This post is a series of minor updates as I’m trying to make best use of my new work-life regime (3-days a week doing my day-job, 2 days dedicated to artwork, and a 2 day weekend of relaxing, contemplating, and tidying up), and that includes blogging a bit more often. I’ll still do the occasional long-form blogpost on a single subject, but I’m experimenting a bit with a format that is more like a newsletter with various bits & pieces.
Refuturing
In a very pleasing coincidence, while I was scrabbling around in my Acid Renaissance: update 3 post earlier this week, clumsily trying to describe the whole idea of the need for us to start creating visions of the future again, Warren Ellis posts about ‘Refuturing’ which he describes as The sense of creating new immediate futures and repopulating the futures space with something entirely divorced from the previous consensus futures
, with a follow-up post that says (amongst other things) that …the future needs to be constantly invented and drawn down to us.
This is good - now I have a simple term that I can use instead of the confused jumble of words I usually come out with.
This week’s artwork
Thursday and Friday of the past week were dedicated to life-drawing. I made about 8 drawings in total, but here’s a selective sample:
Acid Renaissance: Albion’s True Standard Advanced
As I was life-drawing the ideas for some new artwork for Acid Renaissance started to form - three different photographs with the following working titles (some rough concept sketches of mine can be found on Twitter):
- Flower Child: Et in Arcadia ego (Apollonian mix)
- Flower Child: Bacchanalia (Dionysian remix)
- Dionysus
Some of the ideas behind these have been fermenting away in the background for a bit, others were prompted by an article by Simon Reynolds in an exhibition catalogue (Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era) that I picked up second-hand on the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy tensions within psychedelia.
I’m also still planning a number of pieces on the Dream Eaters - I need to find a suitable date for the session and work out the logistics.
“The most trusted accounts tell that the Dream Eaters are always three in number, with the heads of crows, and dressed in black rags over pallid skin. They have silver trinkets tied to their fingers, bird skulls around their necks, and they dance in the moonlight. Best avoided.”
More updates next week.