christmas starts here...don't know when I'll post again, hope 27th. Happy holidays!

Rest In Pieces

Snapped Guitar

My guitar did snap - one of my bad dreams come true, but not as bad as I've dramatised here! It's already been glued at a music and repair shop, so hopefully it'll hold up to the stress of years more johnnynorms music making.

Cruel Oasis

Yes - biro, crayon.

Electric Plant and Barrow

&
March of the Wheelbarrows


Well hello 2007...

Would-Be Phoneix

Illustration Friday: Phoenix

Regal Fanfare Tournament

One Eye Closed

Black pen with digital colour adjustment.
(Yes THAT black pen - see below)

Bad Brain Day

Rolling from the Fire

Ghost-lit Moon

Last minute spectation on Illustration Friday: Ghost

Needles Abstract

Ominous Spider Etching

ArtWords Clan: GOTHIC
I've gone for the generally sinister and gloomy interpretation.
This is a biro drawing given a digital twist or two.

The Nail: Poetry to the Point

Photo by Kate Raworth
Dave Todd, poet, musician, and editor of The Nail magazine, dishing out the latest copy at the Catweazle Club in Oxford.

Number 7 of The Nail is a tasty slice of poetry, from a diversity of contributors, with added illustration (inc yours truly). Well worth the asking price of £2.50 (+ postage). Drop me a line if you should perchance wish to own one. It is A5 format, 40 pages, b&w.

Best of my own Nail drawings, this one for
"Sestina on a Train", by Bihani Sarkar.

And from the pages of Nail #7 here's a fine poem from Mr Dave Todd himself:

This Hug

This hug comes by text message.
This hug comes by email.
This hug is subtly suggested by the arrangement of
junk advertising lying at the base of your door.
This hug is a cloud across a lifted duvet of sky.
This hug comes with enough warmth to keep 3,000
homes in energy until the year 2012.
This hug is the fullness in me invading the emptiness
in you, and vice versa.
This hug is swimming with endolphins, making
Escher tesselations below twinkling surfaces,
disrupted by the grace of your body, everywhere.
This hug is introducing our heatbeats to the notion of
counterpunctual rhythms.
This hug can be spotted from the sky by jealous
police helicopters.
This hug is a potion, this hug is a manifestation,
And should it lead to kissing and undressing and
breakfast and marriage and grandchildren
This hug is a figment of the interlinking networks
of our net imaginations.
This hug comes by Post It note.
This hug comes by fridge magnets.
This hug is printed on a map at the scale of 1:1
which leads from my house to yours.
This hug is you looking at me looking at you looking
at me looking at you and wondering who will stop
smiling first.
This hug is an urgent request shouted across a sea
of other requests as a poet moves to take his cue.
This hug's for you.

Dave Todd, 2006

ARTWORDSSurrealism: Dark Brain Revisited

Taking a lobster for a walk, having fried eggs for eyes...I think it's easy to be superficially surrealist. It's very hard to be originally so, but a different matter altogether to genuinely draw deeply from one's unconscious dreaming mind, and doubly difficult to then shape that raw material into profound finished work. I speak as someone who has merely nibbled at the edges of Andre Breton's Surrealist Manifesto. Here's his official definition:

Surrealism, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express - verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner - the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

I find it very difficult to acheive this level of relinquishing control of my reasoning mind. When I sometimes think I'm approaching automatism, it turns out to be more stream-of-consciousness than stream-of-unconsciousness. Perhaps this is why I quest so much after ways of introducing serendipity or chance elements into my art and music - serious playing! Still, I think surrealism seeps into my drawing, although it could be a memory of looking at so many other surrealist works! D'oh!!

I have a preference for the surrealist artists who tend towards amorphous, ambigous form and movement - especially Joan Miro, Max Ernst & maybe Andre Masson. I also love the teasing conceptual playfulness of Rene Magritte, my favourite of those who use more exact representation. Not to say I can't enjoy a furry teacup or a lobster telephone from time-to-time either! The former approach has obviously influenced my Dark Brain drawings seen here. Perhaps the nearest I've ever got, although you may think that little is really revealed. 'Dark' is meant as the unchartered areas deep down where the light of reason doesn't usually shine, which is not exclusively the primitive, amoral, unspeakable & unthinkable - but certainly includes those.

(I apologise for dragging in almost two year's old work - I wanted to create a new one, but found I couldn't do it to order. The writing is hot off the press anyway.)

Numb Skullery