The quavering pencil

I am now getting over 100 spam comments per day. The only way I can deal with this is bulk delete them, I have no time to read them. So I don’t think it is worth posting a comment here anymore.

I also have to apologise to those of you who have put up genuine comments in the past which I have previously published. In the process of bulk deleting this morning I inadvertently deleted ALL comments, even those I had previously approved.

I’m really sorry about this. I’m having exactly the same spam problem with my Lewis Music emails and now get so much of it I cannot read individual mails any more. One wonders whether it is worth keeping a web site open at all.

It is about three weeks since I last blogged here; how time flies. I seem to have been distracted from blog and site maintenance over the past week. This morning I had to clear about 500 spam emails from the Lewis Music address (about 5 days worth). The bulk of these were to do with viagra, penis enlargement, sex sites and bank scams. Then, having deleted the 500 emails I had to wade through about 30 spam comments on this blog (again collected in the past 5 days). It is a drag. I try to keep on top of this, daily, which usually means about 50-100 spam emails and about 5-10 spam comments. Sometimes, one wonders why one bothers.

Yesterday, I was washed out all day. I had been for a real life music session with my friends Costello, Tony, Tom and Ian, the poet. We had some dinner and then started playing, roughly a couple of songs each, going round and round the circle. When it was Ian’s turn, he read a couple of his published poems instead of singing. Later on in the evening, Costello sang a few songs as well. As far as instruments went, me Tom and Tony all had our acoustic guitars, Tony played some mandolin, too. There was a basic electric piano available and I played quite a bit of stuff on that. This was the first time that I had sung to keyboards outside of my own home studio. Of course, I do that every show I play in Second Life, nowadays. I am currently splitting those shows into two half hour sets: I start with songs on the acoustic guitar, then move to digital piano and synthesiser for the second half. Anyway, back to the jam session. We played on until the wee small hours. Then Tom gave me a lift back in his car. It was an excellent session. Maybe this is what people did to entertain themselves back in the 19th and early 20th centuries, a time when there was no electronically mediated music in the home. I enjoyed the session much more than I  enjoy pub buskers nights, partly because we actually got to play a lot of songs, each, and the assembled company were interested in listening to them. My friends and I have  more or less admitted to ourselves that from a musical performance standpoint pub buskers nights are crap, but as a social occasion where we can meet and have a few pints of beer they are just fine.

I have taken down the visual art section on this Lewis Music site, on the advice of my tutor on the MA in animation. Apparently, it is not uncommon for work to be stolen from such sites and presented as the thief’s own original work. At present I do not have watermarking software and in any case I’m not sure that I can be bothered with that, so I have removed the link. It is possible that I might sometimes include small pics within the text of this blog, in future.

Ok, well, I have to admit that this has been a pretty boring entry. But I needed to get something down just to get back into the swing of the blog. Talk to you later.

It is a beautiful evening, although where I live it is too chilly to be sitting out in a deck chair after about 5 or 6 o’clock. I did spend some time in my garden today. Early this morning I cut back a weeping tree that had got a little out of hand. Having neglected things for a week or so, sorting out the borders has crept progressively higher up the list of quotidian priorities, mirroring the growth of the weeds that are attempting to take over the entire patch.

I went into the university studio this afternoon; it was eerily silent without the undergraduates babbling away. I have to say that I rather like it that way. I ran into a computer problem and so I didn’t stay for too long. I will get some help with it tomorrow. I have some reference video footage for my animatic but when I shot it I turned my compact digital camera to portrait view. So the movie I imported into Final Cut plays on its side. It needs rotating 90 degrees clockwise. I could do that if it were a jpeg, but I don’t know how to do it for a movie. Still, Apple progams are always opaque to me. I wish I could do it all on a PC.

My piano playing has gone into decline. Well, I’m vamping ok in my Second Life concerts. It is my sight-reading that is not improving. Every day I try. I have bought another book of popular tunes for *easy* piano. I now have two quite large volumes. The idea is that I can just try one or two pieces per day and that I now have so many fresh pieces I will probably have forgotten the first ones by the time I get to the end and start again at the beginning. It is so frustrating not be be able to master these so-called easy tunes. My teacher says I am approaching a break-through but it continues to elude me.

