Some New Work from Doodles

A friend recommended me to a blogspot calling longstockings (dedicated to writers of adolescent stories and celebrating pippi longstockings) and it's amazing how subliminal most inspiration is. Anyway - these are from some drawings I was fiddling with this week.

Thanks Denae!!

Comments like that help fuel the motivation!

New Work

Today I feel a little bit like the musicians on the Titanic. Or perhaps like Noah building a boat on a clear sunny day. I sent a message to a friend and said I must be completely insane to be painting away furiously until all hours at night with no indication whatsoever that this work will ever impress anyone other than Emma and Rebecca and maybe a couple of art appreciating family members. Imagine: an artist trying to make it in a major global economic crisis... It's sort of like trying to put Oprah and humility in the same context - it just doesn't seem very possible at all.

But here it is anyway!

The Ostrich

Yesterday on the news, our finance minister Trevor Manuel told us very convincingly (ha ha ha) that South Africa is not facing a financial crisis. I wonder how he would explain that to Ford workers who are working short weeks and the many companies who have closed 3 weeks early for Christmas... It sort of reminds me of our health minister telling us that HIV does not cause Aids.

Ages ago, the kids taped this movie from TV - Osmosis Jones. It's a combination of a real people and animation. The animation is what goes on inside the guy's body. He gets this really bad infection and there's this little president of the body - a short fat guy with william shatner's voice. The body temperature is really spiking and chaos is breaking loose as the body deteriorates at an alarming rate and the little president is walking around with a loud speaker telling everyone not to panic, that everything is fine.

So, I'm just wondering, how bad does it have to be before people pull their heads out the sand?

More Work

Some colonial history of Port Elizabeth. I did this painting from a black and white picture, so my colours are my own and not truly representational.

More Work

The nickname for this plant is "Bloukappies" - not being a botanist or avid gardener, I'm assuming my source of information is correct. However, since "blou" means blue I'm sort of thinking maybe the nickname doesn't really suit the plant afterall. Anyway, the point is, this is one of my favourite paintings. I really enjoyed doing this painting and I'm wondering how quickly I painted it because the plants are inclined to die on me before I get too far!

More work

This is the original Ruby Rednose. I did this drawing a few years back and she's always been hovering in the background - sometimes I do illustrations for the kids and she's in them.

The other drawing is of Danai Tembo. It was a really brilliant photograph - I love doing portraits from a good photo. The whole process of creating a flat textured background with African pattern was starting to germinate here.

More work

This was an illustration that originated from some drawings in my journal. I was playing with the idea of a character called wishing star and the first drawing was of wishing star taking a holiday.

The other character was greenfingers whose leaking watering can left a trail of growing plants.

Still Life

So, here it is - the still life that's almost done. I can't help myself getting stuck into the detail!

I spent almost the entire day watching movies with the kids and this obviously had some sort of subliminal effect since last night I dreamt about Seurat's Sunday Afternoon at La Grande Jatte. Seurat was an impressionist fundamentally, but his method gave rise to a movement called pointilism. He used dots of colour (like blue and yellow together) and when you stood back, it would create a different colour (green) with almost an animated form.
I was thinking in the dream why I'd never recognised the true genius of his abilities - being able to recognise which pure palette colours to put together in order to create even the most simplified form...
I suppose all those tiny dots on the TV screen were working on my subconscious! David Hockney enlarging photos to pixelated stage is one thing, but to do that without the advent of any technology and purely as an exploration of colour for art's sake was far more advanced than I'd ever given poor old Seurat credit for. Sorry, George!

Which reminds me - if you don't want a searing eye strain headache, stop watching Pixar after 4 hours!!!