Cats and clutter

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I took these photos within minutes of each other. This is my painting chair where I prop up my canvases while painting at home. I’m between paintings at the moment so the cats often sit on it. The house is full of “stuff” that Mey or may not be used as subject matter. Hence this poem!

Cats and clutter, clutter and cats.

Do the two go together

Like mittens and bats?

Like bread and butter

Like lamb and spring

Grapes and wine

Cheese and bread?

We all live differently

Each to his own

Cats and clutter are in my home!

Sad face

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Digital drawing, done quickly after watching an art challenge programme on TV. I used ArtRage oils free app. Then I decided to write a poem to verbally illustrate it.

Sad Face

Eyes unfocused

Thinking of a sad place

Ready to weep,

Memories to keep

Warmly wrapped in love.

Sad face

Can you ever be

Happy again?

Lost in a reverie

Of memory

Sad face

Long face

Long may you seek

Peace.

Canal boats

Pictures of the Trent and Mersy canal, these photos are by a friend. The painting is up in the warehouse next to the summit lock ,number 42 on the canal at Etruria.

Canal boats allow you to travel around the countryside without having to use a car except for going to your departure point and parking up. Canal cruises are usually circular so you travel around or along a route and return to your starting point. There are famous routes like the Cheshire ring which can be done over a few days. There are also hotel boats where you have a cabin but all the chores are done by a housekeeper.

There are apparently more canals in Birmingham in the English Midlands than there are in Venice.

Some canals and rivers run either side by side or into one another. The landscape can either be countryside, industrial or town buildings, it just depends where you travel. There is much more information available from the Canal and Rivers Trust.

Photos of Warhorse

I wrote about going to see Warhorse last week, but I did a drawing because we were not allowed to take photos.

Then I found these photos on line. I think they are publicity shots which are allowed to be shared. If they suddenly disappear you will know why.

They just show the beauty and also horror of the play. Such strong sculptural images.

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Sculpted Steel

Charis Jones is a blacksmith and sculptor who runs Sculpted Steel at the Etruria Forge in Etruria Stoke-on-Trent. She is based in the Forge and can be contacted to commission sculptural work. She created a large cat sculpture for our garden.

This weekend she was demonstrating her skills during a steaming weekend at The Etruria Industrial Museum. Home of Jessie Shirley’s bone and flint mill.

The beam engine that powers the flint grinding pans is steamed about once a month.

As with other places in the potteries this is one of those hidden gems that people don’t know about but which are fascinating to visit

Photos courtesy my friend Lorraine.

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Waiting room gallery

If you go into Longport in the potteries (Stoke-on-Trent) and turn off the main road towards the station you will find a new artists led gallery.

The place only opened up this weekend but they have had lots of visitors and sales. There is art by a number of local fine artists for sale. I could not resist asking if I can place some work there and maybe hold an exhibition there.

The gallery is across the road from a shop called cherished chimneys which sells ornamental chimney pots, there was also a sign for a teapot exhibition on another building, and the station building at Longport is also being used as a gallery.

Despite losing City if Culture for 2021 I think artists in the area are proving just what a cultural, artistic city we are.

Plastic in my garden

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My partners been out putting seeds in the garden, pottering with plant pots and sitting in a chair in the sun.

Two magpies are trying to pull twigs off a buddlea Bush, they are building a raggadey nest in the top of one of the trees. They managed to break off 3 or 4 twigs while we watched.

It was so nice I decided to take a few photos. The first is the chair my partner was sitting in. He didn’t want his photo taken second is the cherry tree. With blossom buds about to burst. The third is another tree at the side of the garden, with a great big waving piece of white plastic in the top of it! I don’t know how it got there but I think it must have blown up in a storm. It doesn’t look like a plastic bag, maybe some plastic wrapping? Things are getting green. We need to wash plastic flower pots to reuse them, but I caught my partner burning perfectly good ones! Grr….

What is in my head?

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There’s a lump of stuff like blancmange or jelly inside my head, your head, and anyone who has lived on the planet.

This soggy lump controls your life, your heart, your breathing, movement, and other functions.

It also helps control the world, either personally or by electing or following what other brains think. No telepathy exists, so we only know what a brain is thinking by communication on TV, with books, in newspapers, social media and miriad ways of talking.

My pink jelly brain is mostly water. It’s surrounded by layers of protection to stop it being damaged. The pia mater and dura mater are two of these layers. It’s split into a hind brain, the most primitive part, the mid brain and two halves split between the right and left hemispheres that make up the main part of the brain. It is supplied by a ring of arteries and veins and oxygen and fluid pass from these into the brain through the blood brain barrier. Veins take away waste products back to the heart and lungs and lymphatic system.

Your brain is a tangle of synapses and neurones, nerve cells that use electrical signals to make your body move, allow you to see, talk, feel, eat. Control subconscious activities, control your organs and muscles (although research has shown that the gastric system including the stomach has its own system of nerves equivalent to the brain capacity of a rabbit).

Brains are weird. The left side of your brain controls the right side of your head and body, and vice versa. By the time you notice something has happened, it’s too late to do anything so your brain has to be able to react or predict what is happening before you even realise it.

This pinkish yellowish lump has taken us under the sea or to the top of everest. It has allowed us to go to the Moon, send probes to Mars and the planets and explore the universe with immense telescopes. It has also let us build microscopes to see microbes and even Atoms. It has even given us the skills to build machines to see inside our own brains!

Pink blobs rule! Let us just hope that people start to use them to try and bring peace and sense to the world.

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Threshold, whiskey galore?

#writephoto looking-out-1

For Sue Vincent’s Thursday #writephoto prompt.

‘Well it was like this officer’ she said, ‘we were down on the beach and saw the cave’. She sneezed, the cold was getting into her bones ‘ it reminded me of the film “whiskey galore” based on the book by Compton MacKensie, so we decided to explore it. We scrambled down the rocks and walked past the waterfall. We went straight in because it had started to lash down with rain, so it was a chance to get under shelter too’

‘About what time was that?’ the policeman had a little hand held computer which he typed into. Not as interesting as a notebook she thought.

‘Around 10am yesterday.’ she pulled the silver space blanket tighter around her shoulders. ‘We are on holiday, we don’t know about the tides’ She looked down at her husband lying on a stretcher  The ambulance people had put an oxygen mask on him and dressed the cut on his head. He gave her a little wave.

‘Yes, the tide came in while we were exploring, the cave goes back so far and the water just came up before we knew it. We were in waist deep water, but the waves were pushing us deeper in when we tried to swim out. In the end we found a ledge to sit on…. .’ the policeman was still typing ‘so what happened then?’ ‘we tried using our phones but they wouldn’t work, they had got a soaking, we tried wading out, but by then we were too cold. So we just sat as close together as we could.’

She sighed ‘ we must both have fallen asleep because when we woke up again the tide had come back in. We were exhausted and decided to wait till morning. My husband stood up to stretch and that’s when he cracked his head on the rock’. ‘So that’s when we found you’ said the policeman. ‘It was the landlady at your B&B that alerted us’

‘one thing’ he said ‘what’s that wrapped in your coat?’

‘This? It’s an old bottle of 25 year old single malt’ she smiled.