New drawing

I never seem to devote much time to drawing these days. If I look back to the 1980s and 1990s I was drawing all the time. I suspect that part of that was because I wasn't writing so much - I had young kids and was working a 40 hour week and it's easier to sit with a sketchpad in front of the telly than it is to find time to thump out a new book chapter. 

Here are some examples of what I was churning out back then. Hard to believe that I drew the first picture nearly 40 years ago ...

As the millennium approached I started teaching myself to paint in acrylics so, again, that took up all my spare time, along with a resurgence in my writing. I also learned to create digital art so I was doing these sorts of things:

And then I developed a passion for assemblage - making sculptures from recycled materials: 

But, just recently, I was looking through old sketchpads and I had the sudden urge to pick up pen and pencil once again. So I doodled a goblin. Then I grabbed a pen and started inking it and the results were terrible! I'm so out of practice!

It was completely overworked and, in rushing it, the character's anatomy felt all wrong. 

So I slowed down, got the pencils out again and doodled. Eventually I came up with a figure I liked. So I drew in the basic outlines in biro and then traced it (using my lightbox) onto an A3 sheet of decent cartridge paper.

Then I worked out the shading with the light source coming from the goblin's right (my left).

Some last minute tweaks and then I began to add the inks using Rotring Tikky Graphic art pens in two thicknesses - 0.8 and 0.3.

And here's the finished result. 

There are SO many things wrong with it ... the hands are awful, as are the feet. The horns and the boots don't match and ...

Yes, of course I'm being hyper-critical but spotting what's wrong will hopefully mean that the next drawing will be better. We learn from experience.

I'm pretty sure that some of my influences shine through here - comic artists like Gil Kane, Mick McMahon, Brian Bolland, Simon Bisley, Cam Kennedy, Dave Gibbons, Kev O'Neill, Alfredo Alcala, Alex Nino, Vin Deighan ... they're all in there somewhere along with a smattering of Ronald Searle, W Heath Robinson, Willy Rushton, Rowland Emett and Quentin Blake too. 

I'm quite pleased with it ... despite seeing everything that's wrong with it!

But it has inspired me to do some more.

So watch this space.

The world's most haunted painting?

Following on from the 'cursed crying boy' painting I posted about a few days ago ...

Firstly, the original social media post by m'chum Juliet has gone viral worldwide and magazines and newspapers have carpet bombed the story of the curious portrait in a Hastings shop window.

And, secondly, similar stories have been dragged out of the archives to bve retold for a new generation. One such is this story, as published by the Daily Telegraph ...

The bizarre story behind the world’s most haunted painting 

by Alice Vincent 

The Hands Resist Him by Bill Stoneham/Darren O'Neill © Provided by The Telegraph 

William “Bill” Stoneham was checking his emails in 2000 when he received one from somebody he didn’t know. “Do you know The Hands Resist Him?” it read. Stoneham, an artist in his 50s, replied, saying that the phrase was a title of a poem written by his first wife and, subsequently, a painting he’d done in 1972. 

“He responded back with a link to an eBay auction page and this image, this close-up image of my five-year-old face,” Stoneham explains, over the phone from North California. “It was creepy, very creepy, to see that scrolling up on the computer.” The email had been sent by Kim Smith, a gallery owner who lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan, who had recently bought Stoneham’s painting in one of the first viral eBay auctions in internet history. The listing, posted in 2000, caught international attention thanks to its item description, which included the disclaimer: “This painting may or may not possess supernatural powers that could impact or change your life.” Here begins the story of what’s said to be the most haunted painting in the world. 

The Hands Resist Him - Darren O'Neill/Darren O'Neill © Provided by The Telegraph

The couple selling it did so anonymously. According to the listing, they had discovered Stoneham’s painting in an abandoned brewery and taken it home to hang in the bedroom of their four-year-old daughter. “At the time we wondered a little why a seemingly perfectly fine painting would be discarded like that” they wrote, before adding: “(Today we don’t!)”  Then things became worthy of a scare-by-numbers horror movie script: “One morning our four-and-a-half-year-old daughter claimed that the children in the picture were fighting and coming into the room during the night,” the eBay listing continued. The husband was alarmed, so set up a motion-triggered camera to see what really happened at night. What was perhaps most intriguing about the eBay sellers is that they both denied that any otherworldly activity was going on and suggested that there could be something untoward about The Hands Resist Him. “To deter questions in this direction, there are no ghosts in this world, no supernatural powers,” they wrote. “There was no odour left behind in the room. There were no voices or the smell of gunpowder. No footprints or strange fluids on the wall.” And yet, there were photographs – ones taken by the motion-sensor camera that paint the doll-like figure in a far more sinister light, even suggesting that she was holding a gun towards the boy in the picture. The eBay sellers dismissed it as “probably a fluke lighting effect”. 