I did wonder whether I might explore some scales and arpeggios again for my guitar. I haven’t done any of that sort of thing for quite some time. However, today was too nice to be stuck indoors. I took a sketch pad out and sat on a sun lounger. I started to draw the weeping tree that I mentioned earlier. Unfortunately I got distracted by the roof tiles and drifted over to a skylight window. I didn’t do too badly on the roof but when I looked at the sketch as a whole I realised that I had drawn it at a greater degree of magnification than I had drawn the tree. Two totally different scales were going on in the same picture. I was so fed up with this that I drew our recycling bins instead. I regret to inform you that the wheely bin was pretty dire, too. Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day for sharpening pencils. I must go now. Talk to you soon.

Today has not worked out as it might have done. It is past noon and I have done no sketching and no paino. I had intended to change the battery in my accoustic guitar but that has not been done either. On a more positive note I spoke to my brother on the phone. We are in the habit of having a weekly chat each Sunday; it enables us to stay in touch and to swap news, especially about family.

Moving on, this evening I  played my 300th show in Second Life. I am very happy that it was at Cascadia Harmonics, since my very first gig was at its sister venue, Rocky Shores. I am always the first one to play there on a Sunday, since my show starts at 11 a.m. in Second life (although 7 p.m. for me in England in real life). I usually get there a bit early so I can chat with my friend Woody while I get set up. He is such a nice man and incredibly knowledgeable about all sorts of things. Tishe and Nad refer to him as Woodypedia, which I think is hilarious.

The show was a great success. They had made up a table of food with lots of things relating to my songs. They had even managed to get some virtual Brussels sprouts! I played a selection of some of the favourite songs I play in SL. The major differencebetween this 300th gig and my first gig was that today I played piano. I did not do that when I first started in SL.

Yesterday, I made a couple more abstract acrylic paintings but they are still drying (the paint went on quite thick in some parts). I hope to photograph them and get them up on the sketches section of my website early next week. I still have a lot of work to do on an A3 cityscape drawing I have been making since about 10 days ago. I decided to convert the pencil sketch into pen and ink, and I am about half-way through that task. Eventually I will finish it with watercolour washes. I hope to get that done by the end of the coming week. That seems to be all I want to say now. Talk to you later.

Writing my blog is, today, a displacement activity; I ought to be mowing the lawn. I somehow lack get-up-and-go and maybe put it down to Labour’s miserable showing in the European election. It seems that the problem was that the labour vote collapsed, it wasn’t that the Tories or the independent parties did much better than last time. Clearly two things have not helped one little bit. Firstly, there is the dreadful behaviour of large numbers of MPs across all parties who have been fiddling their expenses and claiming for ridiculous things, even if technically not breaking the rules. This has resulted in disillusionment with the British parliament. However, to blame it on Labour is totally misguided, since all the major parties were at it. Labour just happens to be the government of the day, and so it is picking up a lot of wrongly directed bile, IMHO. The second thing that has not helped labour is the behaviour of its own cabinet members. I feel this is inexcusable since they are seasoned politicians and must have know that their resignations would virtually kill the party at this very difficult time for the government (massive recession coupled with the expenses scandal). Of course, the recession is not the Labour government’s fault either but, once again, they are the ones currently in power and therefore seem to be picking up the brickbats. I think Gordon Brown is better suited to deal with all this than anyone esle but things may have gone too far.

The difficulty with the catastrophic collapse of the labour vote is that there is no longer the broad foundation of industrial trades unionism to support the party. The reason for this is, quite simply, most of the heavy industry, including shipbuilding and coal mining, has vanished. Tony Blair attempted to shift the party into the centre but my feeling is that Blair’s modern left-of-centre Labour party was based on a rather ephemeral relationship between him and his supporters. Now that he has gone, and the old industrial unions are not what they were, it is difficult to see what might constitute the bedrock.

