opoponax, 3.

. . . i think i'll skip a large chunk of the rest. the stuff following on from that last batch into, well, i think its direction was fairly clear. and i feel more negative about posting that stuff today than otherwise, so. . .

another time, maybe. but probably not. anyway. . .

these eleven images are kind of representational of the end of that dark period. we're into november now - the lines are less gnarly, have taken on a different quality altogether in places and there's a definite narrative going on from one image to the next - though we're looking at selections here, not the whole pile - i think you can pretty much see the tension ebbing away. . .

also, yonder pajama wearing skeleton has become something more fully formed than the inky mess that first manifested. . .



34.

this is somewhat out of place in a way, a pencil drawing amongst all that solid black and white, but i wanted to post this because i like it, and because, like previously, backgrounds are creeping into my stuff in the form of interiors as WELL as exterior scenery, as seen here in the shape of, well, my kitchen. this was fast and done with more or less the same ethic as the ink drawings had been done with - don't worry about portraying what you see so much as what you feel. so while it's slight as drawings go in one sense, it's another step somewhere new. . .
















35 & 36.

35 is sort of an anomally. the birdman figure was an abandoned piece from weeks earlier which i just randomly looked at one evening and said 'this needs another figure', which kind of went against my newfound habit of doing the drawings, leaving them and doing something else. a few corrections were made - which i regret now because they stick out like a sore thumb - in white ink, and a more straightforward self-portrait was added. i think. . . this is one of those pieces that has a narrative undercurrent, which 36 carries on with. 36 is noteable for being botha little less stylised, and for the fact that it was done in my trusty sharpie's - the second, actually - death throes. . .


























37.

this one's open for interpretation, but even i don't know what's going on in it. i love this, though, mopstly for small things like emma's hair, my general dishevelled appearance - and the first appearance of the new suit and tie MASKLESS birdman look - the positioning of the fence, compositionally and by no means last or least, our skeletal oddball looking. . . well, skeletal. . . again though, definite narrative suggestion here. that illustration degree not going completely to waste, then . . .
















38 - 40.

a mixed bag of stylized, random goofiness - 38 - further exploration of cityscape backgrounds and composition - 39 - and looser scratcvhing around with a new sharpie, seeing what can be come up with on one very white sheet of A4. i think by this point i'd become equally fond of that damn skeleton and the fully realised owl mask, but eprhaps even more fond of the medium itself. . .






































41.

there's almost nothing to this. i don't think it could be any more minimal - and yet, i don't think i could love it any more than i do. . .
















42.

the final three images - for today at least - are completely random and polar. i don't think they could be more different from each other. this one, i think, is a favourite of mine from a small pile of mask drawings i did around this time kind of. . playing around with how the character had looked and how i wanted him to go. i'm not sure why this one stands out for me, i just like the lines. . .
















43.

bizarre that my hand should ever draw such a thing. do i necessarily like this? no. but the oddness of me drawing it lends its right to a place here. it's another small part of where we're going. this is kind of a landmark of ugly dundee architecture, a tower building belonging to the universtity which. . shows up less stylised in the background of at least one later piece you'll see. . . soon enough. . .

















44.

. . . needs no commentary, explanation, or words of any kind.

Opoponax, 2.

. . . second batch? yes.

these are. . . different. time went on, the ratio of scrunched up balls to drawings changed drastically, and the paper-attack look lessened. they became less severe as my circumstances settled a little, though subjectively they're still pretty bleak, especially towards the last three or four, by which point. well. i don't want to go there . . .

the selection process for these was part random and part humming and hawing. between this post and the next, last post of these drawings which lead into my newer stuff that i'm far less conflicted about, there are a couple of dozen leftover pieces that i'll post at a later date, i think.

some of these are a little obtuse. some get very stylised. some are more straightforward. . .

anyway. in all their black and white sharpie and paper glory, with commentary:



19.

one of a bunch of owl-mask drawings. i picked this one because of the additional detail. it's not just sharpie and i like the contrast of teh thick lines and thin detail lines and that there's more tone to thios than just black and white.
















20 & 21.

he of the striped pajamas again. it should be clear that he really CREPT into the stuff i was producing given how unformed the first few drawings are, even the first one here. they're working towards forming a character. 20 i added because i both love the pure expressionism of the top drawing, and the oddball nonsense of the second - and both on one page.

there's nothing i don't love about 21. and 21 is the first fully formed image of this new odd addition to my rogues gallery of characters. minus the big black wings he was wearing in 15. those have been inherited by the soon to be maskless birdman. make of that what you will. . . also, this marks the beginnings of actual ARCHITECTURE showing up in my drawings instead of plain untouched backgrounds. which is. . . sort of a big thing. . .





