People viewing the listing claimed to have odd reactions, such as falling violently ill or fainting. Children began to scream and others found themselves gripped by an “unseen entity”. Early internet users were nevertheless intrigued: within a month, the auction rocketed from an initial bid of $199 to a final price of $1,050 in just 30 days. The numbers seem underwhelming by today’s standards (more recent eBay viralities include fans spending more than $65,000 on a bag of air taken from a Kanye West concert), but at the turn of the millennium, the combination of potentially haunted painting and lucrative expenditure warranted coverage on the BBC. For Stoneham, it meant being reminded of a painting he first sold more than 25 years earlier and being affectionately dogged by it ever since. “It became a phenomenon. I figured it would go on until the next grilled cheese Madonna turned up,” he says, “but it’s still there. It won’t die.” 

Stoneham is a surrealist painter – he likens his works to film stills, capturing moments in narratives that make the viewer wonder what had just happened or what is about to ensue. He was in his 20s when gallerist Charles “Chuck” Feingarten visited his studio. “He rolled up with his chequebook and bought all of the paintings I had.” Among them was The Hands Resist Him, which Stoneham had been inspired to paint by a poem his first wife Roane had written about him and which shared the title. Stoneham was adopted at birth, he had never known his parents and Roane was referring to this in her poem. “At the time, I had an old family photo album,” Stoneham said. “I had photographs of myself and there was one that intrigued me. First of all, the lighting was so dramatic, coming down on me and the neighbour girl who was standing next to me,” he explains, saying he added the “disembodied hands” through the window as a reference to the distance and sense of unknown opportunities that stemmed from his adoption. The painting is unnerving – Stoneham has rendered the girl in the original photo as a lifeless doll, and the boy has a steely look. It takes a little while to notice the hands, grasping in the darkness of the window behind both of them – but not necessarily sinister. At the time, Stoneham says, nobody thought it was particularly creepy. If anything, it was one of the less unsettling paintings he’d made: “Feingarten didn’t buy one painting,” he says, “called The Gathering. He said ‘I can’t take it, it’s just too dark’”. Stoneham’s description sounds fairly grisly: “It’s a night scene with a lot of ghostly figures, with a horse crashing into a family,” he rattles off. “So you’ve got this vulnerable group and this strange power coming down and the rider on the horse is partly skeletal and there’s a dark, winged apparition up above.” “The guy who bought that painting went mad, set his warehouse on fire and ended up in a penitentiary!” Stoneham continues, laughing: “So Feingarten made the right choice in not taking that one.” 

Source: fineartemerica.com

He hadn’t thought much about The Hands Resist Him, though, which was bought by John Marley, the character actor best known for playing Jack Woltz, the belligerent film mogul who wakes to find the head of his prized horse in his bed during The Godfather. At the time, Stoneham points out, Morley was working on a horror film. Since the eBay listing imbued The Hands Resist Him with a new paranormal quality, people have been quick to point out the deaths that took place after it was exhibited in 1974. Henry Seldis, the Los Angeles Times art critic who covered Stoneham’s show, died of an apparent suicide on the eve of his 53rd birthday in 1978 – although friends said he’d been depressed since the beginnings of his divorce. Feingarten died three years later and then, three years after that Marley died from open heart surgery, having previously sold the painting. Nobody’s really got to the bottom of how The Hands Resist Him ended up in an abandoned brewery, least of all Stoneham. “It’s what makes it so bizarre,” he says of the eBay listing. “These paintings are owned by Weingarten, he sells them, and that’s it. I don’t live in Los Angeles and I don’t see what’s what.” But since 2000, the painting has become a more perennial feature of Stoneham’s life. He regularly gets emails and messages, and interview requests from journalists like me. “How much can we beat this horse?” he asks jovially. “I can go on [radio or television], and make up stories. I said, ‘What do you want, the truth?’” Stoneham cackles at the memory of convincing one young boy that “anyone who looks at the painting will die”. “Over the years I’ve had some fun with this whole thing,” he says.

