radiant fracture

The pattern of becoming fed up and just getting up at 2:30 am instead of lying there listening to hours of movie podcasts continues. I do some marking, I doodle somatophores. It's still full night at 7am these days, which prolongs that floating timeless quality of insomnia.

This is only my second painting for the various February challenges I usually get excited about, but I like my Pan. The reference was a photo of Cecil the Faun, who has four winsome faun personae who lift my spirits.


(Cuter if you click on him)

I used the new gouache paints I got for Christmas, and I do think they have richer, denser colour, and therefore can do more nuanced things (though this was a fairly fast painting whose nuance must be mostly accidental).

They are a bit tricky to figure out -- when the pools of paint dry, they tend to become brittle and to break off into chunks -- probably because they have much more pigment in them than the old cheap ones. It does mean I often chase little balls of pigment around the tray with my brush.

The super secret mission of this painting was to become cover art for one of my games (because that's what I'm excited about lately, obvs) so I threw some text on that sucker:



And now it's the new cover art for The Fledgling and the Vale.

Obviously I need to be using better software to put these graphics together, but I haven't landed on a free application that works smoothly for me / will work on my increasingly cranky Macbook.

Mind you, nothing at all about today was smooth (but in ways so petty that they can't be described effectively.) Anyway, at least this painting happened.

I like the idea of doing original art for the games when I can, because then like -- at least the person got a picture out of the deal?

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I mentioned liking #drawthisinyourstyle challenges on Instagram -- this happens when someone posts an original illustration with an open invitation to reinterpret the image in your own, you know, idiom.

This dialogue of images really pleases me, and it seems to my eye to bring out strengths in the responding artist that aren't always otherwise visible.

sovay asked to see some of my versions & I thought: to the brave, that sounds like a post, so. Lucky you.

Posting pictures instead of a written update seems, honestly, more fitting. Drawing has consumed by far the largest percentage of my time this season -- I draw almost every day, sometimes three or four hours a day, or more.

It's been hard to write for the last few months. Words haven't come very easily to me. I can write -- I can set to work -- but there's a feeling almost like a physical weakness when I sit down to it. I would think it were a physical weakness, except it only seems to apply to picking up a pen. The paintbrush is weightless.

These images probably work better paired with the (generally much more skillfully rendered) originals, but for that you need to go to Instagram. They are all watercolour pencil except the last, which is gouache. They are all between four and five inches square in the originals, which is about all the space I can command before I start to panic.

(After a drawing by @bambiwatsonart)

(After a drawing by @jb0xtchi)

(After a drawing by @isunija, though hers was much more straightforwardly a Beauty and the Beast image, with a furry beast rather than a giant heron)

(After a drawing by @clemence_gouy -- I liked the nonbinary possibilities of the image a lot)


Thank you for your indulgence.

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Well, that was my evening -- a little drawing, a little reading, but mostly white wine and refreshing social media to see if my friends liked my drawing of an octopus.

Life's a funny old thing. Or I guess I am.



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[ETA: Oh dear. White wine is a bad editor. That was meant to sound like a wry comment on my use of time, not fishing (ha) for attention.]

Wednesday after work LB and I hiked in to the lake. We took a more strenuous route than usual, over rough ground, but nothing requiring high endurance -- or so I would have thought. The moment I got home, however, I lay down on the couch and did not rise until night.

The last few days have been like days of recovery from illness -- not soreness or fatigue so much as a sort of muzzy-headedness I dislike much more than pain.

Therefore, I have not done much writing or reading.

I did manage to read Insomniac City, Bill Hayes' memoir of his relationship with Oliver Sacks. It's a lovely, gentle book, a kind of idyll of daily life in New York -- lots of drinking wine on rooftops and talking to strangers in the park. Hayes invokes the sensory detail of their life together with the attention you'd expect of someone who could properly appreciate Oliver Sacks.

I'd read Hayes' description of a piece of music -- Beethoven's Op. 133, say (The Great Big Fugue) -- then cue it up on YouTube and listen -- or look up a meal they ate or an artist Hayes admired. In this way, the book became a delightful multi-sensory experience.

Reading or writing for work and other projects, though, did not seem to be on.

When writing is too difficult, I draw. One of my comfort activities is attempting loose copies of the exquisitely strange radial creatures from Haeckel's Art Forms in Nature. Listening to Beethoven' bright, angular notes, I thought -- why not try to draw this as well?¹

Under the cut are a few creatures drawn out of the music, though they are not perfect synaesthetic renderings of these pieces or anything -- more a fusion of what I was looking at, what I was hearing, and what I could actually draw.


( Musical Drawings )

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1. I do see a little colour to music, but it's a very limited palette, shading from blue-white through golden brown to dark brown, and probably has more to do with the colour of the piano whereon I failed to learn to play music as a child, rather than any intricacy of brain connections.