Moving home

I've decided to up sticks and migrate this blog to a nice new home. It won't happen for a few weeks, but a bit of notice never hurt anyone.

A couple of years ago I registered the domain grahamnunn.net with the intention of showcasing my talents to the world. I even built a website:

Which looked pretty good until I realised that 'showcasing' means that you need to be proud of the things you've done, and that didn't apply to 99% of my output. I scrapped the project but kept the domain, which ever since has been sat there, giving me the sad eyes, waiting for deployment.

My plan is to use it as the basis of a new Wordpress powered site. Over the past couple of weeks I've been teaching myself how to built a Wordpress theme from scratch and found it surprisingly enjoyable, so it feels like the right time to finally roll out grahamnunn.net. Naturally I've given this very little thought and still have no idea how I'm going to populate the site, but I'm sure you've all come to expect style over substance from me by now.

I haven't started it yet, and have no idea what it will look like, but I just wanted to tell you that the end is nigh for New Trash Radio. You all thought that was a rubbish name for a blog anyway, didn't you?

Not really worth waiting for

My efforts to create artwork have not been lacking, but the results are not good. It was my own fault. I should have kept my mouth shut until I was sure I could produce something worthy of display. I haven't abandoned the mission, but it's clearly going to take longer than I expected to condition my brain to come up with decent ideas. The following items I post only to shame myself into action. My hope is that they indicate an absence of inspiration rather than ability.

1. This was my first foray into oil painting, and was intended to be a portrait of my friend Ariane's daughter Lily. I rather enjoyed painting with oils, which came as a surprise because I expected it to be much harder, but my inexperience is rather obvious. Why is she floating in a murky green sea? Why have I amputated her legs? You'd think years of photography would have taught me something about composition. On top of all that it doesn't look much like her, which is a pretty inescapable flaw for a portrait.

2. This is my first attempt at watercolour. In contrast to the oils, I thought watercolour would be a doddle but it isn't. With oils, you know that what you lay down is what you'll end up with. With watercolour, it's very hard to predict how the paint will react to the wet paper, where it will flow, what effect it will have on surrounding colours and how it will dry. All of this is evident here. The neck and nose are just embarrassing and the overall painting conveys nothing at all.

3. Another watercolour, slightly better, but still lacking focus. Her left eye is badly wrong.

4. My debut in acrylics. You have to work fast with acrylics because they dry very quickly, both on the canvas and on the palette, but the advantage of this is that they're very easy to correct if you screw up. Just wait a couple of minutes and you can paint over it. I screwed this one up so many times that it's got about 20 layers. It's probably the pick of the bunch but straight portraits aren't going to get me very far and I don't really know why I did it. It's no one famous, which is probably just as well as it bears little resemblance to the source image. And yes, it is finished.

I suppose I can use the excuse that I'm just experimenting with new mediums, but that doesn't explain the total lack of artistic merit and inspiration. There are two more that I just couldn't bring myself to post. I need to be braver! I'll write these off to experience and start again.