I turn now to more mundane matters. I have made some progress organising the section for my paintings and sketches here on this website. I’m trying to follow the advice my life drawing tutor, Mark, gave me earlier in the year: draw something each day. I also have some helpful books on this topic. I am gaining more confidence in drawing but I am still very anxious about sketching on location (in the city, for example). I did have to go to the city today and I took a sketchbook and pencil but in the end I chickened out. Part of this was that I couldn’t settle on anything I wanted to drawn and part of it was down to feeling self-conscious about it. So back home I ended up drawing a bread roll with seeds on it. I will have to deal with this eventually, I know. But until I can sort myself out, I’ll try to come up with objects or subjects at home.

Apart from the bread roll, I have started work on another acrylic board painting. I want to paint a coal fire for my animation film Mrs Growbeck’s Armchair (this is the song I am working on for my MA in Animation). I applied a base of gesso and gell a few days ago. Today I started putting some washes on the surrounding fireplace. I have ordered some better pastels and they should arrive tomorrow. My plan is to make the fire with the pastels, using yellows, orange and reds. I’m thinking that the smoke can be done with charcoal. The only problem is that if I seal the painting with a satin or gloss medium, that tends to smooth out the visual impact of charcoal and pastel. It is very much like rubbing your fingers over to smudge or blend the colours. I’ll just have to try it out and see.

I did some concentrated piano practice earlier today. It went better than usual, and I was fairly pleased. I have to work hard at my sight reading. It is a very unrewarding thing to do. But today I did get one or two little glimmers of what might eventually turn into success. I had a good gig in Second Life last night at Cascadia Harmonics. I played about five original songs on guitar, then switched over to finish the second half of the show with a keyboards set of covers. It is mainly my digital piano that I play then, but I usually include one or two songs playing my synth, too. I don’t have a gig tonight but I do tomorrow. I’m hoping to practice some more for that show either later today or tomorrow morning.

Ok, well, this blog has been written but the lawn remains uncut. I think I feel cool about that. Talk to you again later this week. Bye for now :))

My friend Dave Marshall has sent me a CD that he has just made [Rossendale Records, MUSCD 008]. It is entitled In Black and White which, given his Tyneside roots and his love of the Newcastle United FC, is neat. He plays acoustic guitar and his songs fall within the broad category of contemporary English folk music.

The first song, Big River, is strongly evocative of the days when a lot of ships were built on the Tyne, a time when you would certainly not have bothered to send coals to Newcastle. The significance of that river for Dave is also reflected by his choice of the next song Deep River Blues.

In Me Mam’s Song, he deals with bereavement and the difficulties men and women have in getting back into the swing of relationships after such a trauma. It is a difficult topic, but he faces it with sensitivity and the song is one that provides hope for those for whom the future seems bleak.

The Holliday treats us to an amusing a capella in the folk style, delivered in Geordie. It is enough to put anyone off setting foot out of the home! This song contrasts markedly with the seriousness of Jen’s Song which is a sometimes  painfully honest account about finding love at a time when you are feeling down and deep in the depths of the blues.

The lyrics of T-shirt in December are very clever. He will make you laugh, but beneath the surface there are plenty of warnings about the state of the planet. The images in the song are so lively, I forgive him for rhyming traffic with terrific.

Dave’s gentle guitar picking comes through well on Sally Wheatley. In this song you really get a glimpse of the Geordie balladeer in him. Next, Travelling Brothers enables Dave to express his clear socialist principles in a warm straightforward way without proselytizing.

Human Traces is a speculative song about the circumstances in which a family must have died, based upon fragmented and incomplete archeological evidence. Dave provides a strong acoustic rhythm guitar on this track but this is supplemented by electric guitar in an arrangent that at times verges on the anthemic, IMHO. 

Dave’s interest in industrial and social history comes through in Bewicke Main. The song deals not only with a mining disaster but also with the demise of the Northumbrian village and its culture, following the pit closure. 

The Tyne reappears again in the penultimate song I Will Find You: a powerfully tender song about a boy’s love for his dead father. I guess the river keeps flowing.

