Back to our regularly scheduled Saturday random updates blog
Which I meant to start up again last week but got sidetracked. Whatever.
Woke up with this song in my head:
Which in a way fits what’s been going on, except it’s all old shit when you consider that I’ve decided to just focus on painting and that goes all the way back to being a kid.
But this time I’m coming at it with fresh eyes and commitment. I decided that I wasn’t off-base or off-route in 2020 going back to painting, just that I needed another temporary detour to pick up another passenger, that being Nick White.
So, when I last wrote one of these Saturday blogs, I was just starting The Nick White Show, and now it’s kinda established, at least in my life. So far, it hasn’t been weekly as planned, but that’s because I realized the scripts I’m writing are too long for that.
I had a notion that I would create a library of footage and then recycle from that so as to speed up the process, but then I realized the problems with that, mainly matching lighting between different filming days and also matching any props that are to be in the background or characters who aren’t.
In other words, continuity is an issue, which I ran into in the “Nick’s Manager” skit wherein Zosime hands Nick a triple platinum album award as she comes in but I recycled some of the shots of Nick from the previous week’s skit, “Paris’ Perfume,” and they of course don’t have the plaque leaned up against Nick’s chair.
So… scratch that, gotta film fresh each week. And I can’t really give more than 20 hours a week to Nick, so between those two constraints I figure I have to do shorter skits of no more than 4 script pages to keep that all manageable. (They’ve been running 8 or 9 pages.)
I’m also tending to lean more on only film and not so much on cutting in stills though it will depend on the week. A series of stills cut in do have their own charm and vibe, after all.
Anyway, as I alluded to in a previous blog, my main themes will be dealing with celebrity culture and particularly rock stars, so I’d say ol’ Nick fits in with that. Who knows, he might even turn up in paintings… or at least cartoons.
So what art have I been making? Well, the last week or two have been more about planning and organizing and getting all of my production/studio space consolidated into the family room (where I was already shooting TNWS and which had previously been my sewing/crafting room), other than the audio workspace upstairs because that’s in a small room I can close off and it already is sorta acoustically treated.
(It’s also my altar space, and I do kinda like having those two purposes connected.)
Another reason I moved stuff into the family room was that I had an incident a few weeks back wherein one of the local crackheads seemed to be casing the joint. Fucker came and rang the doorbell pretending like he was supposed to be staying here and when I told him to get lost he tried to double down on that shit before finally walking to sidewalk and then hanging around pretending to be checking his phone before finally fucking off (he was gone by the time the cops came, of course).
And it just so happened that he left tracks from my front path to the dining room window and the living room windows to peek in (I could tell by the bluebell foliage being knocked down).
And I used to have my desk in the “nook” beside the kitchen, which fronts straight onto the driveway and I’m guessing he peeked in that window too.
Now, I kept my computers upstairs when not in use, but my house is unfortunately too close to the sidewalk so I’m sure I could be seen working on my laptop at that desk. So as much as I liked procrastinating by sitting at the desk and looking out into the front garden, I knew I had to bring that desk back here.
Which also meant I could bring my newer iMac down out of my bedroom to my desk.
So now my writing space is in the same room as my production space:
And I’ve moved the bins full of quilting fabric (well, most of them) up to the spare room and the storage room, so the office-type stuff from up there could come down here:
Lots of tidying and organizing to go, but it’s a start.
Speaking of a start, note that white panel on the production desk. It’s one of 6 drawers for my old IKEA CD cabinet, which now lives next door in the back foyer.
Probably 15 or even 20 years ago I painted them with a flame motif, along with a couple small cabinets I used to have in my room. One remains a flame paint job, the other was painted plain white 6 or 7 years back (actually that one might come down to sit under the printer table, dunno.)
But I want the doors back on the cabinet, especially as I’m thinking of getting a dog or a cat and want the fuzzball out of there, and I don’t want it being flames because I’m over that motif.
I’m thinking I’ll do paintings of some of my favorite musicians to reflect what’s in the cabinet but also to practise for the kind of paintings I’ll be making… minus the embroidery and other embellishments, of course. So, first they get a couple layers of white paint for a base.
And so far that’s it for painting outside of TNWS props.
I have been doing some drawings and cartoons, however, mostly on the covers of my various sketchbooks:
I always find it a conflict between the urge to be organized and therefore have separate sketchbooks for each project or purpose and the urge to not have 10 of the fuckers kicking around, lol… but since I work from home, the multi-sketchbook approach usually wins out, capped with a single smaller “painting ideas” sketchbook that I can carry in my purse in case inspiration strikes when out and about.
Other art news: I mentioned something in one of the above-linked blogs about making sculpts. That has started:
This pot of gold shall be sat upon by a leprechaun Bono, who I will get around to sculpting separately (for ease of painting both before gluing Bono’s butt down onto his gold) next week.
I’m following and adapting Ace of Clay‘s tutorials for these sculpts. His Edward Scissorhands one in particular opened my eyes to the possibilities of being able to make fun little sculptures of rock stars which led to me deciding to make funny ones kinda mocking them, gently or not.
Anyway, Leprechaun Bono is a prototype/model for a garden statue I probably won’t get around to making for a year.
Speaking of the garden… well, it seems I ain’t moving to the US any time soon. Maybe Mexico as a back-up plan since that’s a lot easier to do. But in the meantime, I’m here. And thus my father and I have been discussing how to make the maintenance more manageable.
The pond is on the chopping block – it’s an old-school one with just a fibreglass liner and no infrastructure to have a filter or whatever. In 2019 I cleaned it and found it impossible to keep it clean. Ditto in 2020… plus it seemed clean enough for fish but they all died the first night because I guess there wasn’t enough oxygenation even with a pair of fountain pumps running… and those fountain pumps would both get constantly clogged even when the pond seemed clean. Like clean the pond, clean the pump, run the pump, the pump stops due to being clogged 2 hours later with no apparent source for the gunk. Etc.
And I’ve fallen in and hurt myself trying to clean the damn thing.
So, we decided to fill it in.
Initially I wanted to pull it out since there’s obviously no drainage, fill the hole, and plant in the area, but we decided to make the garden paths all concrete this summer, which then made me decide that we’ll fill the pond in as-is and concrete right over it, making a little patio under the maple tree where I can put a couple wood Adirondack chairs I have for a little seating area to enjoy in the front.
Not too private right now, but that side of the yard is a bit of a garden room in a sense as there’s a large rhododendron and a large lilac already and I just transplanted a camellia which will also get big and provide some screening.
The key will be to stay on top of all the weeding, which means regular small bouts of pulling weeds while still small and also I need to focus on getting groundcovers, which I’ve already started, especially with sedums and thymes.
So… I think I’ve spewed enough for this week, let’s wrap up with some garden pics, now that things are actually blooming more (based on my Facebook “memories” showing garden pics from the last couple years, I’d say things are 2 weeks behind this year with all the cold and clouds).
