It all started with a frog. Then the cattle came

Dear Void

I painted a pitcher for my younger kid.  I decided it would be a frog because I thought I could handle it: friendly lines, flat colours, easy to caricature and so on.  Then I had this psychedelically genius idea about making it celestial or god-like (eat some ‘shrooms and think :Ganesha) so now the Earth hangs in imminent peril at the mouth of the Uni-frogger (If I were smarter, there would be a Ted Kaczynski joke here).

So that’s that.  The kid hated it, and now it hangs in my office.

Now, this dick I used to work with (called Cattle – you’ll see why I told you that in a minute) had a petit version of an idea, ‘Erm like dude you should totally do a whole series with like different types of Earf in ‘em’.

I made him sound dumb there but the joke’s on me because I ended up taking the idea.  With disastrous results SO FUCK YOU CATTLE:

 

Firstly, it is patently obvious I put very little effort into this. I guess my heart wasn’t really in it.  Looking at it now, I feel like I was trying to rip off Gary Larson of ‘The Far Side’ fame but it’s a cow because of Cattle (Remember?  The dick I stole the idea from).  But I’m still proud of the coastline/tennis ball pattern allusion.  But then, as these pages will attest, I set the bar pretty effing low.  Oh and, do you see the strings on the tennis racket?  I done that by stabbing the brush through a swatch of fly screen.  I know, genius right?

Second, note the water damage.  This is the worst example but there are others because I don’t look after my toys and some of these poor, pariahed bastards were left to languish in the garage.

Did I just anthropomorphise my paintings?  Is there a Toy Story-esque script in there?  I’d better go, I’ve got an Oscar to win.

Soc is a fraud

downinahole

One long night of Christ

My dear Void

I don’t know how this came about other than my passive fascination with the Crucifix. I find it’s such a powerful symbol in my community (at some time I’ll have to investigate exactly what My Community is). I guess it’s only as relevant to me as the Eiffel Tower, or the Swastika, or the Opera House; but it speaks to me of humanity in context of death and strength and passion.  And a fuckload of waste.

This is a four piece set (I’m not trying to sell these to you, by the way.  They’re mine).  I kicked off the first one at about eight in the evening and I thought it quite nice.  Cool blue et cetera:

 

Then it was about midnight and I thought I had a themegoing.  This one is tinged with that blocky pointless shit them beatnicks were doing in the early fifties (Oh you’re getting judgy now, Soc?  I’ve seen you’re shit and you can fuckj off — yours, the Void):

 

Suddenly it was three in the morning.  My focus is waning.  You will have noticed that the attention to detail has declined; Soc is very tired and emotional now and there's more of that to come.  Two canvases are drying and teh lines are starting to blur. FIRE AND BRIMESTONE TIME FUCKERS

Maybe not yet, it was jus peach time to   skeep the colour scheme carrying oon:

 

Oh wait wait wait I forgota bit: see that accenty thing ehat keeps recurring at the bottom he cross? Because I fel over and dashed a bit of paint on the yellow one an had t go back and make all the others same so that’s whay that’s tere.  Not artsistic choice just because i’m a clumsy fuck.

And then dawn broke! The sky began to lighten and I thought I might just possibly be human once more!

Well that lasted only a few moments because the fear and cold of the pending day came crashing down like a builder’s skip.  And I don’t think I was quite straight yet. RGHT YO FuCKS I shouted at the unprepared magpies WE’RE GOING TO MAKE A FINAL CROSS AN ITL HAVE A A STABBY THING IN IT LIKE WHAT JESUS GOT. 

Then I quit shouting and got to work:

Sunrise is a time for reflexion on failure, not fire and brimstone.  Or maybe it's the other way around, what do I know?

I didn’t really rip the canvas intentionally, it was another falling over accident, but I retconned it to look like I knew what I was doing.  I see that I have failed to fool you again, Void.

And here I remind you that

Soc is a fraud

downinahole

 

So respondeth Soc

Dear Void

      ___

     /  7

    (_,_/\

     \    \

      \    \

      _\    \__

     (    \    )

            \__  _\__ _/

 Warm regards

Soc is a fraud

 

downinahole

So speaketh the Void

Dear Soc,

This is the Void.

Can we just have a conversation for a sec here please?

