We're all going to be dirt in the ground

Dear void

That’s it. 

I’m done. 

And it’s high time.

There aren’t any more pitchers.

For all my life, man and boy, that was what I did. 

Why don’t you just have a fucking cry, Soc? You big wet.

 
downinahole

 

 

 

I did

Leftover blood

Dear Void

Sometimes (mostly, really) it doesn’t mean anything.

When there’s a bit of paint left over and you know how expensive it is and you happen to have these two mini canvases that you got for your birthday, sometimes a little glimmer of gold happens.  And sometimes it’s just some bullshit you never got around to painting over.  This is an example of the latter:

[WHOA that came out weird!  It looks like I made them out of yarn.  I didn't]

You’d be forgiven for thinking I was trying for some kind of sophomoric poetry with these, but I assure you I was just fucking about.  And all you’ll learn from these is that I know dick all about anatomy.

More fucking about:

This is my piece-of-shit $200 smacktop (on which I am currently writing).  I had just watched Dexter or something and thought it would be fun if my ‘puter looked like it was stolen from a murder scene. Apparently it’s pretty convincing IRL because Frankenspouse asked me if I’d had a nose bleed.  There are also bloody fingerprints on the keyboard (on the keys that spell out ‘You’re a cunt’ but you can’t tell because Soc is a fraud).

downinahole

Narcissism, self-loathing and the paradox it presents – last in a trilogy.

My dearest Void

Soc here

I’m concluding the Catholic of self-portraits today. Starting with this piece: I’m less technically accurate but more true to charac―.

I’ve got to stop myself for a sec here.  I started out this whole project to jovially shred all the ham-handed pitchers I done over the years.  But lo! Where’s the trenchant derision now, fucker? It has become more like a maudlin exercise in self-congratulation thinly veiled as nostalgia.

So here’s how we’re going to round out this dog of a page:  I can’t paint.  I know I can’t paint.  I never went to school to study pitcher makin’.  I just liked doing it enough to burn hours a day doing it.  In fact, I don’t know what I’m going to do with my spare time once this blog is done.  I’ve considered taking up heroin; I’ve heard good things about it and apparently it’s a real time chewer upperer.

So here’s a cartoon of Soc about to start a new abortive cartoon:

That’s how my back yard looked at the time [CHECK DATE] (<- that was a file note to remind me to trudge up to the Cove and check the year I painted it. Please admire my dedication to meticulousness at will.  Except that it turns out that I didn’t either sign or date it.  Now we’re all fucking tortured.  It was probably ‘05ish). The yard was a wreck but some of the foliage came up nice in the pitcher – a shit load of small strokes is key there. 

Frankenspouse never seemed to grasp how emaciatedly thin I was and so all of the clothes she bought me looked like that.

And this, minus the Hieronymus-esque*psychedelica, is how my back yard looks now: 

I hadn’t got around to cleaning up the colours or detailing the background (or even finishing the subject come to that!) when the whole shebang came crashing down around my ears and the painting gears ground to an eternal halt.

*Oh Soc, you little fucker!  So you’re up there with Bosch now, are you? Dude, that is sauteed in wrong sauce!

Yours truly

The Void

And that’s it for the self-portrait trilogy

Soc is a fraud

Downinahole

Narcissism, self-loathing and the paradox it presents – the second in a trilogy.

Dear Void

More from the Stuffed-Shirt Period.  Oh, hang on, it’s still the same period as Mickey Mc NoChin:

This is probably the most technically accurate portrait I ever did, but as for character illumination, it’s treacherous. And here’s why:

I just ten minutes ago exhumed that image from youtube’s dark recesses.  I haven’t seen it for maybe twelve years and I’m fucking astounded at how closely I copied it. It’s Barry Otto in an Australian film based on the novel with the same name: ‘Bliss’. You need no more evidence than that, Void, as to the abject fraudulence of Soc.

That is my head but.   I must cop to that at least.

Soc is the most fraudulent of frauds

downinahole

Evincing melancholy

Dear Void

Soc here

We’re not going to fuck about on this page because reasons.

