Winter, 1.

So,

November into December.

To some degree these are more of the same, in other ways some of what I did when things had cooled down a bit was a step back. Not a big step forward, but just doing - and the desire to do - pieces that were a little less intense and demanding. Understandably.

This first selection is mostly random. While not churning out pieces as I'd been doing, I was still producing more than I had been and being a lot less finnicky. And yes the drawings are a lot less finished looking than my 'usual' work, but again, the idea of sitting spending hours on finnicky, precise drawings had lost its appeal.

The pen would to some extent a backseat in favour of pencil by the middle of December, by which point it had taken on a slightly different role. . .





1.

The bird mask minus its owner. I wanted to draw just this as a way of separating the two, that and to try and do something resembling a design of the mask itself because it's always been a bit vague and amorphous, and generally been drawn / painted in profile. I like this.



















2-4.

Three Emma drawings of slightly differing style and levels of realism that pretty much speak for themselves. Straightforward with no underlying bleak story. Just drawings.









































5.

This one's REALLY sketchy. Mostly I was approaching transferring a vague image I had in my head to paper in a different, more relaxed approach than trying to commit it to the white in very deliberate lines and found that this way came a lot more naturally. While not precisely as I was visualising what I wanted to put on paper, it's a close approximation. And it didn't end with me getting frustrated and scrunching up numerous attempts. . . Mostly with this, I was just determined to have full figures in a drawing. Instead of my old, over-cropped stuff. And again, arhitecture, no matter how vague. . .



















6 & 7.

Now then. Here's where things took a bit of a turn, which sort of speaks for itself - Sharpie drawing as preparatory study. This out of the blue became a 'thing', a habit which led to the production of some great drawings I really love, minus the stress of being finnicky because I'd bashed out the basic concepts first. Admittedly, not the original plan but just something that. . . happened, pottering around, drawing.

And again, full figures, something I've avoided for years. And years. Oh, and years.

The pencil piece itself I like and don't in equal measures, but that's just me doing what I do best - Being my own worst critic.






























8.

Simple. Again with these, no explanation necessary. I was just getting back to enjoying drawing again, without it being about thrashing emotions out of my system. I think it probably shows.















9.

One of my favourites from that period of late November into December. There's nothing to this but I love it. Sharpie and pitt pen for the thinner lines. I couldn't have done something like this in pencil. It wouldn't have 'felt' as this one does. if that makes any sense at all. . .

And that's all for today.

interlude.

alex chilton,

december 28th 1950 - march 17th 2010

shake chris bell's hand for me, alex. . .

and thank you.

Big, 1.

So.

We're onto November into December now in this 'Catch Up' summary drawn over however many entries, and I'll do the same again rather than bombarding you eyes with a gajillion images at once.

But before I get too submerged in another x-number of entries of drawings, I thought I'd post something painted to break things up a little. There's quite a bit of painting to post, but I think thi, an soe of the others I'll slot in between the remaining work from 2009 I have to post, fit a little better than any of the more 'realised' full colour stuff.

This one is. . . Kind of an anomally. And huge, those figures are life-sized. On paper. I had started it months before, abandoned it, worked over it, disiked it, repainted parts, abandoned it some more. It was always a BIT sketchy and while a lot of it remains pretty sketchy, the figures became more fully realised, and thus the focus, and that was what I went back to and worked on until I declared 'done'

The backdrop again is sort of vaguely Dundee. It should really be Edinburgh, but I guess the architecture of Dundee is more ingrained into my sychological source material when it comes to drawin buildings. Especially Perth Road, a long road I must have walked thousands of times my four years at art school. . .

I liked to think of this as not two people standing in front of some distant buildings as two people standing in front of a painting of some distant buildings. And again, bear that in mind, it's an element in some of what I go on to paint next. . .

I like it. The depiction of Emm is far more 2002 than 2009 - rounder face and so on - but i chose not to get finnicky and correct that. Actually, I kind of like that about it. . .

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. . .