experimental painting.

that’s a scary concept, isn’t it? a stick-thin weirdo daubing his vital secretions and excretions all over the stretched, dried skin of a komodo dragon while a blind bongo orchestra whips up a voodoo beat…

nah, it was just boring old me doing a little experiment that i had thought of when i found out that using ‘paint’ (the software, not the medium) you can invert colour. what use it is i can’t really imagine beyond, perhaps, viewing scanned negatives. whatever the reason, it DOES it and because it does it i DID THIS…

NEGATIVE SEASCAPE

don’t forget to clicky on the piccy in order to enbiggify it.

what i wanted to do was a picture that i would paint in the exact opposite of what i wanted the finished result to be, a bit like painting the negative for a colour photograph, and then invert it to see if i had remembered what colours were opposites of what and to see if i could make light bits dark and vice versa.

there are three primary colours; red, blue and yellow. red has an opposite in green because blue and yellow, the remaining primaries, mixed together make green. the opposite of purple should be yellow and so on.

i decided on a seascape for a few reasons: there would be a spread of colours, the yellow and orange of the sun, the blue of the sky, the green of the sea, the yellow, sandy beach; the seascape is easy for the eye to interpret in its normal hues but i wondered what a negative seascape might look like, would it be like the cover of a sci-fi book? and i don’t think i’ve painted one before so off we go…

i painted in ‘bricks’ of colour to give the inversion a chance as i wasn’t sure what would happen. the painting was on black paper which i hoped would be a chance to get free highlights when it turned to white.

the slabs of water behind the breaking wave don’t work so well and the wave itself looks like a bit of a picket fence but what the hey, it’s an experiment. let’s press the button for colourific invertificationalisation…

POSITIVE SEASCAPE

well, the sun and the sand went green. hmmmmmm.

overall, i am pleased with the result of the experiment but i don’t think i’ll be repeating it too soon. when the painting is exhibited i picture a man banging the painting on the top and saying “bloody painting’s not working, i’ll have to call out an engineer, i bet the tube (of paint) has gone!”

i’ve had a good day. originally i asked stu if he might help me with inverting the colour but i managed to do it all by myself and i also mended my rubbish printer. vodka mick came round and he asked for a print-out of ‘the drowned man’ to stick on his wall and told me that it was a good painting and that i should sell it. i must make a stringent effort to remember these days when things go right and go well too. it’s so easy to forget. we must frame these days and keep them by us to look at when we are feeling sad.

goodnight.

one of the things that i go on about every so often is what i call ‘unstoppable self-belief’. i’ll give you the usual example that i cite and that is lord jeffrey archole. he’s certainly got it, and in large quantities, but how did that happen? what did he go through to make him the pri, erm, i mean MAN he is today?

i always maintain that i don’t have this unstoppable self-belief but just today, just this evening, i’m wondering if what i have been claiming is true. i get stage fright whenever i click the button marked ‘publish’ or when someone looks at a painting that i’ve done.

this is because i’m not wholly asking ‘what do you think of THIS?’, i’m asking ‘what do you think of ME?’. do you accept me. do you accept that what i claim, that i AM a writer and artist, is true? or do you think i’m worth a sad internal shake of the head and some encouraging words that you don’t really mean?

but when i look back over what i’ve done in my life, at how stubborn i am, at the things that i really HAVE achieved i really have to admit that i DO have the self-belief, that actually i have a large sack full up with it, that i must have otherwise iwould never have got away with it all. i’d be dead or i’d have given in, but i never did. right or wrong i never did.

so it’s time for me to put away the stage fright and get on with PLAN X.

here’s a lady who is going to find out about stage fright. she’s standing outside a public toilet which, i am told, can be found in houston, which is a large village in amerikaland.

she needs to do a poopoo so

in she goes…

but oh dear, the walls are made of one-way mirror

i think that i’d prefer a bog with walls made of something opaque.

i know no one can see in. you don’t have to keep telling me. no, i’d just prefer opaque walls, that’s all. i KNOW, i know they can’t…………….ad nauseaum

yesterday i spent some money.
shopping is a thing i don’t like. i am a traditional male shopper; i want something, i go and get it, i come home again. i do not ponce about spending 2 quids on coffee or trying on hats. this is because i was blessed with a Y chromosome.