While we appreciate your desperate desire to have your kindergarten-grade pictorial thoughts available to the world at large, we at the Void Caucus are starting to shift uncomfortably in our seats.

Look, it’s fine, but some of us around the office are talking about your sexually explicit and racially insensitive comments, and it’s not going to look good to the upper management.

I know you’ve been a solid company man for – what is it now, ten years? – but would you mind cranking it back a couple of notches, old son?  You’re making people uncomfortable.

Thanks for your time, Soc, and I hope this clears up a few things for you.

Warm regards

The Void

Back to school: the misfits

Dear void,

I have one genuine teenage effort from back in the dizzle and one which doesn’t really fit anywhere so I’m plonking it on this page.

Before I knew what dope sickness was, I’d experienced an agony known only to the hormonally challenged youth and the irreparably foolish.  This is what it felt like:

 

Or so I thought …

Look, I said genuine teenage effort …

Similarly, this one doesn’t really belong here either, but it needed a home.  When my elder kid was about ten he was into the sword and crystal type books, so dashed out this little cartoon and stuck it in his bedroom door. 

 

It stayed there for eight years.

Inevitably, the day came when girls were more important than books and I had to rescue it from the recycle bin.  The ass looks a lot like Scott Mosier (canine, not human) to me.

Soc is a fraud

downinahole

Is it misogyny? Or is it just horrific?

Dear Void

Soc here

Frankenspouse hates this one (I said that like she doesn’t hate them all to varying degrees.  Let’s just lock this issue up: She doesn’t actually  like any of them). Is it because it implies women are two-faced, harpy banshees?  Or is it more that, like the Billy one, it’s just plain unnerving (neither charge can I really answer to, by the bye, I don’t know if it is either):

I don’t remember painting it.  I don’t remember what it was supposed to be about (as if to imply that any of them were about anything – They’re not).  I guess it was just something effed up to look at.  Suffice to say, it was never going to make to a wall in Frankenspouse Manor. 

A quick tangent if you’ll allow it JUST TRY TO STOP ME GO ON

I slyly circumvented Frankenspouse’s rules about hanging pitchers in the house by painting directly onto the internal doors.  I real pain in the arse because you have to sand off all the lacquer first and put down forty thousand layers of undercoat.  I’m a sloth at heart and this sort of prep I would generally consider prohibitive.  I’ll do a page on the doors later.

 

As you can see, like many of its fellows, the this one has a bit of water damage.  I’ve never looked after my toys.  You should see how I treat books.

Soc is a fraud

 

downinahole

Back to school: The third in a series

My dear Void

I present herein another collection of abortions from my youth.  I rather like the idea of abortions having the collective noun ‘Catholic’. 

Here is a Catholic of abortions (fuck you, these pages are for me, and I’ll say what I want and I don’t even know who I’m shouting at) which aren’t themed but were instrumental in my development as a semi-professional abortionist (Oh boy, I painted myself into that corner, didn’t I?).

We open with Kurt, who earns his second mention in these pages: 

Euche! It was just teenaged idolatry and I think we can just leave it at that.  Except that he was so cool when we were young, right?

 

Next up! Girl’s with pistols! Hot!

 

I’m trying to establish some hetero cred here because the next one will strip that away like a tissue in a sand storm.  I think I saw it in a movie or something.  One of them foreign jobs, where the beaches look like damp rock quarries.

At any rate, here’s the cock.  Now, you have to realise that, if memory serves, this was me.  Scrawny fucker, huh?  Still am …

 

But I didn't then, and nor do I now, have a swingin' dick like that.  I'm hung more like a— a duck, if I'm honest.  I presume I must have been embarrassed about that in my early teens.  But not anymore! (Now for the warning: scroll carefully because an actual and current picture is adduced below):

 

 

 

 

downinahole

 

 

An extemporaneous addendum

Dear Void

This is more of a post script than anything else. The ‘Greg and Ryan’ (from Stupid Wankers) painting was exceptionally bad. It was not well received. And that is more than understandable.  Here is why:

Picture this:You're an Executive Producer at Disney and Stephen Whoeverthefuck pitches you ‘Finding Nemo’ or a ‘Toy Story’. You get excited, right? But then he delivers ‘Ice Age: Sid beats the rape charge'.

Disappointing .

And thus, Void, my fraudulence was exposed.  Hence

Soc is a fraud

downinahole

Juxtapose? Oh that’s hilarious, you genius!