The CD concludes with Dave’s song Lager Town. Here he captures the bleakness of Saturday night in a town centre: knife fights, faces getting glassed, heads getting kicked in, girls getting raped.  “Yeah! The boys are here, they’re gonna have fun tonight” is such a chilling chorus. This song is a bitterly critical indictment of the appalling state of contemporary society and the casual viciousness of some aspects of inner city life.

I really enjoyed the CD. I only wish I lived nearer to Dave so I could go listen to him live when he plays at folk and contemporary acoustic pub venues. On the other hand, listening in-ear from laptop or mp3 player does enable one to concentrate on his lyrics; they are worthy of close attention.

So, thanks for sending me the CD, Dave. It is amazing to think of how far we have moved on since the days of Forrest Dim (I think the French title was Bois Epais).

I spent some time this morning reorganising my music sheets for my internet shows. For a while I had separated out songs I performed with guitar from keyboard, and then more recently I had opened up a third category for synth accompaniments. The system became awkward so I have developed an alphabetised file for everything together. Then, for each show, I make a playlist and put all the music and lyric notes I need into a separate small file. This guides me through the live performance. I have notes for all my digital piano voicings and also I pencil in the synthesizer presets where appropriate.

I’m still finding it difficult to manage everything in performance. This is not due to a lack of experience, since I have played nearly 300 x one hour shows since January 2008. I think the problem is that I am operating close to the cusp of information overload in an extreme multi-tasking situation. I can see why some people who sing in SL simply click on an mp3 backing track on their computer and sing over that: a massively simpler operation. I am currently moving between three rl instruments and changing animations in SL whenever I switch from guitar to keyboards. I now have rl mixer controls to adjust, and separate voicing controls on digital piano and synth. I am also trying to watch who has turned up to the show in SL and what they are saying to one another in the chat screen while they listen to my music. I am also trying to keep watch on the sound level indicators in a separate window on my laptop screen for the signal I am streaming up to the internet. It is important that I send a strong signal up but avoid any clipping. When I am playing piano, I have to monitor by looking into a mirror on the wall in order to see the green, yellow, and red meters on the laptop screen. Another problem is that I have two voice mics (one for when I play piano the other for guitar and synth, since I sing from different positions) and even if I get the instrument levels right, the voice can easily bounce me into the red zone, at the drop of a crotchet. Karaoke, it is not!

After I played my show at Foxy Hollow in SL this lunchtime, I switched into painterly mode. Splodge-it-on has not gone well today. I am working with acrylics on the bobbly side of hardboard which I gave a gesso priming to the other day. I am exploring the way three colours interact on this surface: violet, orange and brown. At present, it looks a total mess. I have decided to set it to one side and look at it again tomorrow. I think the way I am working at present is a combination of splodge-it-on combined with Rorsach blot interpretations. In other words, I splodge then pause. The paint dries. Then I stare hard at the board until I enter a trance-like state, hoping that some fragment of meaning might leap out of the randomness. This worked well for my painting of the Swirlette women who were trudging ahead into the blueness of their atmosphere (presumably on the planet Swirl). I’ll have to put up a photo of it when I have one. In the meantime, I shall daub off, as we artists are prone to say. Talk to you later.

It is Wednesday and I am taking a break around lunchtime. This morning I battled with the Mac. I have even bought a book for PC folks on how to understand Macs. I just don’t like ‘em. Apart from that, I was trying to get to grips with Final Cut Express in order to develop an animatic for my MA film. I don’t like that either. I have searched about to see if there is a close equivalent program for PC but have not found anything much.

Yesterday I went to Newcastle. This was a trip with multiple purposes: needed to get a couple of guitar leads with the quarter inch jacks; had a list of stuff I needed from the art supplies shop; wanted to look around the Laing gallery. I found the excursion to be tiring; the metro rides were busy with a lot of school kids running about on their half-term break. However, my trip was reasonably successful on all three counts. I shall test the jacks at my show in Second Life tonight (I play Terra Fyrmusic at 8 pm English time). I finished my acrylic splodge on hardboard, having picked up some tubes of vibrant colours yesterday. The gallery at Newcastle gave me food for thought, as well as a vegetarian slice of pie and salad in its cafeteria. I was fascinated by an exhibition of watercolours that included many by John Wilson Carmichael (1799-1868). Some of his sketches were made on huge sheets of paper, easily a metre wide, perhaps two. I particularly liked a drawing of Newcastle Central Station which was made, I think, as an architectural impression prior to its being built.