He’s had commissions, too. While people sometimes ask Stoneham to recreate the The Hands Resist Him, he refuses – not because of any haunting hunches, but purely because he considers it a cheat. So now there’s a sequence of images, suggesting what may happen next. In 2004 came Resistance at the Threshold, with Stoneham depicted as a middle-aged man, and the doll partially disembodied. By 2012, Stoneham had depicted himself as far older – near 100, he says – and the doll had transformed into a real girl. The painting is called The Threshold of Revelation. It carries great significance for him: he was reunited with a biological sister he never knew he had. “In that third painting, the doll was no longer a doll but a living child,” he said, “it was while I was working on that painting and its title that I found her. It was a very powerful feeling to realise it, that this was my sister, and that there was this whole space of memories that had always been there, but I just had to find the right window to get to it.” Stoneham’s sister died earlier this year, five years after they had found one another. “We were sad we didn’t have a childhood together,” he says, softly. A final painting in the series appeared in 2017: The Hands Invent Him. This time, we get to see beyond the window, and out at the silhouette of the child Stoneham and the doll. It’s this painting that he’s most convinced has something spooky about it – although when pressed, Stoneham says he believes in memory rather than ghosts. 

The Hands Invent Him - Bill Stoneham © Provided by The Telegraph 

Commissioned by Zak Bagans, known as the presenter of American paranormal documentary series Ghost Adventures, the painting shows a the artist surrounded by the kind of detritus you’d find on a horror movie set: overgrown, lifeless trees and strangely animated toys. I never asked him about the elements I put in the painting, Stoneham says of Bagans, “but when I showed it to him, he had some of them in his collection of haunted things. There’s a communication going on.” Strange things happened during the painting’s creation too – Stoneham’s studio was invaded by rats, odd substances emerged from the floor as he was painting the tiles in the image. The Hands Invent Him is now one of the exhibits at Bagans’ Haunted Museum in Las Vegas. 

As for the original, the appeal hasn’t waned. Successful eBay victor Smith still owns it, and has, Stoneham said, encountered some “pilgrims” who are keen to see the work. The eBay story has even proved enough to inspire filmmakers. One Gregg Gibbs set upon making a documentary about the painting. But it’s the Twickenham-based Darren O’Neill who was so moved by The Hands Resist Him that he bought the rights to the painting, wrote a novel inspired by its history and is working to get a film made. “When I came across the image, it captivated me,” he said. “When I found that nobody had made a film or written about it, and its being cursed, I got all excited, bulldozed in and bought the copyright. It has everything going for it, this infamous legacy.” O’Neill’s book elaborates on the events outlined in the eBay listing while combining them with a plotline about a detective investigating a serial killer known as “The Lifeswapper”. While he’s unconvinced that the painting caused the deaths of the men in Los Angeles, O’Neill has spoken to the man who originally listed it on eBay. “He was absolutely convinced those kids came out of the painting and he was a really level-headed person,” he says. There was also an incident with his apartment in Dubai, where he was living when he came across the painting in 2009. The air conditioner had broken during his month-long absence, causing the entire place to be covered in a green mould upon his return. But one thing remained untouched: a print-out of The Hands Resist Him. “That sent a shiver down my spine,” he says. 

For Stoneham, the situation mostly means that he enjoys a renewed interest every year around Halloween. He no longer has the original photograph, though. “I’ve moved so many times and that box with those photographs got picked up and dumped,” he explains. “It’s buried in a landfill in Northern California somewhere”. 

Now there’s the beginning of a horror film sequel.

Source: Daily Telegraph

Vlog: A Visit to West Wycombe (Part 1)

A new video in which Harris, my friend Ally and I visit a lovely piece of meadow, woodlands and chalk streams on the edge of the West Wycombe Park estate.

Making a dragon mask from junk

Does what it says on the tin!

   

Some notes:

This was the first time I've made a mask using cardboard and papier mache. I did not take into account that (a) the cardboard would get wet from the papier mache coat and would deform in places - especially around the jaw, and (b) that as the cardboard and papier mache dried the whole structure would shrink slightly - thankfully I have a large head so most adults could still wear it.

The eyes were made from cup lids from a local coffee shop. I had to rely on my friends and family here as I don't drink coffee. The pupils and the nostrils were made from wheels off a charity shop wooden toy train (£2). Other than that, it's all waste cardboard.

I've learned a lot from doing this.

The next mask will be better.

The cursed painting of Hastings

A lovely arty friend of mine called Juliet Brando posted online recently that a local charity shop in her native Hastings was having problems shifting a portrait painting.

Apparently it's been bought twice ...  and returned twice. Why?

For those of you old enough to remember, it reminded me of the allegedly cursed 'Crying Boy' paintings of the 1980s.