If you wanted to inspire gloom and despair in me, you need do no more than show me a child playing alone in their bedroom.  And such has it been my entire adult life. Just thinking about it now creates a virtual knot in my stomach. My children are grown now so I don’t ever witness this, but when they were small I saw it all too frequently. I’d complain to my wife and she’d cursorily pronounce me a mawkish twat.

Without getting too psychoanally, I reckon it’s rooted in a lonely and awkward childhood.  I don’t know if it was really so, or my adult brain pretends it was.

I did this one in the late nineties, when my elder kid was small:

 

Notā bene: I don’t have the original any more.  I gave it away many years ago and have been unsuccessful in acquiring a picture of it.  All I have is what’s pictured above. FUCK YOU MUPPET LOL JKS ETC

I was lamenting one day about having lost it to the universe.  Then I thought, ‘Hang on there, Soc me old boy.  You’re an artist*, just paint it again’.  So, in ’08, I did:

And it’s a vast improvement. All the original elements are there but everything is tighter.  I guess that’s what ten years practise does for you; I’d learned a few more cheats and what a difference patience and perseverance makes.

So much had the craft improved that Frankenspouse has allowed this one to reside in Frankenspouse Manor.  So it can torture me with its inherent sadness every day.

There was something powerful about the ham-fistedness of the original though.

Soc is a fraud

downinahole

*Shut it.  It serves my purpose for this page

Another extemporaneous addendum

Dear Void etc

There’s this bloke who explained, as eloquently as can be, more than twenty years ago that there is one thing you can’t lose: that feel.

An undeniably brilliant, and romantic sentiment. 

But I lost that feel

But then

Soc is a fraud

Narcissism, self-loathing and the paradox it presents – the first in a trilogy

Dear Void, you faceless, no-account wastrels, it’s time to cut to the vice.

I can’t paint good but I always wanted to paint portraits.  Here’s the thing: People find out that I paint for a hobby and their first question is, ‘ORLY what do you paint?’.  Well if you’ve seen any of the other pages in this cess pit, you’ll understand how difficult it is to answer that question. 

I decided to be a portrait artist simply to make that question go away.  The problem was that I had then even less artistic ability than I do now (or did, until recently. Now I’m back where I started, with little possibility of recovery). So I couldn’t very well ask people to let me practise on them; there was pride and integrity on the line (both false, I assure you).

If I do your portrait, you will respond in one of two ways:

A)     You’ll shout at me in a hurt tone, ‘That’s how you see me?! You’re a cunt, Soc!’
B)      You’ll shout at me derisively, ‘That’s what you call a portrait?! You’re a cunt, Soc!’

We both lose either way, so I never do it.  Well, almost never.  I have one subject who calls me a cunt on a regular basis, both in hurt and derision by turns. My subject is Soc.

I kicked off when I was about eighteen, completely confused about how paint works, and utterly untrained (heh, apart from my age, these conditions persist to this day).  This nascent effort was more than a little delusional.  And laughably twee:

As will be evident by the time this is done, I’ve never liked my hair, so this is a complete fabrication. I’m still a skinny fuck though.

Next up, a few years later, the second attempt.  This Soc is about to marry Frankenspouse:

While still woefully amateur, it’s not a bad representation (as best I can remember) of me at the time.  The square-on angle a) clearly reveals that I used a mirror and b) obscures the monolithic protuberance that is my nose (while at the same time accentuating my sticky-outy ears).  But check out that head of hair!  I wonder if it really looked like that!  I’m skull-bald now.  But I remember that shirt.

In later years, I got a bit more figurative:

Now we’re getting introspective! Yes we’re copping to the big nose and the sticky-outy ears, but what’s this? No chin?! That’s why forty-year-old Soc wears a beard.

I was approaching my late twenties and had a penchant for the stuffed-shirt, three piece suit look.  I never did it in the real world because I’m a bum.
And the hair’s gone! Portentous...

Soc is a fraud

downinahole