Canal boats

On our walk today round Westport Lake we incorporated a bit of the Trent and Mersey canal. We saw a few canal barges as we walked along the towpath. It made me think of a song we sing at choir which goes ‘fifteen miles on the Erie canal’. Most of the boats were painted dull blues and greys but there was a more traditionally painted cafe boat in primarily green and red but with yellow and white details too. It made me smile to see it.

Cat portrait

I do love sharing this painting of one of my old cats. It’s about twenty or twenty five years old. Just after we moved to our current house. She used to love sitting behind the flowerpot at the top of the stairs. By the way the weeping fig grew to five foot tall before we had to rehomed it because it got too big for the space in the kitchen where it had to be moved too because it got too big for the windowledge. Thank goodness the cat didn’t grow that big!

Abstracted reflection

Trees and roots and cars reflected in a photo, then filtered digitally in various ways. I have buzzing ears today so I don’t want to spend a long time describing what I’ve done to the photo. I could say my whistling ears have been partly responsible for this, undulating noise, like a tide whispering in and out, and the picture seems to be covered in dirty ice that lumps up over the surface? Anyway, it’s just an experiment for today. A bit of synesthesia perhaps?

Galaxy

Light pollution is destroying our view of the night sky. In cities and towns only a few stars are visible at night, but if you get out away from them the sky can be full of thousands of faint stars including our Galaxy, the Milky Way. Our Galaxy is one of Billions or Trillions in the known Universe. It might look a bit like this if we were outside it, but as we are about a third of the way into a spiral arm of the Milky Way, it’s impossible to see that. Plus we are surrounded by dust lanes that obscure the view. Our galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its centre, and is made up not only of normal matter but dark matter and dark energy as well according to Astronomers and Astrophysical scientists.

The image is a digital drawing I did several years ago. You can only see something like this through a telescope though.

White rabbit

I couldn’t resist, I’ve never had my photo taken as a white rabbit before. My hubby had his taken as the mad hatter. This was at the New Vic theatre yesterday. The only problem was that I had to really crouch down as the cut out faces were really placed to be the right height for children. I was impressed by the quality of the painting. Whoever painted the Alice in Wonderland characters has a real talent, full of energy and funny.

Sold a painting

I sold this today, only for a few pounds, but it was my first for 2023. I’m not making a great deal of money out of my art, but I know that this will be going to a good home. I didn’t get a photo of it fully completed because my phone camera is playing up but it’s a pretty good representation of the final piece. I didn’t really think about it but it also made me feel calm when I looked at it.