22 & 23.

. . . and speaking of architecture. these were random, odd, sketchy. sharpie again, with that more detailed addition of a thinner drawing pen in 23, the more 'complete of the two. i did a bunch of these, and picked two sort of at random to show the difference between the looser ones and the more finished - vaguely - drawings.





























24.

a straightforward birdman drawing. but i love this one passionately.


















25 & 26.

and it's HIM again. i think there's an odd thing with this character in that as grim as he is, he seems more court jester than grim reaper. i picked these two because i love how gnarly he looks in 25, and how utterly ridiculous and random the notion of him doing his 'sound of music' routine is', even though said drawing is pretty much just a mess of black ink. but come on, wouldn't you rather see a skeleton in stripey PJ's than julie andrews? i know i would. . .

comic relief in hard times? i think so. . .



























26 - 33.

i'll leave these without commentary. i wasn't going to post these, and i may NOT keep them up indefinitely, so. they're kind of a return to the darker tone of some of the early drawings in that last post, with reason. take them and interpret them as you will.

Opopanax, 1.

. . . and so, we begin.

i'll scatter these black and white drawings between two posts. possibly three. they're by no means ALL of what was produced, more a summary, sometimes randomly selected from piles of what amounts to very similar images. . .

obviously these are difficult to verbally summarise in any way other than describing them as being produced very physically, sometimes frenziedly. you can kind of read my moods and different points of the great low i was falling into by how linear or non-linear the images get, the line quality, so on. . .

they're not aesthetically very nice to look at, and they may technically be all over the place but they. . . well, they performed a necessary buffer. an outlet. and certainly they could be called personal. though hoinestly, i'm posting them as much to put that whole era behind me as anything else. what evolves out of this visceral near-ugliness is, toi me, better than what existed before it, artistically. . .

anyway. this bunch do fall into categories though. i think maybe more of a directors commentary is needed this time around than liner notes. . .



1-4.

. . . if something bad's starting to go down, and you feel helpless or worried it's supposedly helpful to distract yourself. these were drawn during an afternoon where my mother's condition, thought initially to be a bad dose of food poisoning got worse. and worse. and worse, until she was ambulanced into hospital, completely delirious.

attempting to distract myself, i drew. the first two drawings you can see a jump in style - my mood shifted down a notch. i attempted to focus more, rather than drawing randomly - i had an idea for a painting i wanted to do and the composition was in my head but i couldn't quite get it onto paper on top of being in a self-critical mood and my state of mind got increasingly mroe anxious, which. . . i think shows. there were more drawings, now long destroyed, that were along the same lines so to speak. the same old same old. but it was an afternoon of nothing coming out looking 'right', something that was about to be pretty much abandoned. the painting i was struggling to lay down a composition for, incidentally, i'll post two or three entries down the line - it got there, eventually.













































5-7.

three remnants of the next couple of days attempts to draw, which mostly ended up scrunched balls of paper strewn from one end of the floor to another and produced during a couple of completely sleepless nights. my mother's condition worsened., the words swine flu were thrown into the mix. her delerium got worse.

in the case of #5, i had almost, almost managed to calm my anxiety stricken brain enough to distraction and produce a drawing - in the thinner pen - that looked good, and then it went wrong. i think i screwed up the mouth, something i'm prone to doing - and pretty much ATTACKED the paper with a black sharpie. 6 and 7 could be said to have been done in the same manner, as were others, which i won't post because. . . well, you get the idea. and these are more linear examples.






































8-9.

more 'remnants', survivors of paper-massacres that didn't end up scrunched up on the floor. as things remained grim, i carried on trying not so much to take myself out of the situation as to find an outlet that wasn't, well, jumping out of the window. and while i continued with the scratchy sharpie and sometimes liquid ink, and usually destroyed the fruits of my labours, i began to loosen up the 'attacking the paper' a little. not a lot, but a little. these are sort of significant in that they're the beginnings of something that develops later on, just as 3 & 4 led to a finished piece of work, these planted a seed or two. . .

























10 & 11.

again, remnants, one marginally less loose than the other more. i did loads of these, and just picked two at random from the pile.


























