Thursday, March 10, 2011

Painting again


Step by step through my first oil painting in five years, accompanied by Wobbly, an old piece from 2004.

10 comments:

  1. I like this, the music goes well with the video

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  2. You haven't blogged in awhile! About the only thing I miss about twitter after having quit it a month or so ago is your tweets. Hope music making etc is going well.

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  3. Hi, thank you for asking!
    I'm sort of in a rebuilding phase. I practice guitar every day and, ahem, think about what kinds of pictures I want to do next. Thinking of semi-abstract comics built from collages of my photographs, but as a lifelong fan of comics that feels so very pompous and wrong that I'm still gathering my courage. :)
    That is, I have very rarely seen poem style comics that were an improvement on the classic narrative form.
    The guitar will hopefully coalesce into some sort of broken prog rock parody once my fingers obey me again. Horribly out of practice. It doesn't have to be pretty, but I insist that it be ugly the way I want it.
    I gave up on Twitter, as well. Communicating with slogans pretty much guarantees that one is wrong about everything. Life and truth hides in nuances.

    I hope the rebuilding of your home town does not make it as ugly as certain European cities that were built from scratch after 1945. Turku, my home town, has been gradually wrecked by developers. I realized just how much we've lost of our history when I visited Kristiinankaupunki on the West coast north from here. Cut and paste that name into Google Maps and walk through it with Streetview. It's a beautifully preserved town of traditional wooden architecture. Fun way to pass half an hour. I streetviewed Paris, Texas last week. The movie by Wim Wenders doesn't actually show much of it, I seem to recall...

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  4. Good to hear!

    I think the idea of a collage comic sounds really interesting. I had recently thought about doing a poem chapbook based on old girls comics, but I kind of feel similar. It might be a bit pointless considering how good the orginals were.

    I'm sure you'll get your guitar sounding suitably ugly - I picked up mine again awhile ago and found out I actually remembered some chords. It sounded nice and sloppy though.

    I must have a look at that - I believe they have done something similar online with old Christchurch streets, but I haven't looked at that yet. I do hope they keep a bit of heritage style. At least some buildings on the other side of town from the 19th C are fine or fixable.

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  5. Then again, there is the slight problem that now, not only my mother but also my father is aware of this blog (since New Year). This imposes levels of self-censorship and discomfort that I'm no longer able to overcome. Time for a change of name and blog, I think. I'll let you know when I'm done with rebooting my identity. (cf. Franz Kafka's letter to his father...)

    Come to think of it, doing pointless things is often a source of intense pleasure, so I suggest you go right ahead with your poem chapbook. Enjoy yourself.

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  6. Ah, yes _ it's fuuny how the blog form feels more private than the supposed privacy of say, facebook. Tumblr is quite good, but mine is just an image repository so far. Do let me know when you rework your blog and yes, pointless is good. It's likely I will pursue that idea alongside a few others.

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  7. Oops, forgot to reply to this.
    I decided to stop whining and stick with this blog. Too lazy to gallop all over cyberspace to look for perfect solutions. And this one feels comfortable like an old shoe.
    And I'm reminded of what I always knew in the back of my mind: Painting makes me happy. So it is really stupid of me not to stick with it. Happily, a friend offered me a gallery exhibition in Helsinki next March, which gave me the impetus to become ridiculously productive again.
    Life looks good again.

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  8. Aha, thanks for replying and I have been following your paintings - congrats on your upcoming exhibiton - that's great! Also glad that it is making you happy.

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  9. Sorry for prodding like that. :)
    I wish I could say it will get good soon, but I can see long weeks of hard slog ahead before things start to click into place. Maybe November. If I don't get the exhibition paintings done by New Year, I'll have to switch to acrylics to have them dry in time. Oil colours are slow. They take years to dry completely.

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  10. No problem! I had been meaning to say I like your paintings, it's very inspiring - I have just been a little slack with blog commenting and whatnot lately :)

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