Kaiser Caimo – Page 104

Quick figure study. Graphite and white pencil on brown paper.

Head study. Graphite and white pencil on brown paper.

Head study. Graphite and white pencil (Staedtler Glasochrom) on brown paper.

Girls who post photos on the internet, I salute you. (This is Lily.)

Edit: better quality image.

It feels good to draw bodies again.

Pencil sketch, manipulated in Photoshop.

Sunrise. I hope I never take living by the ocean for granted.

Two major reasons I have not been getting much painting done are:

1) very distracted by the sea.

2) Despite zero experience in the maintenance and repair of bicycles, let alone decrepit folding bikes dating from the seventies, I’ve been messing around with the rusty piece of much-loved junk pictured above. Full title Viscount Trusty Delta, informally known as Sexybike.

Sony DSC-HX1, colours heightened in Photoshop CS2.

SO. hello.

Since the move, I have been really, really unfocused. I have no idea what I’m doing. It’s…fine, actually. It’s great. I am not worrying about the future, or dwelling on things that don’t matter, or making any plans whatsoever beyond the level of “maybe I will buy a nice pencil today”. My sleep patterns are all over the place, I am probably drinking too much and I think I have forgotten how to read but that is okay. For now.

Since my attention span is shot, I am not committing to any large-scale or long-term painting projects just now. Instead, in the spirit of spontaneity, I’ve been messing about with low-fi, quick & dirty, one-off print techniques – monoprint/monotype, frottage, collagraph, and what-have-you.

Untitled prints, water-based ink on various papers.

I now live beside the sea. It looks like this.

So, I stayed up too late one night trying to fix this painting and ended up slathering most of it in a thin layer of Prussian blue. The result struck me with the force of an epiphany and I even wrote a note to myself that read “WHEN IN DOUBT BLUE” and pinned it up in the studio with a flourish. Next day I came back in and saw this. Hahaha what the hell have I been doing?

So I took the only logical course of action. I abandoned the painting and moved house.

This painting. This goddamn painting. It is breaking my heart. I started the wretched thing back in April of this year. It is now November. I am about ready to claw my own face off.

I mean, lookit the thing. Jiminy Christmas.

I am posting it here in an attempt to see it differently, out of the context of the studio, with fresh eyes. (Oil on linen, most definitely not completed.)