Today I took a large blossom study up the Härräng Väg and on the strength of it our hunch to scale up was correct. We have painted the same tree once before but that one was tame, lame and vane in comparison; a product of our commercial season, but today's study is certainly progress. Owing to the scale (almost a thirty) it was easier to include some additional elements and thus making more of a picture of it. The blossoms themselves are another attempt to master the complexity of rendering interspersed branches leaves and flowers and so saying we have the off white salvos but pushed further. To prepare I took to the google art project resource where one can view reproductions at near microscopic level and my discovery of just how thick and worked his blossoms are was forefront in my mind on this one but as always he achieves great balance between his riotous areas and the sparse and delicate. During the Wretched Painter interlude we searched for subjects which hint at the pandemic situation, the life and death of it all, and found some joy in the pairing of living and fallen trees (the attached ink of Wretched Painter Work 4 is an example) and indeed our inclusion of the piles of cut trunk to the left in the present study is a continuation of this theme, but it was observed and the positioning only adjusted a touch.
You know since stating our reluctance to use the reed pen during one of the later Wretched Painter posts I secretly made up my mind to try it and this one is our first attempt at a work after several nights of getting used to the quill pen (the reeds here are too soft) which I have found very challenging to use and as a result we have even more admiration for Van Gogh’s ink works, particularly the Mont Majour series.
But what do we expect? We are no draughtsman after all and hope only for our own progress beyond any objective criteria of success, at least at first.
It was just so difficult to deliver the ink consistently, that was the most frustrating aspect and one I had not expected but we now have that perverse buzz of determination one gets when trying to learn a new creative way and finding the going tougher than expected; turn back or struggle on? Struggle on.
I cashed in my apple munk earlier and enjoyed every bite.1 At least some good has come of the despicable Cummings saga. You know I took inspiration from benefactor Dave who back in 2016 placed a wager on Don Donald to win the election based on the logic that it was his patriotic duty as an american to profit in some way from disaster. I wonder what he spent it on, but look here does not the Cummings episode tell us something about the new populist right politics of the post truth era with regards to political resignations? It seems to me that the whole saga of resignation is not what it was and the left or even the regular right opponents of the alt right powers should be aware. Who am I to say this? What do we know about any of it? Very little is the answer to that - we’re just a clog hook after all - but the days of a minister or person in a position of power resigning because it is the descent thing to do are over if they ever really existed. The real reason for resignations was surely more about damage control to the party as a result of the constant media pressure, was that not it? But with the new far alt right politics that is not the case at all as media attention, scandal, is their sustenance in post truth times.
The scandal is just more fuel to work the engine of the ’base’ against the ’liberal elites’ and here’s the real news: that’s all they’ve got. It would be better would it not to simply say that what happened was a serious breach of lock down rules and he really should resign and leave it at that. Calmly add it to a humble list of reasons not to vote for the government and continue with some other productive undermining of far right that is not simultaneously sustaining them - a ’productive sheltering’ perhaps, to use your phrase. A media scandal only lets the accused, Cummings in this case, appeal to the base of supporters across a dividing line that they themselves have created and depend on. At this point it really matters not whether that base support even exists, its function is only dramatic, part of the plot which allows the bad guy (Cummings) to behave in a certain way, to seem heroic, and generally playing it like a movie. Far more important than the visibility of support is the visibility of the opposition, the enemy, the dreaded ’liberal elites’ meaning almost anybody who is criticising. Indeed the ’media which hunt’ is a gift to these powers. Is that not obvious? And it extends outwards. Just today I saw a stunt by a group of activists who performed a ’die in’ outside the house of the man in question’ and I really feel that this too is fuel to the enemy and probably of much more use to them than it is to the left. What do you think?
The problem is that if everyone stopped complaining at injustices then would life not get worse? Would that be handing victory? Well, they have already won and for me they really do depend on the external critique of themselves to exist - its is much more than the old cycle of anticapitlaist critique and recuperation where the system feeds from critique through incorporation, it is more like the critique is the very life blood of this new far alt right way.
No, the outrage must remain but something is missing in the management of outrage. Activists rightly and admirably take action and the public participate occasionally but that cannot be the end of the story. Indeed that is the beginning of the story for the far right and we will have ample opportunity to see their reality twisting machine in full global force in response to the George Floyd protests which have really had a huge impact it seems all over society with sports, entertainment, and business realms all pledging support, taking knees all over the place. It feels like this might be a strong enough show against the fundamentals of the far alt right powers to twist the plot of reality. We shall see but as we say above the work of the alt right begins now, when the people are screaming, and across the world there will be shifts put in to twist and troll this global demand for social justice back into something they can use to cement their bases and push society further into the pit. Let’s watch. How will they approach the problem of undermining and discrediting a protest against a man being murdered by a police officer out in public with a knee on the neck? How can they turn people and the plot away from that? My money is on the issue of removal of statues as their way in to reestablishing their dividing lines.
Yours,
John
1 See work 23 note 4.
2 In Sweden we are beginning to see the same thing.
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