Tag: Blog

Fuzzy brain

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Finished or almost finished? Not sure. I’ve spent the last two days painting this while having my studio open to the public. In the end you lose track of what you are doing. What you are saying. I can waffle forever but it stops making sense after a while.

I like people to ask me questions about art. But then I get nervous. It’s like a fog descends over my head and I can’t articulate or describe what I mean. I hope my paintings are pretty self explanatory but I still try and explain what I am doing. Artists on TV seem to be able to tell people what they are doing, but I can’t do that. I’m a painter not a public speaker…..

So anyway, I finished this painting today. It’s called mermaid.

X

Whats the point?

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Someone speaks to you, says they can do all sorts of things to help you. It just needs to go through some sort of committee .

You wait to hear back, but after a while you hear you have been unsuccessful. It’s like having a job interview for a job you didn’t know was available, you hadn’t prepared for it, had no knowledge of what it entailed but once someone had dangled the carrot you felt suddenly recognised for having some small amount of worth.

So

What is the point?

Have they read this blog and decided its not commercial enough? That it does not come up to scratch? Should I just post photos of my art and keep my thoughts to myself?

What is the point?

Why bother?

What should I do?

What is the point? What is the point…..

Feeling down, but not quite out.

Dawn

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The Sun is rising, its light peeking over the horizon, traffic is flowing past the front door…it’s 6.30 am and people are going to work. Can’t hear any birds singing, they don’t seem to as much this time of year. There is a wind buffeting the trees outside, and heavy rain is expected later.

I’m awake again after going to bed at 2am, I enjoy being up early sometimes, it helps me gather my thoughts, I guess I will probably go back to bed though. I don’t have any heating on so it’s quite cool in my living room, not that its been really cold yet, but you can certainly tell the season is changing to autumn.

One thing I must do is bring in my house plants. We put them outside this summer while we had the kitchen and bathroom done.  Trouble is we have no space now for a 6 ft weeping fig plant. Anyone need a huge weeping fig? Free to a good home (I’m not pay in for shipping!)

The cats are both asleep, I’m surprised they are not chasing each other. Seamus has lost his collar with its bell. Gracie could hear him coming before, so it’s become more equal in the game of sneaking up on each other and pouncing!

Well this is an exciting bit of blogging, my life laid bare…. I wonder why humans do this kind of thing. Hardly life shattering, I think I will go back to bed. Its now 6.44 am.

Sleep

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The Sun sets earlier every day now, by 9pm it is dark, the summer sun falls below the horizon, dropping down and bringing shadows.

My head nods with weariness, barely able to keep my eyes open. I long for sleep, ready to rest my weary limbs beneath cool sheets, but sleep sneaks away sometimes, I’m hazy with it one minute then alert and awake the next jerking back into the world with a jump, taken out of sleep by a noise or a pain.

So yes, I do need sleep, but it tends to grab hold of me in the daytime. When I’m not expecting it I fall asleep. Listening to the radio or watching tv. In a meeting. Thankfully never when I am driving. But I could almost fall asleep in a queue in a shop, tonight I was nodding at choir practice… but now at well after midnight, nothing,  no sleep.

Sleep is the soft rest that gently rocks your body into dreams,

Sleep is the midnight air coursing through your veins,

Sleep is looking at your partner as he slumbers,

Sleep hides ills and heals woes,

Sleep shapes wakefulness, giving rest to the weary.

I want sleep in my eyes, sleep in my mind.

I want to be drousy, dreaming of soft down pillows.

I need rest, from fears, from worries.

Give me sleep, now.

Dereliction

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What does the word dereliction make you think of? Is it your physical surroundings? The derelict state the world seems to be in, or even the people about you?

Living in a town where there seem to be more homeless people than ever makes me feel like the whole of the town is guilty of a dereliction of duty to them. Why would a civilised society allow that to happen? I talk to the people sitting there out in all weather. I sometimes give them some change or the number of the homelessness teams rough sleepers telephone number. My partner saw the people around me looking on I disgust yesterday When I gave money to a homeless man.

When you see someone who has sores on his legs and apparently a broken ankle you have to think how? Why? How have we come to this. He could not get into a doctor because he has no address! I wish I had taken him to the hospital …I dont know why I didn’t. I’m scared society is being allowed to break. Our former leader Margaret Thatcher once said “there is no such thing as society “.

Sadly  I’m beginning to think she was right…shame on us all for allowing such dereliction of humanity.

