New paintings and regular art updates.
The skies gone a dirty grey brown colour and the forecast is for heavy rain showers or even thunderstorms. The sun won’t be setting for at least another hour, but as they say round here ‘its gone dark over Bill’s mums!’ in other words it’s going to rain soon! In fact as I write this I can hear raindrops drumming against the window. It did try and hail earlier on and there were little grains of ice on the car windscreen.
I’m going to do some cards using this linocut for a craft fair I’m thinking of doing. I wonder if this is to quirky and should I try different colours. Perhaps gold or bronze instead. If I also get envelopes it might make an interesting card. I hoe cat lovers will like them.
Sadly I didn’t sell any of my paintings at Stone (exhibition ends today). I did get some feedback from a customer who said it was a shame they didn’t display them on another wall. They were in the corridor on the way to the toilets and she said she would not have seen them if she hadn’t gone to the loo! I guess it just shows that whatever you do if your work is not visible enough it won’t get any interest.
Today’s #bandofsketchers prompt was Lake. This is a drawing of Westport Lake from a photo I took on Tuesday.. The sky was quite dark and overcast so it gave it a very atmospheric feeling. The silhouetted tries look good reflected in the water. This is a felt pen sketch of it.
A doodle based on the previous post about the environment. They say allergies are caused by being bought up in conditions that are too clean so the body does not learn how to react normally to its surroundings.
Feeling stressed
Thinking of nature
But suffering hay-fever!
Eyes water
When I try and commune
With the outside world
The pollen
So tiny
Can keep me trapped.
Sneezing
Enclosed
Removed from nature!
Well trained Weimaraner dog seen on our walk round Westport Lake. Trained as a therapy dog, it was very capable of following orders. The colour was a grey brown and its eyes were a mixture of yellow and blue.. Its owner said that as it got older the colour might become more amber. I might do a painting of it as I have a closer view of it. One thing is because of the way I took the photo its head looks a little too big because if foreshortening. It looks more in proportion on the other photo.
For mist of our existence humans lived outside or in caves or huts. It is only within the last few thousand years that we started to live in villages, then towns and finally cities. With each increase in population we have moved away from greenery and plant life. The movement into flats and apartments has imprisoned us in concrete even more.
Humans need shelter from the elements, either the cold of the winter, the heat of the summer and the changes in wind and rain. So buildings are needed, but perhaps we should include more greenery in these places. Not just lawns or neat hedges, but more green walls or indoor planting.
It’s good for our mental health, a connection to our historical past. If it could also be used to clean the air, or add a layer of cool air to our streets surely it is worth pursuing?
Instead I see stories in the press of trees being cut down, ancient ones, to make way for railways, or being blamed for damaging buildings, instead of reversing the engineering and not building next to ancient trees. Let’s have an intelligent discussion about this. Green in important to out health and our planet.
Several years ago I worked in housing. In that job I was responsible for looking after abandoned properties among other things.
One day I had to go out and inspect a house. It was full of belongings which was very difficult to get through because furniture was strewn everywhere. So I did an inventory and arranged for it to be cleared. I took photos, and when I reviewed them I saw a very green fishtank. The property had apparently been empty for two months before we were notified it was empty, but something prompted me to contact the team who were due to clear the house and asked them to look for it.
It turned out there was a goldfish in the tank! Not visible because of the algae in there. Luckily it had been eating the algae. It was rehomed to a garden fishpond.
I have just deleted 1% of my photos on my WordPress account. Because I had reached 99.9% of images on my media… 13 gigabytes of pictures! The only way to add images is to delete old ones. So if you find a post I have written without an image you know why!
Since I started this blog a few years ago I have always tried to add images of my own to illustrate what I’m describing. I’ve tried to limit them to one’s that were not as good, a bit confusing or untidy. I hope readers don’t mind. But unless I do this I won’t be adding any more images!
I think this was a coot chick (could be moorhen chick) we saw yesterday. I goy a reasonable photo of it although it’s beak seems to disappear into the stony soil on the side of the lake. It’s mum was just out of shot swimming on the lake. I guess they have to be as independent as possible as quickly as they can so that they can go out into the world. But this is a little fuzz ball and it’s still without feathers. I hope it survives to full fledge.
Mallaband-Brown