i’d like to combat my arthritis. ken gives his dog tablets made out of stinging nettles and i had heard something about stinging nettles being good for the condition. and bee stings too. i looked things up on the intermawebular magic typing television box.

so off i went to the station. look what i saw by the platform…

…toadflax

toadflax in the middle of october. i’m glad i gave up car ownership fifteen years ago. at least i will be able to hold my head high when the global reckoning for filthy pollution comes in (as long as a steenking two-pot lister diesel engine doesn’t count).

with the toadflax were some stingers so for experimental purposes i stang the distal joints of the first two fingers of my left hand. guess what. i think i have noticed an improvement and it’s sufficient to make me enstingify all my problem finger joints on a daily basis. i also have arthritis in my lower back, hips and knees but don’t worry, i shan’t be lowering my kecks and reversing into the stingers on the towpath for i have medificationalisation. nettle tablets.

yep, i bought some nettle tablets and some more glucosamine what my g.p. recommended. that set me back a tenner.

look! there’s a DAY’S WORTH of tablets in that strip there. 16 tablets a day. and there are my two types of insulin. 4 jabs a day. if anyone doubts that i’m ill i just show them all that stuff and with my fingers what are starting to resemble a handful of blind cobbler’s thumbs the evidence is convincing.

you will also see there my new mobile telephone. technermology and i don’t get on. does the little bastard work? do you really have to ask?

when i bought it (20 quids plus i had to top it up with 10 quids) the 10 year old assistant claimed that he would enswappify everything out of my old sim card and magically stick it right up my…

new phone. do you think that in real-life he did? do you?

i’m slowly putting all the lost numbers that i can track down into my new phone (which doesn’t send txt msgs for some bonkers reason) but here’s my proposition:

in order to make my head swell with pride i can calculate how many ‘h’ fans i have out there in www-land. i can do this by asking “please send me your telephone number by electronical mail to me, henrythethirst at aol dot com.

so far i have only thrown my new phone once so i must be learning how to control my temper.

today i went to art therapy. following the minor miracle that was ‘a drowned man’ i thought i would do an experiment…

it’s not finished so i might not have a photo until next week but what i was thinking of was a negative picture that could be manipulated using my new ‘gimp’ software. using the power of my mind i tried to paint a sea/beach/sky-scape where everything was negative. the paper was black, the sun was blue, the sky was orange and i just started the sea in pale pink.

my idea is that the picture will look alright but unusual but that the negative of my negative picture will be a stranger yet surprise.

i thought of doing that while i was on the bus. using public transport. if only everyone could be as smug, er, i mean environmentally aware as i.

and i walk a lot,
h.
xxx

you know that music that is played on a saw, the music that means ’spooky’ and ‘weird’ and ‘more than coincidental’? that music like on ‘midsomer moiders’? well, play that music in your head while we talk about the thing on the left…

…which is called a coolie hat.

a coolie hat goes on/in your stove chimney (or should that be flue?) and keeps the rain from falling down the inside while letting the smoke out. this one i magged up out of newark lock on the ruins side just near the top gates.

i’ve only magged up one coolie hat before and guess what (you should turn up the ‘weird’ music at this point) it was from EXACTLY the same place. there must be some kind of spectral wind, caused by lost spirits of the black monks who have wandered restlessly since the dissolution, that gets under coolie hats and lifts them up and, PLOP!, into the lock.

trouty painted up the first one i recovered and we left it on the chimney, pushed down to keep the rain out, when we left the boat on the mooring. next time we went back it had gone. was it one of the black friars come bck to haunt our chimney pot?

right. stop the music and look at the next things, the smiley face things. do you know what they are?

i’ll tell you what they are, they are the only ‘magic’ things that actually work , that’s what they are.

they are handwarmers and what you do is boil them in a pan of water for five minutes. the thing is full of crystals of sodium acetate and the boiling dissolves them to a gel. it melts them because they have a very high melting/freezing point. now obviously everybody knows that this solution of sodium acetate as a gel is stable below its own freezing point and therefore, paradoxically, can remain a gel (i’m making this up, good isn’t it?) until, and here’s the clever bit, it is forced into crystalline formation by an action of compression. this is provided by a small metal disc with a cross cut into it and a clicking action performed by your chilly fingers when the thing has cooled to an ambient temperature and you want to be warmed up.