Yellow bowl

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This is a quick, half hour painting, of a yellow bowl I have. This is a little acrylic on canvas, from my memory. I’ve had this bowl for years. I just wanted to paint something simple after all the work I did on the previous painting. I may work on the shadows. I want to try and he the elipse of the bowl top right, but its after midnight now and I haven’t been very well so I think I will give myself a rest.

I’m glad I tried painting in these lovely primary colours. They pretty much are an accurate representation of the bowl.

Time Ticks

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PicsArt_1536439451689It does! I started writing this over 12 hours ago but then the battery on my tablet went flat so I had to wait until now .

Anyway, time does tick by, sometimes I know exactly when the alarm is going to go off, and it does. I can wake up a second before the alarm clock goes off….nothing is clicking or whirring or spinning to give me a cue or a clue. Same with the alarm on our oven, last night I got up from my chair to check it just before it went off.

One explanation is the brain has tiny cells beating regularly giving us a sense of time. There are also electric nodes in your heart that regulate your heartbeat, and your breathing is a regular rhythm allowing you to get just the right amount of air.

But what is time, why do we feel times arrow? Why does a cup fall and then break as it hits the floor? Why isn’t it on the floor then bouncing back up onto the table, reforming from smashed to solid in a second? There is something called entropy, everything breaks down over time. Everything tends towards chaos. The Universe is cooling, as space expands. Astrophysicists speak of the heat death of the universe as everything spreads out and cools towards absolute zero. Galaxies are flying away from each other. If things continue, in many billions or trillions of years, we would have completely black skies, no stars in sight. Our Sun will have cooled to a husk of burnt matter and all the other Stars will fly off away for us. There is something called red shift, as galaxies move away their light shifts towards the red end of the spectrum, the larger the red shift the faster they are moving. There are theories about things called dark energy and dark matter that try to explain this, but I wouldn’t know where to start with that aspect of space time.

Time ticks for everything, although time may not actually exist, it might just be our way of measuring the passing of things happening, but not understanding the universe. But if it is real there may be an advantage of time. The end of the universe or more likely its continuous, infinite existence, will not happen in our time. But a long long long time in the future.

 

In Space..

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No one can hear you scream!

So why add sound to movies set in space?…..I think the best film I saw was 2001 a Space Odessy, because instead of having the sound of engine noises the film has music playing over the space scenes. It is so atmospheric   (pun intended) because space is a vacuum and sound cannot propagate in a vacuum. There are not enough molecules for one to hit or push against the next and transfer sound vibrations to your ears. In any case if you were in space you would need a suit, so all you would hear is your own breathing and perhaps tinnitus or a rumbling stomach!

I know I’m being pedantic but I get bothered by mistakes or wrong assumptions. If you are going to watch a space film I think it should be made correctly.

There was an old man called Luke,

a flight into space he took…

No  squeak of a sound

in the vacuum surround

Could be heard, so he read a book.

I’m not saying there would not be sounds inside a space craft either, there will be an atmosphere so noise can travel through that. Which is why Apollo 13 could hear the gas tank rupture when they were on their way to the moon. But if you were outside …well you would not hear it, and if you tried to put your ear to it you would be dead without a suit on!

Anyway enough of my pet peeves.

night x

Too many books?

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How many books is too many? I was counting ours a few years ago and when I got to over 1000 I gave up. We had books in all the rooms except the bathroom but they have also had to be moved out of the kitchen now it’s been modernised. If I could sneak a few cookbooks in I would, but then the books on trains would follow…

What books do I like?

Biography, Science, Astronomy, Autobiography, Physics, Maths, Science Fiction, Science Fantasy, Fantasy, Train books, Novels, Thrillers, Art books. Books about Pottery and Ceramics. Books about photography.

Books I dislike. …I don’t know..

So what do you do when you have a partner who goes out and  buys books from charity shops every week! ..? You send him back with ones to donate.  I have wondered if I should take some to a local second hand book shop but I dont know if they would take them.

I read books at bedtime to help me sleep. Some of the physics ones can send me off in minutes. At the moment I’m reading the Earthsea Quartet by Ursula LeGuin and 1356 by Bernard Cornwell. I have a copy of The Handmaids Tale I bought in the 1980’s by Margaret Atwood, and also The Colour Purple by Alice Walker. One book Richard introduced me to was A Canticle for Leibovitz which is a post apocalyptic story.  It’s very strange.

So yes I love these books, I would never get a kindle or e-book reader. There is something about turning paper pages, without having to charge the battery up just when you are mid chapter, also if you drop a book when you fall asleep it doesn’t break the screen, and yes I have read books in the bath… they can get very soggy!