Seemed to be going alright but then took a plunge and that spoils any goodness from earlier.
Millennium 11. At least with this one I can put my finger on a Promethean vision, though it's more simply a flight of fancy, a literal running with the initial beginning thoughts.
With the supposed count of Picasso paintings, I wonder how many actual grand machines I have produced? My method is radically different in that almost all the sheets of the 'sketchbooks' should be seen as finished works in themselves, perhaps allying me more to Klee say. I suppose some strands of development can be traced, and also the returning to things long after the first investigations of it. I have done series that represent stories of my disordered life, and ones that are like catalogues of my possessions, in the widest sense of the term, but most are simply spontaneous apparitions of my mind's sub-basement legions.
It is strange that the head, bald and see-through looks so concrete. If I am a crystal or glass skull, my presence is undeniable, there is very little breaching of the outlines, even when there are overlapping motifs, as here. My hair is silver now, though it maintained its colour far longer than my father's did. So the face is not very like me. The head serves as paradigm; I think the conflicts of youth are bodied forth.
I find it hard to understand how anyone at all puts up with the whips and scorns of our supposedly freedom-filled time? It is not that one cannot really cope with the vagaries of technology, but rather that the bombardment and regular glitches to the flow ensure that modern living is so far from smooth. Greed seems to characterise the epoch, and the miracles of ICT aid the greedy, rather than the majority of the human race, Most are satisfied with their Z-list celebrities, through whom they live vicariously. Culture is packaged such that the pleb now loves his visit to Tate Modern to picnic on the porcelain sunflower seeds. People make playlists and stream the latest blockbusters to their devices as if that includes them in the ill-defined Community (very much with its capital letter and no inverted commas)
And I look at these our young and weep. The con is perfectly managed. Education and the property ladder tell them they have achieved. And even the pandemic slows not the progress of the lack of progress. And in the meantime the planet smoulders. We are all lost and any image of a mage or prophet are as ultimately blank as the colour field and post-painterly abstraction.
So thanks PayPal for your darn inadequacy today, for the struggle to upload a vid to TikTok, for the extra hour the cassoulet on BBC recipes took to cook, and the fact that the Pepney Gallery accepted my painting 'A Little Rough' did nothing to alleviate the torture, because I could not get over the next hurdle in the way. I should ask Bahar what the stars predict, but we are both here in a sort of internal Lockdown of a houseshare. That HCPs line, 'Life is more than just a read-through,' passed me by. Now it's going through the motions, hoping against hope. I wish I could endorse and accept the religious fervour and faith that comes therewith that all my family have bar me, but there's no chance of that happening. More likely to genuflect respectfully to the Aztec god Tlazolteotl because she was patroness of steam baths, among other things - though there is little sign that saunas will open now before dune, so I will remain unclean until then. Do you need a winking emoji to balance out this paragraph, or will you just take my word for it that it is meant ironically? It all is.