12 - 15.

these, i don't even remember doing, and again they're very stark but some of the imagery, again, will be repeated later on in a more conscious manner. these also mark the first utterly random appearance of the very odd, thus far unnamed pajama wearing skeleton. make of him what you will. . .














































16 & 17.

these are random survivors of a drawing session done late into that first week my mother was in hospital, the remainders of which could be said to be a bit more like #10 and #11, but these stand out from this particular bunch. i should also note that all of these drawings are AS they appear on the paper, compositionally speaking. i think i had sort of. . . stoppsed caring about whether pieces of what i was drawing got chopped off by the edges of teh paper by this point. in fact i was just putting pen to paper and drawing with very little thought beforehand, a rather new concept given my habit of sitting staring at blank paper / canvas for minutes at a time before producing a single mark. some part of HOW i had worked to this point was no longer working. . .



























18.













and finally for this batch, further development of what i first scrawled in #8 and #9 with that mishapen and messy, vaguely birdish mask starting to become somthing very specific, the heart-shaped face of an owl.

and again, this goes soemwhere in time. . .

by this point, a lot of tension had been eased, things were begionning to still, and i think the more controlled - though still loose by my usual standards - line kind of expresses that. . .

anyway. further down the iceberg's tip next time. . .

Leftovers.

. . . . right.

so where to begin. the start, i guess. dozens upon dozens of pieces to upload and post that tell some kind of a story of going through a dark period last october into november, drawings for the most part but which - i think - don't necessarily make for easy viewing.

someone you love deeply almost dying kind of has. . . an adverse reaction on your work. and work into that other things going on at the same time - they were some pretty dark times. 'pretty' pictures' are not made on darker days. . .

thus, we'll begin with some leftovers - some rescans, some unposted stuff, some from as early as last spring, a couple of others from early october. before, you could say. . . and again, some i like, some i'm posting because emma - the subject, as ever - likes them, and some are better than others. . .

a note - i work from my imagination. i don't use photographs, i don't draw from life. i used to do both, but, especially working from photographs for a few years led me to a place where i became VERY dependant upon reference material and when it came to drawing from the top of my head, once my favourite way to work, i became overly critical of everything i produced, and that. . . bled into my other work. the decision to NOT work from source material has pros and cons - sometimes for example, the likeness of a person is lost a little in favour of capturing more some essence of them. i couldn't say whether that's a pro or a con, it's just something that is. some of what i do comes off very stylised, some doesn't. my brain decides. it's. . . i think, as honest a way to draw, or paint as there is.

so. some of it is better than others. but even the weaker stuff has elements i like. as you'll see when everything 'kicks off' in the next entry, the aesthetic goal of everything looking 'right' sort of goes out of the window in favour of expressive, visceral purging. and it does very much become about imagination, and abandoning old, finnicky, realist habits. . .

these, meanwhile, mostly speak for themselves, though some liner notes might be helpful. i'll post those at the end.






































































































































































































'liner notes':

1- the 'very short-haired emma' drawing is an oldie. about a year ago she had her hair cut almost - but not quite - that short, something she immediately regretted and fortunately her hair grows almost freakishly fast, the progression of which can be seen over the course of the other drawings, although it's often hard to put older stuff in chronological order because i - to appease her unease over how short her hair was - more often than not drew her with LONGER hair. . .

2- the dark, inky 'sleeping emma' piece that follows is one of my favourite pieces from last year. acrylic/ink on board, this kind of thing i feel i'm 'in my element', it's messy and loose in places (okay, most of it) and then finnicky in others like the hair. i also really liked that wing / shadow because it could be either, but wouldn't have worked with the usual, standard owl's wing. and more on owls, later. . .

3- the single, colour piece is me messing around with watercolours, not especially liking it and then inking lines over the whole thing. and yes, i know her head is disproportionately large. her head isn't that big in real life, i promise. i should also point out that she doesn't wear that cardigan ALL the time. i'm just especially fond of it. . .

4- the three panel piece. this is from the 'book of emma' and dates back to about the same time as a similar, almost comic book page. i like this a lot, even though as emma pointed out before i was even finished drawing the thing, the third panel looks more like sarah from 'chuck', which we'd not long watched. that's the subconscious for you. some you win, some you lose. . .

5- ears. some of those are emma's, some of them are mine. and some of them are composites. i was clearly a bit OCD that particular day.

. . . and the last two were the last two done BEFORE everything went. . . dark. the humour and prettiness of these is all but missing from what follows.

so these were as good a place as any to begin all this again . . .