I can't believe October is already here, and it's startling how fast time is moving. I shouldn't be up this late, but I wanted to make some art, especially given how today has been (8-3:15 'in school,' 3:15-10pm doing homework). The honest answer is I just feel down. I can usually phrase things better but my brain is fried. Everything is non-stop, the time I have to breathe seems to get shorter. Anyway, it's 11pm, I should get to bed.
Started with an idea this morning but not really a plan so I'm not 100% where this one is going but I have certainly had fun getting it to this point, looking forward to getting stuck into it again tomorrow.
Dmitry Shostakovich (1906–1975)
Shostakovich’s contemporaries do not recall seeing him working, at least not in the traditional sense. The Russian composer was able to conceptualize a new work entirely in his head, and then write it down with extreme rapidity—if uninterrupted, he could average twenty or thirty pages of score a day, making virtually no corrections as he went.
But this feat was apparently preceded by hours or days of mental composition—during which he “appeared to be a man of great inner tensions,” the musicologist Alexei Ikonnikov observed, “with his continually moving, ‘speaking’ hands, which were never at rest.”
Shostakovich himself was afraid that perhaps he worked too fast. “I worry about the lightning speed with which I compose,” he confessed in a letter to a friend. Undoubtedly this is bad. One shouldn’t compose as quickly as I do. Composition is a serious process, and in the words of a ballerina friend of mine, “You can’t keep going at a gallop.” I compose with diabolical speed and can’t stop myself.… It is exhausting, rather unpleasant, and at the end of the day you lack any confidence in the result. But I can’t rid myself of the bad habit.
- From Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey
#dailyrituals #inktober #shostakovich @masoncurrey
✨My plan this month was to celebrate women, among them Princess Leia / Carrie Fisher. A leader and fighter against the Empire's tyranny. If this was today she'd be a health professional, or hygiene professional (cleaners), or food retailer worker or security professional. May the force be with you.
Haven't posted for a while, I've been crazy busy but also feeling pretty flat to be honest so I've been drawing weird little floppy cats to cheer myself up a bit. Today one of them made it onto the back of my drawing board. Acrylic paint and sharpie markers :)
Beer Label design incorporating lots of local facts/things to do with the area it's brewed in. Sailing, windsurfing, big lake, spitfire plane, invading shrimps, highland cattle, sunken church, snakes, beer swilling octopus (ok I made that one up).
