New paintings and regular art updates.
Nine years ago I was helping with penkhull mystery plays. Painting flat boards for scenery and Picassoesque horses which were props for the show. I really miss those days. The plays were sometimes religious or sometimes historical. Covid seems to have ended it. We all got older and it was hard work for the organisers to keep going…
One of the Art groups I’m in wanted us to post a picture based on the prompt #movement. This was from my imagination after swimming with a wild dolphin called Georges. It had swum into a bay where we were caravanning and stayed around after the rest of his pod had gone. There was a notice the next day saying you shouldn’t swim with him because he was over friendly and dolphins can pass on pneumonia from the droplets from their blowhole. Anyway. I loved painting this and have great memories of swimming with a dolphin!
What are your daily habits?
For 323 days now
I started this last year. It was recommended as a way of bringing more positive thoughts to my mind. I have done it for 323 days now and there’s no sign of me stopping. I’m most of the way through my third sketchbook. I draw a sketch for each of three gratitudes and a short description of what I’m grateful for.
The idea is you don’t write big gratitudes, but little ones so you don’t feel put off by not having a big enough thing to write about. So on one day I wrote that the traffic lights were on green and I got to the doctors in time. For that I drew the traffic lights. Another could be that the cat came up and was very loving. I drew a curled up cat. Finally I wanted something else to write, and the plants in the garden were lovely so I wrote that and drew some flowers.
I have continued to do this each day, sometimes I forget, but it’s a good habit for me to keep to and it has helped me to keep things together. So if I’ve forgotten I will catch it up. It’s become that important to me. It’s going to mean a lot of gratitude sketchbooks though if I carry on!
Photo taken outside Etruria Industrial museum. This is not a colourful tourist boat. Painted with castles and roses. But careful lines have been painted on it to delineate it’s shape. I think its part of the industrial museum exhibit? Perhaps it was used in the past to transport the flint and bone that had been ground into fine powder at the Jessie Shirley flint mill. This is the main part of the industrial museum. A stationery steam engine called Princess was used to provide power to do the grinding. The boat or barge might have transported the powder to the local potteries to add to clay and produce fine bone China pottery. So much history in this city of ours.
A friend just sent me this photo. It’s one of my little paintings in someone’s kitchen. Just a simple design. I was rather pleased to get this. Knowing my art is appreciated cheers me up!
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.
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.
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.
Mallaband-Brown