TIM BAKER

Another Inktober / Mynktober finished – oops spoilers! the second in as many years. This year I think I managed it better, last year I did a lot of prevaricating and starting work at 3am – not possible this year and I think it helped make it a lot less stressful. Also working smaller helped, part of the stress last year was I needed to try and take photos outside because the pieces were larger, or try and take photos in the terrible light indoors. Also video might be more ‘grabby’ and viral, but it takes a lot of setup and work. Certainly I think the work didn’t suffer from any of those.

The prompt from day 25 was one I prevaricated about throwing out when the random word generator spewed it out ‘reactor’. I wish I had actually, but thought I’d come up with something non-prescriptive. Not at all, so I did an anti-nuclear piece in Posca markers, something I had neglected. I named it after one of my favourite Negativland tracks ‘Yellow, Black And Rectangular’.

It’s very similar in direct political approach to ‘Ally’ from day 27, which the prompt came out on the day the US LBGTQ* were in shock at the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett who has very conservative views on sexuality, gender and abortion. So I felt a message in support of my LGBTQ family was needed using the progress flag, painted with Dr PH Martin’s Bombay inks…indeed I’ve just got green and orange as well because I found I was using so many of the other inks to mix the colours.

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Jumping back a day the prompt for day 26 was ‘rational’ – and given I had just drew and painted this study of the Diana/Arethusa fountain at Bushy Park. It has a long checkered history, from republics to kings – I wont repeat what you can read in that wiki link apart from the fact it was preserved and moved to the Hampton Court Privy Garden by Oliver Cromwell.

The debates about reason and rationality raged from the time of Martin Luther onwards – and the arts especially neo-classicism, mythical/pagan themes and garden design were linked to that. I think fountains like this using non-Christian themes were a coded attack on the power of the church, and part of a queer/rational progressive movement that dare not speak it’s name.

Anyway I did this sketch in the etchr sketchbook with fountain pen – quite a painful drawing in fact, and watercolour…I got quite cold doing this, although weirdly families walked right by me like I wasn’t there. There was someone fishing as well!

‘Master’ was a difficult one – I was going to emulate an old master like Raphael or Michelangelo but I did that last time, so I decided like always to focus on what I could master more – portraits and likenesses.

It’s been a real struggle recently with a sort of likeness blindness that hits me when I try to draw…I think it’s a combination of being more critical and struggling with working from a 2D screen. I had beginner’s luck on the Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Week last time, working in a fairly new medium, but it soured by the end. But as it’s restarted I thought I’d force myself to try and master this by combining them both.

After 6-7 pen drawings which you’ll never see they are so awful, I switched to Posca pens and did this. I realised that a lot of the issues I had were to do with the medium – oils or fountain pen work, and that I need to layer and build on those layers – oil takes too long to dry and fountain pen is too inflexible. Not sure why the latter happened, since I used to draw perfectly fine portraits during the portrait sessions and online. That’s why it’s a bit like stage fright, it is more of a mental thing, I lost my nerve somehow.

The portrait is of Nihal Arthanayake who is a rapper and DJ working on the BBC Asian Network – so I thought a more lively graffiti hip-hop portrait would work best, hence the Posca, Liquitex and Molotow markers. This is currently my most liked Instagram post ever clocking up at 116 likes as of writing this. It’s not my best piece but I’m proud of it, and how I got partly over that block.

So feeling bold and as the next prompt was ‘Clash’ I decided to attempt another portrait, this time of Joe Strummer. Again, the first fountain pen drawing was terrible, but switching to Liquid Indian ink and brush seemed to work, and I liked the loose nature of his face so left that and concentrated on the other detail, like his DIY stencilled clothes with the Molotow white marker. The original photo was taken at the ICA in 1976. Predictably without the #mypaotw hashtag and celebrity, this peaked at 17 likes. Oh the fickle finger of fortune!

Day 30 and feeling demob happy with only two days to go I had the prompt ‘standard’ – I’d already decided to make this an abstract flag piece, standard being a name for a type of flag. As I love codes in my work I decided to use the nautical flag alphabet to spell out a message, read top to bottom as you would flags at sea. Although it’s not kid-safe, it’s a heartfelt message and a hint is in the title ‘Free Pratique’ which is to do with quarantine in ships.

I spent my formative years sailing with my Dad, so I’ve always been fascinated with pennants and flag alphabets. This was again painted in ink, but without any sketches hence being loose but also quite nerve-wracking to do.

And the final prompt was ‘Loop’ – I did toy with redrawing the radio from day 1, in a very circular fashion but decided in the end to go abstract again. This is a nod to the experimental drawing I did in week two and the brain piece I did in week one of Inktober last year…so I guess it does still loop back!

First piece was an extension of the ink and ZEBRA Abstracts I’ve been doing recently with an addition of layers of loopiness. I learned from last year that you get into a sort of trance state with repeated drawing motions. This is using some new acrylic markers bought cheaply from Poundland of all place! They have started stocking some of Daler Rowney’s Simply range, which despite the cheapo look are usually quite decent quality.

The second piece is an experiment in layering and how far I could take it with loops in various parallel and fountain pens. oddly I hadn’t used the Pentel parallel pens at all in this challenge, so felt they had to be in at least one of the pieces. This proved that theory that if you mess with loops and spirals enough it becomes celtic – that the mad celtic art was based on this kind of experimentation. That’s my theory anyway!

And of course the title is the song that has been haunting my recent waking hours – Windmills of Your Mind.

So that was My Inktober, and I think it was a success, especially that portrait. I will do it again next year, but as this year under my own terms.