beautiful little strands of crystals form and the handwarmer gives up its latent heat. bingo! warm hands and a fun thing to do. over and over again. because unlike so-called ‘magic’ sand which should be called ‘rubbish’ sand, this thing really, really works.

the handwarmers were a royal gift from the king of all the swedes, his royal highness, ‘king omally. cheers omally! on christmas day i shall celebrate the birth of our lord by sticking one in each back pocket and warming up my arse. and i shall think of you while i’m doing it.

and the last thing is what i thought was an old chisel that i dug out of the towpath, but having watched a dvd with john noakes in about the inland waterways i wonder if it is a thingy that they would have used to ram caulking in between the planks on the old wooden boats.

whatever, it’s old, like me, and i like it.

call in next time for another trip round my museum. or maybe something else.

cheroodle!

the paints are like school paints. they come in squeezy bottles like washing up liquid does and they are a bit gummed up in the main. you have to prise the top off and pour the paint out. there are those paints in big primary blocks and there are pastels and crayons and marker pens but i felt that today was a painty day so i used the squeezy bottle paints.

i had been looking at the ‘black paintings’ of GOYA and i liked the way he used the cream paint to lift a face from the black wall. i wanted to do something similar with my subject matter for this week.

the drowned man has been on my mind. i don’t even know if the man in the canal was drowned or what but what caught my imagination was the man, any man, under the water. unseen, corrupt in decay, the sightless eyes, the sinuses filled with water. water everywhere, films of water, the shape and the body… dissolving…

for this picture i didn’t sketch it out with a pencil first, which is unusual for me, i just wanted to get some paint on the paper and take it from there. i chose the black paper for the dramatic effect and for the immediate depth and sense of something once hidden being revealed, being given up to earthly sight from a very private depth.

i mixed up white with some tints of blue and yellow and put in the obvious highlights for a side-lit face. as it was the face of any and everyman so long as i got the proportions about right i was ok.

that done i darkened my mixture a little with orange and some green and painted more and then darker still, just working in my mind as to where highlights and lowlights might fall, not really looking at what i was doing.

i added purple to give me the shade i wanted for the mouth and eyes. all the time i was working from some weird thing inside of me rather than trying to paint a picture. hard to explain. perhaps something inside of me painted it because i got quite a surprise when it was finished, i thought ‘fuck me! i just did that’ like i’d not seen it before and someone else had just shown it to me.

the ripply effect was supposed to convey the face coming through the surface and being part of it at the same time. a face pressed against a veil of water.

i mixed up a fresh little batch of off white for the whites of the eyes and some dark for the hair and so on, then i looked at it.

it was finished.

and for once i felt that i had painted what i wanted to paint, what it was that i saw in my head that usually i can’t capture. today i had luck on my side.

THE DROWNED MAN

my name is henry and i am an alcoholic.
and a writer.
and an artist.
watch me grow.

you may be wondering why i have asked you all to gather here in lonely thirst hall. cut off by the tide, you may be sure that we are quite alone in our isolation…

or are we?

no! lord snotboodle, you may NOT leave by the french windows! kindly remain seated next to monobrow, the gardener and as the atmospheric thunder rolls in the lightning torn heavens above i shall reveal the name of…

THE MOIDERER!

except i shan’t because i don’t know who the moiderer is and i don’t even know if there has been a moider at all. but snuggle up by the flickering flames of the fire and i’ll tell you about the body, the body in the water. the body at DEAD MAN’S BRIDGE!

dan dan DAHH!!!

anyway, what happened was that omally came to stay at the weekend. he came all the way from southampton so that we could spend the weekend a boatin’ and a larkin’ and all that kind of thing. we boated as far as new haw lock and we got there at about half past twelve on saturday last. i went up to prepare the lock as it needed emptying and i was just closing the top gates when a policeman thanked me for closing it. eh? eh?

then he got his roll of ‘crime scene go away’ tape and started roping off the towpath and he told me there was A BODY in the water. and he pointed vaguely up along the boats moored along the new haw line (mostly yoghurt pots not proper, steel boats) and i wondered if it might be the corpse of vodka mick having a float about so i asked if the policeman wanted me to have a look as i know a lot of people along there. give him his due, he knew immediately that i was just a liar after a nosy gawp. i had to stay on the boring side of the ’shove off, it’s nothing to do with you’ tape.