The story went that an Essex fire officer reportedly stated that he had attended a number of house fires that had utterly destroyed the properties but that, in each case, there had been a copy of 'the crying boy' that had miraculously survived. In September 1985, The Sun newspaper reported the story and popularised the idea of a curse. By the end of November, belief in the painting's curse was widespread enough that paper was organising mass bonfires of the paintings, sent in by readers. Over time the story went on to accrue a lot of extra details such as the subject of the painting being an orphan nicknamed 'Diablo' who moved from home to home as they all mysteriously caught fire. It was also said that the artist dabbled in black magic and forced his models to cry by terrifying them and that the 'essence' of their fear became embedded in his paintings.

It is, of course, all hogwash.

The artist in question was Venetian Bruno Amadio who worked under a number of pseudonyms, the most famous being Giovanni Bragolin. Far from being some satanic practitioner, he was a respected and kind family man with a well-documented sense of humour. He painted at least 65-70 (and maybe more) portraits of crying children - girls as well as boys - many of which became bestselling prints. In the UK they were mostly sold in Woolworth stores.

Personally, I can't see the appeal. They're a bit kitsch and maudlin. But they caught the zeitgeist of the late 1970s/early 80s and hundreds of thousands of prints were sold. I regularly saw a Crying Boy in people's house, especially older people. The very fact that so many houses had one of these paintings perhaps explains why they turned up so often in house fires. 

As for why they didn't burn, the answer is simple - the first thing to catch would be the string by which it hung on the wall. If it then fell face down, most of the heat would be above it and the back boards and canvas were made of fire-retardent materials. Undoubtedly, many Crying Boys did get destroyed by fire. But they were so ubiquitous that the number of survivors became notable. The entire phenomenon was thoroughly explored and debunked in an episode of Punt PI, an investigative series on BBC Radio 4 (listen here). You can also watch an experiment replicating the conditions of a Crying Boy in a house fire here:

There are a few other myths that can also be debunked. Bragolin did not find his models in orphanages or in Gypsy camps from around Venice. Although most of his models look as they were from poor backgrounds, they were picked out at random among schools and playgrounds from around Venice and through ads in newspapers. The Gypsy claim probably stems from the fact that the paintings were known as Zigeunerjongetje - The Gypsy Boy - in the Netherlands. 

Bragolin should have become a very rich man as millions of prints of his works were sold worldwide. Sadly, however, many of these prints were produced without his permission by unscrupulous art dealers and traders in the Low Countries, Germany and Scandinavia and he hardly received any royalties. However, he did earn a good living from his work - he also painted more conventional portraits as well as still-lifes and landscapes - and died in Padua in 1981 at the age of 69.

Meanwhile, however, what is going on in Hastings .... ?

Making the alien

I was watching some old black and white sci fi 'B movies' over the weekend and was struck by just how much they were able to achieve - alien costume wise - with what they had back then. They had tiny budgets, no CGI and limited technology. The same can be said for early Doctor Who monsters. So I decided to make a wearble alien mask out of junk for minimal cost. 

I started with cardboard. It's a great material and there's always lots of it about. I cut out basic shapes for a front and back, stuck them together and tried them on for size.

I made sure the eye holes lined up with my own eyes and then covered the back in scales/tiles of cardboard. Then I got out the glue gun and added lots of googly eyes and small polystyrene balls (I have bags of them in my junk box left over from a monster making workshop with local kids). I then realised that trailing hot glue over the surface would also simulate veins so I did a bit of that. Then I sprayed the whole thing with grey primer, then black, then a zenithal highlight in a kind of dark military green.

The eyes were next. It was my only purchase and it was under a tenner. I bought some clear acrylic plastic 'fill your own' two piece Christmas tree baubles. I found an image of an iris online, changed the colour to a bright green and then printed it it onto paper.

Then I carefully cut it out and stuck it on the inside of one half of a bauble. I then used a Sharpie to draw on some veins and then sprayed the entire interior of the dome with white.

The final thing to make was the mouth. I had some old foam pipe-cladding so I cut some wedges out of it so that it would fold into a mouth shape and glued the ends together. I painted it bright red with a mix of acrylic paint and PVA. Then I spray painted a piece of card black and attached it behind the 'lips' and made teeth from polystyrene packaging.

A little touch up here and there and some highlighting of veins in pink and I was done. Here's the final assembly. 

I know. Pointless and silly. But fun.

Urban Harvest

A foraging video with a difference today because I'm looking for edibles in my neighbours' front gardens. I decided to look out for treats (apart from the usual suspects like blackberries) on a ten minute walk from my house to the village shops. It's surprising how much urban environments have to offer.

Then the second part of the video is me watching the local farm workers getting the harvet done. It's all tractors and machinery and I couldn't be happier watching it all happen.

And it means the plough will be out soon and I can fossil hunt over the fields. Three found to date (see here).