New paintings and regular art updates.
One way to emphasise something is to get down low so the object or objects show up against the sky. Usually the idea is to have two thirds sky to one third land, or vice versa, but this is split halfway. The spiky seed heads show up nicely and there is subtle colour and texture in the bottom half of the photo. Sometimes I will choose portrait orientation but this was definitely best in landscape.
What has this become? Duplicated, added filters, texture, sharpness. Mixed and muddled. Colourful, like false colour terrain. You can have a lot of fun with digital art. I feel like I’m flying over a mad landscape, rather like in 2001 a space oddessy when Dave Bowman flies through an alien landscape near the end of the film. What fun a bit psychedelic! x
Is a chair!
I have a real studio
Down at spode
Was going today
But I hurt my foot!
Going to paint
Going to draw,
But I turned my foot
On the floor.
To get to Spode
Means climbing stairs…
A really short walk
Not too far,
But my foot is sore..
So I’ll stare at my chair…
Feet up..
Richter scale
/ˈrɪktə/
noun
GEOLOGY
Last night around 8pm there was a small earthquake near Tean in Staffordshire. It registered 3.3 on the richter scale, and houses near to it felt a jolt and their windows rattled.
My friend just asked if we felt anything? No, we didn’t feel a thing. We probably get more shaking from traffic driving past our house. Apparently the UK gets about a thousand earthquake s or tremors a year, and most are only 1 or 2 on the richter scale (or 30 or 900? times smaller). So although 3.3 is high in the UK it’s not bad. I think we may have had a 5 a few years ago.
I couldn’t find an image to use so I drew a ‘geological’ abstract instead, trying to draw something like a fracture or fault moving in the rocks below us….
Before it burnt down, the Leopard Hotel was a great place to visit, the owners asked me to paint a series of murals in the Arnold Bennett suite at the back of the hotel.
Here is one of a few photos a visitor to it took of my paintings. It doesn’t show them clearly, but it does give an idea of the sizes and the distances between them.
I’ve painted murals at other places but the buildings they were in have mostly been demolished! I’m not complaining but I think its sad that all the effort that was put in to paint them has been lost. Some of them were joint projects with artists from Stoke-on-Trent city council. I was just helping on those and wasn’t the main artist so I don’t feel as attached to them as I did with the Leopard. Such a sad loss to the town of Burslem. It was a historic building that had a lot of influence on the lives of its residents.
What’s the most delicious thing you’ve ever eaten?
A knickerbocker glory in the cafe at the top of the Great Orme mountain in Llandudno in Wales.
Why? It’s the only one I ever ate, I was a child, and I was amazed by it.
A tall cold glass with a long spoon, a fan shaped wafer in the top. Vanilla ice cream, fruit (I think cherries and peaches), chocolate and raspberry sauces, and fresh cream…. Well that’s how I remember it! We had gone up on the cable car and it was a real adventure. I think we were staying in Rhyl and had a day trip down the Coast to Llandudno.
I remember deep blue sea and bright blue sky, tall houses and wide, quiet roads. The cable car was scary but fun and the cafe had cool drinks and ice-cream for sale.
I don’t know if I ate the whole knickerbocker glory or if I shared with one of my sisters? It seemed to be huge. I think we chose it because of the picture on the menu? It certainly cooled us down on that hot sunny day. Fifty years later.. I still remember…. Delicious!
Tuesdays #bandofsketchers prompt was Content. I struggled with this, then looked up ‘content’ online. I found a lot of content faces. This is based on one of them. The drawing is done in fine black ink liner pen. I tried shading with it. Photo taken in quite a dark room so the brightness /contrast is a bit off.
These are a few of my favourite red plants. Well petals not leaves. I love poppies and chuck in a few pelagoniums and fushias.
Photos from a couple of years ago. I’d have planted up a lot of annuals by now but I have had bigger bills to pay, and having problems with shaking and weaker muscles means I cannot shift flowerpots around like I used to. I do hope my health improves. I have to rely on (argue with) hubby to move things about. Anyway I’ll post photos once I’m satisfied with what it looks like.
Another old painting from 2015, I’m not quite sure what I was thinking and it’s probably best forgotten!
Things I would change? The colours possibly. I would try and work from a horse photo because this isn’t very anatomically correct, I know it doesn’t actually have wings either! I guess I’ve made it delicate to be light enough to be held up by wings… Strange what you create as an artist.
My friend Apple has a restaurant and also a coffee shop. The shop has been closed for a while because of the pandemic, but now things are calming down she’s trying to reopen it. After three years she’s putting a lot of work into creating a social and friendly space for people to meet up. She’s given herself a month to get things sorted out. I was talking to her and found this photo of an old painting I did based on the painting Proserpine by one of the Pre-Raphaelite artists. I can’t remember the actual artist.
What I did was to try and copy the painting and add an apple instead of a pomegranate to relate to my friends name. You can’t see but I also painted Apples coffee house at the top right on a sign. Sorry the photos a bit blurry!
Mallaband-Brown