along came a fireman and he wanted to know about vehicular access. he told me that there was a body and that a boat had gone over it. and pulled it up. and that the body had got caught in the propeller. mmmmmmm, gruesome.

unbelievably, no one at all wanted me to poke my nose in so i went back to the boat. i told trouty about it and we convinced ourselves in about five secs that the corpse was vodka mick. i phoned vodka mick h.q. and was surprised when the phone was answered by the ghost of vodka mick. he said that he was not dead and that rather than knocking once for yes he would be going to tesco to buy some cider. so if the moideree wasn’t vodka mick, WHO WAS IT?

you’re thinking HANG ON! who said anything about moider? i’ll tell you who, it was that reliable old standby of all these type of adventures and stories, it was a man who had just come out of the pub and was walking by. and as the afternoon ticked by and more pedestrians got kicked off the towpath and reported what they had seen of the scene where the body had been it looked as if the pub man might have been right and that FOUL PLAY was suspected.

like any rubber-necked gawper i had little solid information but that didn’t mean NUTHIN. i can make stuff up if i want so i did. bodies usually float, not sink. sometimes they do a bit of both but we are talking about the navigation here. it’s busy. there are always people about. you try going for a wee up against a tree and you’ll soon see how many people there are. floating bodies come to notice. therefore this body must have been tied up or weighted down or something that would tell anyone straight away that nobody just falls in wrapped in a carpet with a set of dumbells wired to him with coathangers.

and i spoke to more people and then we knew that the body was just under where the m25 bridge goes over, dusty earth where the sun never shines and nothing ever grows, and the graffiti tags stretch ten feet up all the bridge supports in all their indecipherable glory. we knew there was a pontoon out across the water and that there were divers working.

divers working in the cold, muddied water. looking for clues. pulling god knows what out from the shaft and the blades of a still and silent propeller under a dark metal boat. and a helicopter hovering overhead.

so on the saturday we turned round and went down to thames lock and then back to the mooring and chatted with our friends. the next morning there were boats coming down so we knew the pound at new haw must have been opened again. off we went and i spoke to a few people who i’d best not identify and i learned precisely hardly anything.

i learned that the body had ‘been down there some time’ but the navigation is not deep. you can walk across most of it. i learned that we were talking about the body of a male, late teens or early twenties. i talked to people on two boats that i had seen going up river before us on the saturday morning and i just got the feeling that i wasn’t BEING TOLD. as if people that really knew had been told not to say anything. i don’t KNOW, it’s just a feeling.

what a rubbish detective i am because i never asked anyone which boat it was that got a corpse jammed under her. i know nearly all the boats on the bottom half of the navigation just because i look at them all the time. and i FORGOT to ask. tut tut. they won’t have me in charge of the moider squad at this rate.

and the latest news comes in from secret agent vodka mick. alerted by my phone call he has spent a profitable day collecting chestnuts for trouty and a gleanin’ of the information. he was told that the body was of a WOMAN and that it had been WEIGHTED DOWN.

tomorrow i might phone the surrey police press bureau and pretend that i have a ticket marked ‘press’ sticking from the hatband of my trilby, i might ask them if there is any proper news.

i spent a while this evening making peppermint creams. i feel so useless out here on the outside of it all. i gotta speak to the D.A., if i can only get him to reinstate me, give me back my badge and my gun, if he’ll just give me 24 HOURS i know i can crack this case wide open and it’s going all the way to the TOP!

it’s always the same, isn’t it? always, always, always.

there always is a discrepancy between what really happened, what really was said, and what got ’said’ later on when it all got processed in your head, the disagreement, the frank exchange of views, when you play and edit over and over and over.

the way it is for me (and i strongly suspect that it is exactly the same for everyone else in the whole wide world except the dalai lama) is that when i have a bit of a ruck, a row, a run-in with a somebody or other i have to go over what happened until i make myself sick to death of it all. and then i go over it again. what i said. what he, she or it said….

and then we have the discrepancy

….what I SHOULD HAVE SAID.

