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

Hide the dick and balls, Puritan!

Dear Void

When you see something that looks wrong, it’s not always an artistic choice

The Giftstone. Oh boy! Where do I start?

There’s no hiding from it, here’s some bullshit I did back in the early nineties:

I didn’t know what a Möbius loop was then and I’ve no idea why I used it here. The proportions are embarrassingly off and there appears to be careful, if clumsy, obscuring of genitalia. 

The background for the teenage sketches is not by design but simply for convenience. It’s our blue bed-spread and it reminds me of the Juxtapose bed sheets.  And it’s entirely coincidental and it tickles me no end.

I’m not going to make excuses for these sketches. I was fifteen and illiterate. Which, admittedly sounds very much like an excuse, because it is.  I’m a fucking coward.

I may have to make some excuses for the next abortion too.  I was in my twenties by the time I pulled the trigger on this shit, and I should have known better:

I mean really!  Why did I even do this?! What about that teenage sketch made me think, ‘OH FUCK this shit has to be writ large in oil!’. I’ve no idea, and it’s only here to show my poor judgment at every turn.

And that I still want to hide the dick and balls.

Soc is a fraud

Downinahole

About being smarter than Frankenspouse. Or at least more recalcitrant … (two in a series)

Dear Void

I painted directly onto the doors in my house, much to the chagrin of my long-suffering wife, Frankenspouse.

I found a clunky solution to my photographic problem.  It’s not a good one, because it necessitates loading these pages with huge images.  But you have to remember, this is about me, so fuck you.

I previously showed the initial abortion. The next one is the elder kid's bedroom door.  I distinctly remember doing this one; it came together in four hours: 11pm 'til 3am. Not counting the time it took to sand down the lacquer (by hand back in them days) and slap on 382 layers of undercoat:

 

The theme to these is the ajar door TO COMPLETE THE ILLUSION.  Trouble is, I suck at perspective, so none of them look quite right.

The last one (as it turned out) was the younger kid's door.  He was little then and keen on animals, so:

 

See that little feller down the bottom there? Merrily fucking up my fake door? 

I started on the bathroom door.  It stands to this day, sanded and undercoated and ready to go.  I guess that’s the way it’ll stay because

Soc is a fraud

downinahole

Shiny paint and how to misuse it

Look Void, I’m not trying to puss out on posting part two of the doors paintings but I had some more of the technical issues that resulted in the last post. So rather than get all vulgar about it (perish the thought!), I thought I’d take a moment to figure out a better way to do it.

To sate your unquestionably ferocious appetite in the interim, I thought I’d leap back a few years to an abortion which was birthed* by pure experimentation. I really don’t remember exactly when this was but I’m going back a good chunk of years.

The rapey copper man: 

 

This pitcher was painted with one of those highly reflective, metallic paints.  It looks great when the light is right (which it clearly wasn’t for that shot) so I tried to make it look like a copper bas-relief.  This is why I’ve tinged the tears in the canvas with a dirty green (as though it was oxidising, you see).

I think I got that wrong.  It’s copper ore that’s green, but I didn’t know that then and I’m not even sure now BUT THIS IS NOT A FUCKING CHEMISTRY LESSON SO LET’S ALL JUST CALM DOWN FOR A MINUTE

(The canvas tears weren’t an artistic choice either, by the way, I fell over again)

I’m not sure which of the two principals is more creepy: the sweaty old man who is boxing the little girl in the corner, or the threatened, Victorian virago** who’s been backed into that corner.  I know which one frightens me more; I’ll punch a fat man in the face any time you like.

Holy shit! This never occurred to me before!  Maybe she’s not there at all, and only appears in his shadow.  A wife from many years ago?  A daughter?  But why only in his shadow, Void, why?!

You see that’s just another nail in my ‘artist’ coffin.  I don’t pretend there’s a meaning to this shit.  I just like things that look cool.

If only I could paint …

Soc is a fraud

 

downinahole

*You see what I did there?  Because of irony and—.  Never mind

**I’ll fess to you right now, Void, you need no more proof of a brutally patriarchal society than the literal definition of that word.  But with my critically limited vocabulary, that’s the best I could do.  I hope you can forgive me.

An additional extemporaneous addendum

 I fucked that one up in a big, and bad way.  The fucking picture wouldn’t go in the way I wanted it  and it’s entirely my fault.  It kept importing horizontally and I WANTED IT ALL VERTICAL LIKE
but it kept coming out like this:

 

I now know my mistake but here’s how I subtexted the mistake before I fixed it:

[FUCK FUCK CUNTITY FUCK I can't get that right. I'll fix it later]

[You know what, Void? I fucking tried and tried but this software has no love for Ole Soc today. So you're getting it all sidewards and shit. I apologise. Twist your iPad really fast and maybe you'll get it. Unless you're Frankenspouse who can just walk down the hall]

I’m as flawed as a three storey building.

 Soc is a fraud

downinahole

About being smarter than Frankenspouse. Or at least more recalcitrant … (one in a series)

Dear Void

Frankenspouse is not enamoured of my paintings.  But she indulged my daublings up to, but not including, hanging them in the house.  Understandably, sophomoric cartoons of phalluses and daylight nightmares are not welcome in Frankenspouse Manor.

But Old Soc was a creep who was as conniving as he was anathema.  I painted directly onto the doors. "Fuck you, bitch," I shouted thought as quietly as possible, 'My art will be endured by you, by me, and by your friends when they come around for coffee!'

All the internal doors at our place were lacquered brown. Not tan, not beige, not even chocolate.  Just fucking brown. We have this pointlessly shallow cupboard at the end of the corridor, which would glare at you like an oblong turd as you walked down to the bedrooms.  It was the first to fall!

 

"If you're looking for me, lovey, I'll be out on the patio with a single-malt and the Fin Review"etc

Before you ask, I've no idea why the clouds are cubic. Some quasi artist bullshit I expect.

We were in the middle of replacing the floors which were just bare concrete at the time. Rather than leave a permanent scar on the floor, I took the opportunity to do this:

YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE IT LOOKS LIKE THE SUNLIGHT IS FALLING INTO THE CORRIDOR

That 3D chalk guy can duck my sick!

I think I’ve assaulted your ocular input receptacles enough for this day

Soc is a fraud

downinahole