I had my tutorials today and, apparently, my splodges are jolly good. So I feel a lot better about that. I shall go home soon.

…much later….

I played my internet show this evening to a small audience. For the first time the hour long show, apart from a final number on guitar, was played on keyboards (digital piano and synth). I am very pleased about that and I may do some keyboard only shows in SL in future.

It is late now and I need to think about going to bed. Will talk again soon.

I felt a bit down yesterday. Both my tutors on the MA (Mel for animation, Alison for illustration) are now concertedly exhorting me to paint intuitively, paint my emotions, paint from the heart. So, I forced myself to splosh a load of water onto the paper. I had previously mixed up some pretty strong colours.I attacked  paper with brush in an unthinking pseudo-emotional kind of way. I tried to leave areas of the white page untainted by my brush (and this denies the possiblity of broad washes (about which I had read reams). The problem is that my goals, so far, have been in the direction of photo-realism. Yet that is precisely what is NOT wanted, as far as I can see. I feel that I am being exhorted to paint in a way that is alien to me and this might be linked to gender-role stereotypes. In a nutshell, all this ‘paint what you feel‘ and ‘just do it intuitively‘ stuff just seems too girlie by half.

I talked this over with my mate Tom during the course of our two-hour full English breakfast this morning. I have hatched a strategy. I am going to continue sploshing out randomly generated (the girls would call this intuitive or emotional) paintings as the first stage. For each painting, I will label the four edges by compass points (N,S,E and W). Then I will look at the dried mess, standing the sketch book up with each compass point at the top in turn and try to see what theme or subject might be hiding within the painting (and this I will then develop at a second stage). Allison has said to me that it is useful to look with eyes half-closed sometimes. But then I suddenly realised that my bad eyesight can be put to good use here; all I have to do is remove my spectacles and the page looks a blur of colour. This could be ideal!

I will jot down my free-associations as to a possible subject for the painting and then choose one of them to work up into the final picture (using whatever orientation I think is best). I have just sploshed out my second background and it is drying as I write this. It was so wet and runny it might take till tomorrow to get dry. Maybe I should open up another sketchbook in parallel, so I can move things along a bit faster. Or use a hair dryer perhaps. Lots of possibilities here. I might borrow my daughter’s hair dryer (I do not possess or use one) and experiment a bit later.

Tom and I talked about music, of course, and I told him about my adventure into the world of synthesizers. It is not usual for people to use a synthesizer as a solo accompanying instrument for voice, but that is what I am determined to do. One problem is that when I switch from one synth voicing to another, the instrument goes silent on me. This is not what I want when I am singing a song and wish to move into a new synth sound for the next verse. So far, I have developed a highly precarious solution to this problem. Firstly, I put my digital piano into a fairly spacey pad sound that will sustain well and generally match the synth. Ok. Say the second verse ends on a chord of C and I want to go into a new voicing for the third verse. What I do is finger the C chord on the synth in the right hand, with an octave in the left hand. Then I take off my left hand, keeping the C chord going with the right hand on synth. I hit a bass octive on the note of C on digital piano. As soon as I hear that kick in, I take my right hand off the synth and press the buttons to get me to my next voicing. I then finger the right hand C chord on synth in the new voicing, take my left hand off the digital piano octave and place it back onto the synth. I am then ready to roll into the third verse of the song in the new synth voicing (some folks call it a patch, I think). Now, this is quite dangerous because I do all this perched on a bar stool that is midway between synth and piano. And I have just recovered from a head injury resulting from a fall. So I don’t want another fall. But my conversation with Tom produced a neater solution to the problem, one that I need to explore over this coming week.