take today. what i should have said, in calm and even tones, was:

oh, it doesn’t even matter what i should have said, all that matters is that i felt i hadn’t done as well as i could have done. but these situations never allow for pre-planning, for carefully composed and rehearsed ‘ad-libs’. all of a sudden you find you are fighting with words and the courtly display of them. add to the surprise a debilitating squirt from the adrenal gland and i say ‘debilitating’ because i think that adrenaline is supposed to turn you into a street fightin’ man with the red mist blinding him or someone who would have a good chance in the grand national and that’s without a horse. i don’t think adrenaline helps with the cut and thrust, the turn of phrase, the surgical wordplay that i always aspire to in these situations.

i hear people talking about these battles that we all have when we try to stand up for ourselves. “so i said to him and then he said to me and blah blah blah so i said to him". i know someone who ALWAYS has these type of conversations but featuring a great deal of revolving; “so he turned round and said so i turned round and then he turned round and he said blah blah". he ALWAYS says it. or turns round and says it. his conversations must be held with the little ballerinas on the top of a little girl’s clockwork jewellery box.

i wonder when i hear about what A said to B whether the reported conversation ever really happened at all. or am i hearing the post-reality version that only ever existed in the head of whoever it is that is turning round and saying all this… this stuff?

it’s not too bad for me because i generally acquit myself well, just not well enough for MY exacting standards to be satisfied and i really should find better things to occupy my brainular powers with. but i don’t. i mull things over and over until a sort of equilibrium is reached and i can forget about the whole thing and file it under ‘dealt with’.

one aspect of what happened today that made the whole thing easier to file away was that after having done something stupid and thoughtless and earning himself a run-in with me my antagonist then went on to perform a stunt so wanky that he surely must have realised for himself and noticed glances being passed by his crew. and surely the self-diagnosis of wankiness must have been confirmed for him when a boat passed by and caught him at it and its crew passed comments amongst themselves and shouts of mimicry and derision and catcalls echoed over the water from a boat that flew a pirate flag.

oh, and there was a dead bloke in the canal but i’ll tell you about that another time.

as everybody knows, what i do on wednesdays is go to art therapy. it is the only resource i have used since leaving the windmill (blessed be its name) and i find it so helpful.

i have posted the pictures that i drew while i was in the windmill (blessed be its name), and now i’m going to post the pictures that i have made during one-to-one sessions. next i will be ‘promoted’, if you like, to a group and that will be another story. so, here we are with some pictures. i have photographed them all but some of them won’t be posted here because they are pencil that hasn’t shown up and or they are unfinished/rubbish. please click on the piccies to enbiggify them.

the pictures are made in slots of max one hour although some of them i did go back to the following week. this is why they have a perfunctory air to them. sometimes i’d have a painting to go back to and just didn’t want to do it any more. this isn’t an excuse it’s just how i had to operate under the constraints. also, i am simply not capable, technically, of producing what i want to, what i see in my head. i don’t know HOW to do these things and i haven’t got time to muck around experimenting. i would like to say, in my own defence, that all these works came right out of my own head. i just drew what i wanted (except for a print out of a head and neck from a medical site) and didn’t draw or copy actual things. hands up, the spear and heart and c-d-c motifs were lifted. one off a dead pirate and the other off a caveman. so sue me.

i’ve got stagefright. all the paintings are the right way up. here we go and in no particular order…

UNTITLED (a2, pencil and paint)
i don’t really want to talk about this and you can probably tell why. it might be the most important (to me) thing i drew. sorry the pencil is so faint. look closely, the people in dresses are not the same. the painting seems so still.

YOU’LL BE LUCKY (a2, marker pen)
i had the terrible pain in my shoulder and i wanted more opioid painkillers. and that was the answer i got. (gottem in the end though, hooray!)

DENTIST (a2, pastel and collage)
a view through my specs when i went to the dentist. her gloved hand is reaching in between my yellowing fangs. i wonder if she would like to buy it off me and hang it on her surgery wall? pr’aps not.

I HAD A DREAM THAT THIS WAS WORTH SOMETHING (a2, finger paint)
i put a lot of store by dreams. once i dreamed that trouty won a tenner on the lottery and she did. i really had a dream that the ‘henry’ signature was worth some money. 5000 quids to be precise. so i made up some paint the same colour as in the dream and painted with my fingers. it felt revolting, like the paper was sucking at my fingers and it set my teeth on edge. it came out just like the dream. weird.

