Irreverent Things

I was reading Jordan Hoggard’s blog earlier and paused over a question he posed… Mr S was sat next to me. I said to him – Would you say I have any irreverent habits? He guffawed PAH! ALL of your habits are irreverent!

Oh? Like what? I said… He starts to go through a long list… Hmmm… Well that’s just bloody rude, I tell him. You’re just bloody rude, he says. Hmmm I ask him – does this have anything to do with me pranking you yesterday? He concedes that yes, maybe it does… I guffaw, he says – See! You ARE bloody rude! That pleases me possibly slightly more than it should do, so I decide to leave him alone and dig out my sketchpad…

I have new acrylic pens so I shake them up and make rows of scribbles to test out the colours. I forget about the question and start to doodle… I fill a few pages with random crap as I feel out how the paint moves… I start a clean page and as an image appears, I start to laugh… Oh… That’s my irrevent thing! I fuck up faces! I have sketchbooks full of faces plucked from the ether… Luckily daughter is not around as my faces make her eyes bleed and make her screech KAREN!! PROPORTIONS!! FOR GOD’S SAKE WHY DON’T YOU LEARN TO GRID?!

I did learn to grid, I learnt to grid to complete youngest son’s art homework for him once. He told me not to make too good a job of it or he’d get busted… I got him an A* and a year’s worth of nagging from his art teacher who would repeatedly say to him – Look, you did it once, you can do it again… Come on! Focus! He was very annoyed with me about that, I told him it was a lesson in why he shouldn’t ask me to forge his work… Funnily enough none of my kids have ever asked me twice to do their homework…

Anyway… Back to fucked up faces… First off, I don’t get the point of drawing photo realistic faces. Isn’t that what cameras are for? Or what cameras used to be for before filters and duck face pouts? Secondly… When I draw faces, it’s not so much about the end result but more about the place my head goes to whilst my hands are busy, and the thoughts that fractal out…

Anyway… Here’s the fucked up face I drew and threw through an app, whilst I thought about that question…