I’ll diverge from the Back to School series for a moment for this little embarrassment.

Here’s Soc’s thought process, such as it was:

Real artistd do nudes right I could rdo that ands I would be a realsl artist right bu I get to paint pitcher s of tities and sweet sweet abs and none wilil judge me for it right?em

So I painted titties:

 

And abs:

 

But it was artistic and I punned it up with the titles, ‘Juxta’ and ‘Pose’. You see?  Because they are together and I’m fucking cleverer than you because I—.

But I’m not cleverer than you, am I?

Soc is a fraud

downinahole

Back to School: Second is a series

Dear void

Since we’ve started this fucking thing, I guess we should finish it. 

Girls didn’t feature much in my youth.  Well, not the nice kind, at any rate …

So this bijou page is about little girls.  Oh, not like that, you sick fuck, I was a kid!

I plagiarised this landscape from the cover of a tin pencil box I inherited.  I find that a touch poetic, and not in any way a copyright infringement.

 Here it is: 

This was the first colour girl in my oeuvre.  That wasn’t a typo (I can’t decide whether I should use these parentheses to highlight that racially insensitive comment or point out that I used the word ‘oeuvre’ in reference to the sewage I’ve been pumping out for twenty-five years.  I suppose they did both.  Shall we move on?)

 Given the macabre nature of most of the shit I’ve done, you might surmise that the girl in the violet  dress (Yes!  Coloured.  Now STFU) has been pitched off (or, Heaven forbid, pitched herself off) some upper peak. 

Not the case, you morbid fuck.  I think she’s just looking at the view upside-down.  And what a vista it is!

Euche!  I was a kid stealing images from pencil boxes and putting fantasy girls in them.  What the fuck do you want from me?!

Oh boy, this one’s a bit closer to the spleen:

 

Even with my wife of twenty years, I find myself reticent on this topic.  What’s the expression about less said, sooner mended?  That.

If it wasn’t plainly apparent from the above,

Soc is a fraud

downinahole

Back to School: The first in a series

Dear void

Soc here

You know how you used to doodle on the back of text books at school?  Or personalise your school bag with the Metallica’s all-too phallic symbol?  Well if you were a heterosexual boy you did anyway.  I, on the other hand, did sketches of people.  No-one in particular, just faces.  This page, and the next two or so, will be dedicated to those years.

I am so thankful to Frankenspouse for squirreling these away because, when I hit the real world and had to get a job, I was ready to chuck them all in the bin.

This first category of Back to School sketches is Accidental Celebrity Likenesses.  They’re just random drawings which, upon reflexion, appear to look like real people.  There are hundreds of pages and these are just a selected few.  Ah fuck! There was a Heath Ledger one I forgot to upload.  Dammit! You’ll just have to take my word for it. 

To kick off, d’you think this looks like James Van Der Beek?

I had to google this guy to get his name right OH FOR THE LOVE OF PETE HE’S THE SAME AGE AS ME but I’m pretty sure the world didn’t know his name when I scrawled that shit.  And who remembers ‘Dawson’s Crack’ now, hmm?

I think this one looks kind of like Shannen Doherty:

 (google, google).  Well, she’s held up better than me, I can tell you that.

After ‘Less Than Zero’ but definitely  before ‘Iron Man’ I banged out this one:

 

Do you reckon it’s got a bit of RDJ in it?  Maybe Judd Nelson.  Or perhaps it’s just the eyeliner.

It could simply be because he started shaving his head (much like old Soc over here) but this one looks a lot like Billy Corgan to me:

 I’m sure this is before I’d ever heard of the Smashing Pumpkins.  But AMIRITE:

These were just the bullshit scribblings of a boy with an uncertain future.  If you'd like to see scribblings by a middle-aged man with an uncertain future, feel free to roll through these pages.  But I'll warn you of two things right here: they aren't any better and; the next tranche of Back to School will be just as appalling as this and will likely feature penises, so steel yourself, Void, this shit’s about to get grubby.

I warned you

Soc is a fraud

downinahole

The middle years

Dear Void

I have some laughable rubbish for your scorn and derision. 

I’ve never been keen on landscapes or portraits.  While I’ve done a few, landscapes don’t jiggle my nuts and portraits are far too perilous: Am I a bad painter or are you just fucking ugly?