ILL EVERY DAY (a2, paint, marker pen, collage)
sometimes i get so sorry for myself what with my health. the seventeen years refers to how long i have been a diabetic. the collage applique is about my poor shoulder when i had damaged a nerve around the 6th vertebra. my art therapist, mary (hello mary! are you reading this?), won’t say the eff word but she likes this work and so do i. rage against your ill-health and you’ll feel better. probably.

PUNCH (a3, paint and pencil)
i love mr punch. he is everything that i would like to be when he goes round murdering people in his explosively anarchistic way. kids love him and he has a great dog. whatta guy! this is a very quiet painting of punch but look into his eye. he knows something you don’t know.

THE FORTY TWO YEAR WORK IN PROGRESS (a3, pastel, charcoal, colored pencils, collage)
i remembered writing the beginning of a story when i was first at school aged about five. poor old snuffy the dwarf has been waiting to get into outer space for the last forty two years and so i rescued him by reproducing the drawing and story from memory. we can see my shadowy figure on the left here, reaching through the shower curtain of time and laying a wispy finger on the old picture. what will happen to poor snuffy? will he reach space this time? now read on, dot dot dot

TRIKE (a3, paint)
87 adeyfield road, hemel hempstead, herts. my trike wouldn’t go through the doorway between the house and the garage that led into the garden. so i kicked it. it still wouldn’t go through. i have been faithfully repeating this behaviour ever since and it gets me nowhere. you can see the swing that my dad made hanging from the tree at the bottom of the garden. next door there was a boxer dog called smudge. he used to do white shits but i never did. fascinating.

IMPACT (a3, marker pen)
this is all about my certainty that i will die as a result of some horrendous impact. it’s supposed to look like a sort of video/one armed bandit thing. i hate walking along roads where buses or lorries might smash into me and i haven’t flown since, oh, more than 20 years now. if i could only do a parachute jump i would feel like superman. shame it will never happen.

FINGERS CROSSED (a3, pencil, pen)
there was a really great job going as a lengthsman on the navigation based at catteshall lock. i would have loved that job. BUT here’s another kick in the teeth from good old ill-health, i have arthritis and standing in a canal, in winter, trying to fix a doghole in the bank with hazel and wire and mud is not going to help my condition. my fingers hurt like hell whenever it’s going to rain and in the winter…
mary said “but your fingers don’t look like that". i said “but they FEEL like that". ho hum, i might as well sell that old stradivarius, i s’pose.

TRAFFIC (a3, paint, marker pen)
i can NOT abide traffic. i hate it with a vengeance. petrol should be 5 quid a litre and then we would see how many journeys are really necessary. and i’m scared of traffic because it’s so noisy and fast and heavy and like a monster. it can kill you. the sort of J shaped marks represent the sort of grinding hcgggcggcchh sound of brakes really near your ear that you get off lorries. yet again my technical abilities fail to communicate how truly awful i feel traffic is.

SNUFFY IN SPACE (a3, paint, felt pen)
hooray! he made it! snuffy sure has matured since the last time we saw him, he looks quite grown up. that planet looks great and i see that snuffy appears to be driving an english electric lightning f1 that is illustrated just inside the front cover of the ladybird book of aircraft. and it’s got a steering wheel, AND it’s got an overtaking mirror. sorry i left you hanging around for so long, snuffy, but i never forgot you, you know!

MY ISLAND (a3, pencil, paint)
an exercise in isolationism (which i’m told is not a good thing). when i drew this i was drawing what i wanted, and probably still DO want if i’m honest. the writing is a joke because it doesn’t end how you are expecting it to end. it says “i live on an island in the middle of the… …19th century". so i would like to be isolated both geographically AND in time. uber-isolation. i quite like the pencilwork of the self-portrait. shame you can’t see it then, really.

CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD PART ONE (a3, marker pen)
this is the first work i did in these sessions, mary reminds me. come on, everyone talks to god in their head. don’t they? oh, must just be me than. anyway, because of god’s stubborn refusal to do magic tricks for me to prove that he exists (here’s a clue, henry, look UP. that’s right. it’s the sky.) i have to go round wasting my time wondering if he does or not. these days i’m thinking that the answer is YES. i think this because i feel that i have been on the receiving end of a miracle. i report as i find. that’s all.

