New paintings and regular art updates.
Urban sketchers Stoke-on-Trent challenge today, Light. I had got some new permanent markers so decided to do something colourful. I did use a fine liner pen and a 6b pencil. Also used an almost dried up pale blue felt pen to add some shading to the window frame. The standard lamp has a lampshade covered in sequins. (speckles on the drawing). There will be another challenge in a couple of days. I wonder what it will be….
Ride a white horse to Banbury Cross,
To see a fine lady upon a white horse;
Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
And she shall have music wherever she goes.
I’ve started to remember old nursery rhymes…
See saw Margary Door,
She shall have a new master
She shall earn but a penny a day.
Because she can’t work any faster.
They just popped into my head. They are things I used to recite or sing to myself when I was about six or seven.
I’ve asked my hubby and he remembers
“if you stand on a nick, you’ll marry a brick and a beetle will come to your wedding’.
And ‘I wish I was a wooly worm, with wool upon my tummy, into a honey pot I’d squirm, and make my tummy gummy!,”
Nostalgia!
There was a couple, Mr and Mrs Opie that collected them and they lived in Salford, near Manchester, England. There is a whole collection of this type of verse there. I only remember this vaguely. They worked out that a rhyme could travel from the south up to the north of the country (Britain) in a week because of children repeating them. If I remember rightly. But I am getting older.
Every so often I delete old photos off my phone. Then all the photos that are left get mixed up and I discover old photos like this one that I really like! Basically I do this because the photos are taking up most of the phones memory. I have thousands of pictures. Today I got rid of a couple of hundred old pictures of grey skies and trees. And I also got rid of duplicate images because when I post to Instagram it saves an extra picture.
Another issue is that my phone camera takes Megabyte, not kilobyte sized pictures. It means that when I save them to WordPress the media files take up a lot if space. I’m on about 78% on my plan, and I expanded that earlier in the year. So, how do i reduce my file sizes without losing image quality? The answer is I let my anti virus software review the pictures and replace them with smaller versions. It doesn’t stop my phone taking large files though and I would like to find out how to do this. Must be in settings somewhere….
Sorry if this is boring…
22.4.20, about a month into lockdown. I wonder what was going through my mind? I don’t think I was as nervous then as I am now. I was thinking about food. Now I’m thinking about not going out, despite the pubs opening up carefully and hairdressers and other non essential shops. Do I feel like going out? No, I think this is too early. Especially where alcohol is involved. I’ve seen groups of four or five men walking past the house, looking like they are off for a ‘good night out’.
What can I say. I understand people need to escape. I feel so tense I’m shaking. How do refugees and people in war torn areas survive? We are lucky. The problem might cause massive problems with wealth but I want people to be safe and survive this. Ah well, maybe I will do another drawing x.
I’d written a poem about nature and autumn. But my phone won’t save drafts of my posts. I hit the wrong key. So I’ve lost it. It no longer exists. Like summer moving into autum then onwards, the poem has gone into the aether, lost for all time. I could try rewriting it, but the sentiment is lost, the feeling has gone. I’d done some nice rhymes, but I’m not going to easily remember them.
And when we get to this time next year? The world will have moved on through space and time. We never come back to the same place. The Earth turns, spiralling around the sun, which in turn moves around the galaxy…..
Bye words, take care xxx
my attempt at the great wave after Hokusai.
I’m writing an assignment about the artist Hokusai and his ink and wood block print, The Great wave, or The Great Wave off Kanagawa produced around 1830. He had previously painted two other great waves in 1803 and 1805. There is a collection of 36 views of Mount Fuji by him.
I found out that he had been influenced by an artist called Shiba Kokan, who in turn had been influenced by Western Art. The Portuguese first started trading with the Japanese as early as 1543 and later the Dutch came along and started to trade with them in 1609.
Hokusai’s first waves were not as stylised as the Great Wave, but over the intervening 30 years he honed his style. His wave painting has a low horizon which gives it a more western and also menacing feel. The wave towers over three fishing boats, threatening to swamp them, Fingers of water claw the air in a very fractal pattern, and a tiny Mount Fuji sits in the background, apparently encircled by a threatening sea and lowering clouds.
Did you know the wave emoji is based on Hokusai’s work, and this in turn is linked to the waving hand emoji. There is a site called emojipedia that gives lots of interesting facts about emoji icons.
I wont go into great detail about the assignment, but I had to link in semiotics and other ways of critically appraising art works. I was up till 4am trying to pull it all together!
x
In a time when photos
were printed on paper,
and swords
were made of cardboard
and silver foil.
Hooped earrings were in fashion,
And bangles jingled.
I wore an eyepatch on my glasses
and pretended to be
Long John Silver,
or Captain Hook,
Red beard
or some other rapskallion…
Oh what fun!
To be young again,
and silly…
Oh I do like playing with paint. For example this is a little canvas I’m working on, it’s a WIP, (work in progress). I was thinking of adding some patterns and decorations to it. Maybe in the sky. Some stars, a comet, maybe a pattern in the glass. I haven’t decided yet. It’s another acrylic on canvas. I was trying to make more of a stylised character out of it.
Better get on and do some more work on things.
X
It’s not often that you find a cycling scalextric set for sale for a tenner, and it works. From a local charity shop. After a bit of messing about with the pickups underneath the model cyclists, we were flying round the velodrome, racing round the backed curves and barging each other in the little built in narrow sections. I flew off into the crowd and hubby fell off sideways onto the blue track around the base of the racing surface. It was fun, I actually smiled! Plus the cat found it interesting, her head was going side to side as she watched the toy cyclists.
It bought back memories of Sir Chris Hoy at the London Olympics, and all the different sorts of races cyclists do, devil take the hind most, different numbers of laps, pursuit and other races, (OK I cant remember the names). They race fixed gear bikes with no brakes on banked track. I had a go once. I could not get onto the banking on my old steel bike. I was much happier watching the races!
I use a piece of plastic to keep my acrylic paints moist between using them. A little bit of each paint sticks to the plastic. So I pressed it against a tiny 3 inch square canvas. I did it over and over, rubbing the plastic down onto the canvas and turning it round each time. When I looked at the result I thought it looked like reflections on a pool so added curves to look like ripples from drops of rain. Just simple…
I might turn the orange splodges into goldfish….