I have a Boss Loop Station pedal, that I bought for my guitar work. I still haven’t got the hang of it but I must do so soon. The idea is that you can record something you are playing, then stomp on the pedal, and it will keep looping around seamlessly until you stomp the pedal again. What I need to do is learn how to do that for my turn-around chord or chord sequence on the synth. Then I won’t have to lean back precariously to finger the bass on my digital piano. That should be good.

I also told Tom about my brilliant solution to finding a way to make a clip board stand up from the synth and lean back onto my bureau top, without it slipping down and wobbling about (the clip board acts as a music stand). The solution is surprisingly low-tech: a couple of pairs of rolled up socks! They stabilise things nicely. I’ll have to take some pics of the synth stand that I made to fit onto the top drawer of my bureau. I have to say that I think it is quite ingenious.

My piano lesson was cancelled today because, unfortunately.  my teacher had some rather sad family matters to attend to. I was actually relieved because I didn’t really have much to show her. I have been stuck on a plateau for ages. I can’t think of what to do except to keep practicing my sight-reading. I am convinced that that is what is holding me back and making my progress so dreadfully slow. I shall try to do some work on this a little later this afternoon. One day both watercolour painting and classical piano playing will leap ahead. I am definitely not going to be beaten by this.

I had a nice show in SL last night. I started up in a bad mood, probably brought on by having to do a supermarket run in real life. But by the time I had finished my first guitar set, I was enjoying myself. I moved over to the piano and played some songs on that. Then I decided to just go for it and I played a couple of songs on synth. I came back onto guitar to finish the show. Ferdy, Coin and Madelin came along to the show and a few others drifted in and out. It is great to have some people there who I know really like my material. As I was playing at my own little venue (Terra Fyrmusica), I could relax and get into an experimental frame of mind. One thing that I have been thinking about is to occasionally go there and do a spontaneous improvisation. I have my own stream for small numbers (about 20 listeners) which would be plenty for that sort of thing. So I could do it absolutely any time I liked. When I have played in the English morning (say around 10 or 11 am) I find you sometimes get folks from Australia or New Zealand listening in, and occasionally some insomniacs from North America. There are often a few Europeans hanging around then; presumably folk who don’t have to be at work in the morning. I must think about all this.

I can hear the rain on my skylight window. I’m glad I am not travelling today, since it is the English bank holiday weekend; loads of traffic and the inevitable jams. I must get on and do stuff now, even if it is only having a nap. Hmm…. that does seem like a good idea. Speak to you later.

I am starting to explore the synth. I had intended to play it at my show at Bara Bar last night in SL but I had forgotten that the slot I had been booked into was a 30 minute one and not the usual 60 minutes. So, in the event, I didn’t have time. I am due to play at Terra Fyrmusica tomorrow, Thursday, and I am hoping to explore it more fully then.

I have just finished reading Danny Gregory’s book Everyday Matters, in which he extols the virtue of drawing everyday objects and scenes. It certainly made me think, and I feel my drawing is now pretty much on a par with his. So I have to accept that I can no longer produce the ‘I can’t draw’ card with any credibility, as an excuse. I have tutorials today with Mel for animation and Allison for my watercolours and other illustrations. I’m hoping that they will help provide me with direction for the coming week. Incidentally, I had a very good chat with Helen, who draws a lot using pastels. She manages to get the most fantastic colours out of them and she demonstrated to me how she mixes them on the paper. I suddenly realised that the paper I had been using hitherto has far too much tooth for this technique and she very kindly tore out a couple of smoother sheets from her own sketch book for me to try out. We also talked about the cost of arts materials. Part of the reason for the vibrancy of her colours is bound up with the quality of the pigments in the pastels she bought (and they were incredibly expensive): a case for having the proper tools and materials for the job, I feel.

I still am not ready to plough ahead with the Mary Todd Beam book on celebrating my creative self. But I’m starting to get to the point where I might put a toe into the waters, very gingerly. I think Mel wants me to jump in at the deep end, but I can’t see myself doing that. Ok. I must go now. I have so much stuff to take down to the studio, I have to get organised. And I must drive to a mini-market to pick up a sandwich for my lunch on the way. Speak to you later.