It is Sunday morning and I have driven my daughter to work. Back home my stomach suggests that it is time for a simple breakfast: coffee and a fried egg on toast. I assemble the basic ingredients, functioning with the automaticity that comes from an over-practiced skill. When I wrote my book on the psychology of food and eating, I thought about such actions in terms of plans and the structure of behaviour. Now, having studied animation this past year, I can also think of what happens as a series of key frames and I include pics of four of these. To make an animation of my breakfast episode I would need more key frames than I have included here, for purposes of illustration, but I am sure you get the gist. #1 The ingredients #2 The fried egg on the toast #3 The breakfast being eaten #4 All washed up.
At first my plan was to draw these frames in my sketch book. I am really slow when it comes to sketching and by the time I had started on the toaster with the piece of bread sticking out of the opening at the top, my stomach had begun to rebel in earnest. I started to hurry the sketch along. It was fatal. All I produced was a sad-looking, genetically mutated specimen of a toaster. It was at this point that I resorted to my compact digital camera.
Giving up my MA was primarily based upon financial considerations relating to the magnitude of the university fees compared to the funds available from my pension, once ordinary household and living expenses were taken out. So my decision to quit the MA has not impacted on my desire to improve my sketching and painting skills. First thing this morning I did some pen/pencil control exercises, as usual. I then did some basic piano practice, too. I feel there are many similarities between music and visual art basic skills training.
My young friends who have completed their full-time MA will be having an exhibition on the 22nd September. At present, I don’t think I could cope with going. I think it would make me feel too sad. However, I am getting on very well in terms of re-organising my life world. Who knows, maybe I will feel able to go by the time it comes around. I think that perhaps it would be good for me to do that; one has to face up to these things.
Coming back to sketching, I have been reading a book, for the second time this year, about how to approach keeping a drawn journal. I think the time it takes me to sketch is a major barrier to doing this. That and the fact that I feel very self-conscious to draw in public. The crazy thing is that I feel perfectly confident getting up to a microphone and singing in public, solo. If anything, one might think that the singing would be the more difficult thing to do. I have to get on top of this.
Artistic self-confidence seems to go up and down like a yo-yo. Last Friday at my piano lesson I felt that I was playing dreadfully. When I think about how basic my piano skills are and how badly I play sometimes, I wonder how on earth I have the gall to play keyboard across the internet. Yet I do, and mostly I thoroughly enjoy it. I shall soon have completed 350 shows since January 2008.
Now that I have a bit more time, I might go back and try to improve some of my guitar arpeggios. I do use the major scale shapes a lot in my internet performance, and I also use major and dominant 7th arpeggios. However, I think it might be time to extend that a little.
While I am reviewing my artistic progress, part of me hankers after my fictional hero, Harold Hake. I enjoyed writing my e-novel about Harold. Of course, I never seem to do anything much with any of this. Hmmm…. This is obviously a time for taking stock of things. I’ll get this up on the blog before I have to drive out to the supermarket. Talk to you later.
John's Quavering Pencil 
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