THE DEATH OF ICARUS (a3, paint, marker pen)
am i trying just a little bit too hard here? i think i am. i was quite pleased with it but now i’m not. i was thinking about icarus and i wondered if someone DID try to make a hang-glider in ancient times but that adhesives technology was not all that it would later become and thus he fell to earth because there was no evo-stik. except he didn’t fall to earth, he fell in the water and i only had him falling sort of over a wall because it was easier to draw. not that i drew it very well. it’s alRIGHT i guess but to me now it just looks a little bit wankery. a bit 6th form college. charles bukowski’s epitaph is “Don’t Try". he’s right.

SURRENDER OR DIE (a3, pencil, ink)
i drew this freehand and i like it. i pinched the spear and heart idea from the pirate flag of edward teach. blackbeard. this was the last image i drew in these sessions and it refers back to a pirate flag (a more or less straight rip-off of the blackbeard original) that i drew in the second art therapy session IN the windmill (blessed be its name). some people get a tattoo done when they finish at a treatment centre. that’s because they are stupid but there’s nothing wrong with DRAWING a tattoo, just not indelibly into your skin, eh? so, ’surrender or die’ seems to me like a useful summing up of my recovery from the abuse of alcohol. it can be my theme tune if it wants and this design came out really well i think. if it was on a t-shirt i’d buy it. i haven’t coloured it in at all because i didn’t want to ruin it; maybe i’ll experiment on a photocopy of the image rather than wreck my original and cry.

ST HENRY (a3, pen, paint, collage)
when my neck was playing up i was convinced i had cervical spondylosis and that’s where the head and neck diagram came from. the st sebastian style arrows refer to the extreme pain i was in with my shoulder at the time (note to self, get book of martyrdom of the saints) at the top, where it says st henry i had done it in a rather wanky lower-case style that just shouted ‘look at me! i think i’m e e cummings!’, so i drew a sheet of school type, lined paper and stuck that over like a kiddies’ writing lesson. of course, i consider myself to be a saint where the navigations are concerned so look to my silvery trumpet. i am saying ‘can i help you?’ and ‘don’t fucking wave at me you idiot’ and there is a sailors’ prayer there too, ‘dear god, please watch over me for my boat is very small and the water is very big indeed’. see also my mighty MOOBS and my impressive GUT. in my left hand is a windlass.

so that’s about that. ‘hold on’ i hear you shout, ‘what about MY favourite picture, GLITTERNOB?’
well, glitternob has already been posted and let me tell you, i haven’t managed to capture it as a photo. the original is really rich and colourful. i’m thinking that i might try to sell it as a design for a t-shirt seeing as how the copyright is MINE and how people tell me it should be a t-shirt. it will be an adventure at any rate. i’ll get on to viv westwood in the morning.

mr ‘punch’ would make a nice t-shirt and so would ’surrender or die’ with a bit of colour. DO let me know what you think of my works, even if you think they are plop. but i don’t think that you will think they are plop. i think this because i am a harsh critic not only of any living thing that crosses my path, but of myself, and when i was uploading these pictures i saw them as unfamiliar thumbnails and i thought ‘you know, henry me old son, these aren’t too bad at all, even though i say so myself’.

i’m tired now, after this marathon blog and i bet you are too.

night night.

thanks to rochedale state school you can be a treasure huntin’ pirate!
and you can print out your own cerstiflicate!
dare you take up the challenge?

after all that piratin’ you deserve to relax with a nice, soothing game of cat bowling for halloween. meet the witch here.

i only scored a spoooooOOOOOooooky 155. can you beat me?

blimey! it really IS fun at FUNTIME!

whenever i go there she’s there already
sometimes i wonder if she’s bolted to the floor
outside the shop where they sell cider and newspapers.

all the way from eastern europe
all she’s ever said to me is
hello, one big issue please

i can tell by the way she speaks
i can tell by the way she wears her scarf
i can tell where she is from and it’s not from here

the ground is big enough
big enough to swallow us all up
the seas can drink us all down

and i’m ashamed of the thing
the very first thing
that comes into my mind