New paintings and regular art updates.
Two years ago we were having regular hedgehog visitors to our garden, but this year we haven’t seen any. We live next to a busy road and I worry about them. There was also an area of wasteland next to our garden that had brambles growing on it. That was cleared by a builder who removed all the vegetation from it, our garden is quite wild but there was old bits of wood to hide under. I think we will start leaving food out for them to forage again.
Thursdays #bandofsketchers prompt was pyjamas. I’m watching a programme about Picasso and I drew a digital image channelling one of his female portraits. Then I decided to collage it and see if I could make it look like a print for pyjamas. Artrage, incollage and Sketchbook apps used.
I was at the potbank cafe, which was part of the potbank hotel in the grounds of Spode factory site, part of the industrial heritage (and revolution) of Stoke on Trent.
The cafe was taken over by a cafe group called “the quarter”, but the hotel is still there and is based within the industrial architecture on the site.
I think I drew the flower in a jam jar while waiting for a friend? I noticed the deration of the flower stem in the water, an example of how the density of matter changes the way light travels through it. When I was young I hated trying to calculate the angle of defraction. Perhaps I should have drawn it and measured my drawing?
What aspects of your cultural heritage are you most proud of or interested in?
I’ve said before I’m not religious, I don’t go to Church or Chapel anymore, but when I was younger I did. The methodist way of prayer and praise was simple. Not much adornments, no artistic decoration, just plain white walls and brown wooden pews and pulpit.
That heritage is in abundance where I live now. Just not of here is a village called Mow Cop where primitive Methodists used to preach outside to their flocks of parishoners. I believe that John Wesley preached there.
Wikipedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesleyan_Methodist_Church_(Great_Britain)
Gives more information than I am aware of.
Bethesda Methodist Chapel, in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, is gradually being restored to it’s previous magnificent state, after being left to rack and ruin over several decades. I have had the pleasure of performing there with a choir on a couple of occasions and have seen the improvement over the years. It is rather large for a Methodist Chapel and could almost be classified as a cathedral.
Other cultural heritage I am aware of is the formation of the first co-operative movement in the world. It was started in Toad Lane in Rochdale, England. Wikipedia probably has information about that too.
Sometimes I have no iea what I’m doing. I just doodle, draw and dabble with textures on the apps in my phone. First drawn in Artrage and then used photodirector to play and change things, then adjusted he colours in Instagram.
I wouldn’t normally post a meme here but I love this one. I think art is so important and yet life gets in the way of people becoming artists. There needs to be the freedom to create, I don’t think people can be a square peg squeezed into a round hole. They should be allowed to do art if they want to. X
Every so often I paint one of the iconic bottle ovens from Stoke-on-Trent. These were where pottery was originally fired with coal fires. The city would be covered by a pall of thick smoke, morning noon and night.
They sometimes had metal bands wrapped round them to strengthen them, and the old bricks can shine like gold when there is a lovely sunrise or set. Arthur Berry, famous artist of Stoke-on-Trent used to speak about the beauty of the potteries towns. He painted and drew abstracted views of the six towns. He’s known as the potteries Lowry.
This painting is of a derelict oven, I’ve painted clematis growing up it, rewinding the ancient landscape. The blue area represents the local canals, it’s shape mirrors the bottle oven. The flowers in it represent the abstract canal roses that are found adorning canal barges throughout Britain.
You can take a cat to a box but you can’t make it lie in one. I tickled his tummy risking my fingers, (his claws come out if you are not gentle). The paradox of cats, no wonder Shrodinger chose them as an example. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t want to be in the box?
One of the other cats takes up half the space I want to sleep in, he is double the size of this one so he’s difficult to shift when he’s asleep. He can’t even fit in the box I think.
What brands do you associate with?
Brands? You can keep them. Expensive, exclusive, snobbish, wasteful, fashion victims.
I have never really bought brands, especially clothes. I don’t feel they mean anything to me. I can see how expensive brands exclude the majority. Or people spend money they can’t afford to go one better than their neighbours.
In some ways I can see the manufacturer Ford’s argument that you could have any colour of car so long as it was black! Now people want exclusive sports cars, or utility vehicles. But to me as long as a car gets me from A to B safely and at no great cost? I’m happy. It can be shabby, growing moss on the bodywork. As long as I can use it for transport that’s fine.
Imagine the savings? You don’t have to spend too much to get something decent. If I can I will try and choose reliability and boring mundanity over glitzy, showy brands. And with those characteristics you can have something that is less likely to get stolen. It makes life easier not to bother with brands.
I started drawing circles, then decided to run it through several iterations of photodirector using it’s AI style button and adding a background of butterflies, then sending it through the AI texturiser again. I think it makes a quite gentle image, I like the colours, enhanced in the Clarendon Instagram filter. I do enjoy experimenting.
Mallaband-Brown