See the problem? 

I’ve done a number of self portraits but that was with the general understanding that I’m both a bad painter and an ugly cunt.  So no-one was offended.

That’s how I fetched up in The Middle Years.

How doth the flower appear to thee?

Or does it go this way up?

[Alright.  Fair cop, governor.  I fucked up the download and the image isn’t available.  But it’s not a great loss because it was just a ninety degree twist of the other one.  So, either use your imagination or turn your iPad real quick before the OS adjusts the image or, and this is just a suggestion, fuck the fuck off].

The point is that there was no point.  A simple exercise in arse-hattery.
Moving on to the only remaining pitcher (as my wife pronounces it) from The Billy series. 

I did a bunch of them but most are gone.  This abortion, inexplicably, remains.  Nota bene, for all the shit that made it into these pages, quite a lot was shoved back into the machine for recycling.  Think on that for a moment, won’t you?  This is the shit that made the cut. Hmm. 

Here’s Billy:

 

 

Frankenspouse hates it.  And with good reason.  It’s unnerving.  I don’t know if Billy is me or my brother or my father. Or, Heaven forbid, my son.
At any rate, it’s poorly executed.  And that’s being kind.
Still, I imagine you've concluded that already because you know that

Soc is a fraud

 

Downinahole

My parents hate me too. And with good reason

Dear void

When I was sixteen I had a particular view of myself.   It was as delusional then as it is now.

Irony abounds:  I thought of myself as bookish (I was practically illiterate), cultured (I was then, and still am, a card carrying bogan) and artistic (As is plainly apparent in these pages, I can’t paint to save my life).

Here’s how I saw myself:

 

You see that hat? 

Never owned one.

You see that glass? 

Don’t know what it was meant to be for.

You see that candle? 

Still can’t paint candles. 

You see that egg timer? 

I’ve no fucking idea what that means.

I don’t need to tell you that the perspective is off, or that the lines are clumsy and ham-handed.  You can see that for yourself. I couldn't paint hands then and I can't paint hands now.  So fuck you.

I gave this pitcher to my parents because I’m a tight-arse.

And I didn’t even frame it. They did. And you can bet your life that frame cost more than the canvas. 

At this time Soc hides his face

 Jump forward several years to this:

It is a remarkably accurate rendition, IMHO, of my father.  Something I’m not sure he’d readily cop to. 

The brickwork is fine, but it’s annoyingly off-centre and that bugs the shit out of me.  Still, spilt milk et cetera.

Fuck you, I like this one. But
Soc is a fraud

downinahole

My children hate me. And with good reason

Dear Void

This is a bit of a saga but bear with me.

I’m not a good parent.  But if I paint a pitcher for each of the children’s bedrooms, that will surely mitigate years of neglect, right?

What do they like? Mmmmmmmmmmmm. The big one likes racing cars and the little one likes bugs and dirt (actually, I don’t even know what the fuck they like.  In fact, I would be hard pressed to pick their faces out of a Norwegian line-up).

Okay, I’ll paint them something they’ll like BUT I’LL MAKE IT MOSTLY ABOUT ME.  And I’ll paint two pitchers that are thematically linked thus satisfying my perpetual narcissism.  Genius!

And here you can witness the first draft:

 

Alright, I have to admit I rather like the frog, even if it is a bit existentially macabre.  But the burn-out pitcher?  I wasn’t happy with it.  It wasn’t enough about me.  I decided to tool it up a bit:

 

Check out that masking-taped crisp line!  Is anyone else getting a tingly feeling in the groin and/or surrounding areas? Just me?  At any rate, the downinahole craft is really coming together!

But then I decided that the green paint didn’t match my shoes and this penultimate tweak happened:

 

You will have noticed that the frog changed very little.  Because I liked it.  Fuck the children, this is my art, you  fascist stuffed-shirt!

I didn’t juxtapose* the pitchers digitally, by the bye, what you’re seeing there is one canvas perilously balancing atop the other.

My kids could not have been less intersested in those pitchers.  Not because of that, but for a thousand other reasons

Soc is a fraud

downinahole

*a little foreshadowing there, for I am not only a talented pitcher doer but a crafty story maker.    

 And I’m good at word writing as well as good grammar user too.

I really am a fucking fraud