New paintings and regular art updates.
Received from space? Old photo mirrored. The original photo was about a stormy sky but the effect of mirroring this has bought the attention to the (seemingly) floating TV Ariel.
What is it for? Is it an alien Ariel? A communication from beyond the stratosphere? An energy collector or scrambler of radio waves? Something from a Sci-fi movie. Could it tune in to the high pitched sounds of bats? Imagination can take you anywhere!
I just love them, their colour, brilliance, shape, papery petals. Colourful flowers that are imbued with sorrow because they were used to commemorate wars. They sprang up in the fields of flanders after the battles there. And yet to me they don’t signify fighting or fears, but memories of summers long gone, my favourite colour and how tiny seeds can create such magnificent flowers.
I must go down to the sea again
Says the old poem.
And I know why
Beauty and violence
Gentle lapping wavelets
And white horses.
Frantic families
Lost sailors
Storms and waves
So high they reach up, up
To the sky.
Birds skim the surface
Grab fish in their beaks
Puffins and Skewers
Cormorants and Choughs
Ever changing
Sometimes boring
I must go there again.
What is that? I can see something. It’s dark but shining. Glowing from within. Like a coal surrounded by a gas flame. But it’s floating in the air and it’s big. Huge, still, hot, but not very, a sort of terrifying? No one else seems bothered.
Cars are driving around. People walking. I can see it but they can’t. I don’t understand. I don’t know what to think. Is it in my mind, my imagination? Am I hallucinating? I will try and get closer and see…….
Feed the birds.
£2 a box
There’s a song there somewhere? One of our things we do when we walked round Westport lake. The birds were all round us, pecking our toes. Trying to get the food out of my hand. Even in this weather they want feeding. Ducks, Geese, Goslings, Coots and Moorhens and a solitary Swan.
The birds still have babies, a bit bigger than yesterday, they haven’t all flown the nest yet. It was lovely to see them.
Walking in the almost 30°C heat, in full sunshine is uncomfortable and tiring. I’m not used to those temperatures here in the UK. We are basically lucky to get a few days of tepid sunshine in the summer and it generally heats up more in August.
So anyway, I have a small challenge with myself to do 5000 steps a day or hopefully more, and to get up to 20 heart points by walking faster than usual. But by the time we had walked round the lake I’d done around 4000 steps and 8 heart points, but I guess the heat slowed me down.
Tell me not to obsess about exercise, but I can’t help it, I wasn’t doing any really two years ago….
Viruses don’t care about people because they are barely alive, it’s possibly not even alive. It’s just a shell surrounding a strand of RNA. When it attaches to receptors on a cell this gets into the cell and makes copies of itself so that new viruses are made.
Viruses don’t think, they are tiny. Saying that they attack people is like saying a thumb tack attacks your feet when you stand on it. The pain happens but it wasn’t caused by the thumb tack but by you for not looking at what you are doing.
Attacking, war, invading, fighting, phrases that anthropomorphise the virus. Making it sound like a human invader. But it’s just in the environment. It gets passed on through contact between humans. On your hands, if you cough or sneeze, on surfaces. Wearing masks and sanitising your hands are there to prevent it being passed on. Getting a vaccine will help you and help others. But the virus is not jumping on people and attacking them. We, us, humans are the way it travels….
Today’s #bandofsketchers prompt was Woven. I tried to copy some celtic knotwork but it went a bit wrong. Plus my pen was running out. Anyway I had a go. I used to love celtic art. I may try again. Black ink drawing.
Someone asked if there should only be self service tills in supermarkets. I aid no. I went to our local supermarket yesterday evening. I had to get a lot of stuff so we got a trolley. Have you ever tried balancing everything from your trolley on the tiny platform at the self service till? balancing it and then putting it in bags and balancing them on the other tiny platform that weighs your goods? It was crazy. There was one woman helper. She had to let me move stuff so I could carry on.
Plus it puts decent people out of work!
Hot day, blue sky, barely a cloud in the sky, cattle in a field, reflections in the canal. Memories are made of this, blues and greens, shade and light.
I have memories of days like this, maybe not as hot, but they were calm and happy. I remember a time when things were not scary. Oh there were diseases around, and awful things were happening. But I was a child. I didn’t know about them.
Then I remembered the disaster at Aberfan. There was a land slip of old mining waste. It slid down a hill and landed on a school. Children and adults died. That was the first TV report I remember seeing.
Now rivers rise and places flood all the time, “hundred year events” happen every ten or twenty years. Storms dump three months water on a country while other places suffer heat domes and wild fires.
Will the wonderful days of summer be once in 100 days instead? Maybe we need to sort it out NOW!
I wrote this a few days ago but for some reason it did not publish? Now on a grey, dismal day I look back after another walk and Im sad it wasnt like this, but glad it was a lot cooler!
Mallaband-Brown