New paintings and regular art updates.
A snowy cottage (with led lights) and a flowerbed for cut flowers. Made by a craft group I’m in. The wooden model was mostly painted with white acrylic to replicate snow. I added dark outlines to indicate bricks, stone and tiles.
This is not a good photo, but it gives you an idea of it’s size. At least it feels like I did something artistic last week.
In a gallery
But looking outside
Fresh green against brick red
Daylight catches the wall
As sun starts to set.
Always look outside the box
The view might change
Your thoughts too….
Chances are
You’ll see something new.
Round window at Spode painted a couple of years, ago, the glass was held in a circular metal frame. I enjoyed trying to get a feeling of depth using deep shade, and perspective with the rows of bricks. I think they might be a bit exaggerated. I liked the way the concentric circles sink inwards and the shadows bend around the edges.
Exercise in perspective. Digitally manipulated photo of a door and window. It’s created an apparent corner where non exists. I tried rotating the image four times until I was satisfied with this picture. I used the incollage app to do it, I was previously using the old Instagram layout app.
The falcon works in Stoke has an emblem on the wall of the old derelict pottery, it is a Goss hawk. I took a photo of it and painted it onto this wooden planter from Project 2000?in Stoke on Trent. I painted on all the individual bricks too. It’s been outside for a couple of years and it’s still looking good because I put a thick layer of yatch varnish all over it to protect it.
It dawned on me this morning, the walls around me have grown… I’ve felt hemmed in by the pandemic, and tied down by ropes attached to concrete blocks. Not physically but mentally, emotionally, sadly.
Why? It stems from fear of what might happen. There is a word ‘catastrophise’ that I’ve heard recently. Maybe that’s what I’m doing. Plus hubbys situation bothers me, I feel very protective. Then again, as I age, bits of me don’t work properly. I tried to do something about it, but the authorities don’t seem to understand. It’s made me despondent to some extent. My prevarication is getting to me.
Sorry to lay all of this at your doors, I think by speaking out it allows me to order my thoughts. Those walls need to come down, and I need to let some light in, I need to be less of a scardey cat… But it’s not easy..
Bricks or sets? A good surface to walk on, but not for the environment. As the song by Joni Mitchell goes ‘they paved paradise and put up a parking lot’.
Everywhere everyone is having driveways installed, block paviours or tarmac. Repelling water so it runs away quickly instead of being absorbed into the soil. Then the drains flood and storm drains are overwhelmed. Raw sewerage gets released into rivers, which keeps happening. People have been wild swimming in rivers and around the coast for years, but the amount of waste effluent getting into our natural waterways is causing extreme concern for health.
There are new rules to make paving permiable to rain water. But who checks on it. So instead of putting in a driveway think about a more environmental and possibly cheaper option?
Just to show you what I was trying to draw today. Dark and forbidding on the outside. Great place to hear classical music concerts on the inside. I think it was built in the 1950’s or 60’s. Part of the Keele University campus.
Someone had taken off the plaster and replaced the bricks, you could see it, new mortar holding them in place. The house had been bought at auction, half refurbished, needing plasterboard and plaster. It wouldn’t take much to tidy it up ready for the rental market.
But Sam was nosey, she liked riddles, and as the wallwas double thickness and she wanted to fit an extra window, well why not put a lintle in and add the bathroom window here?
She decided to get her brother to help. They would support the top of the hole with a metal beam and then knock out the hole afterwards. They managed to get the beam in but it was late so they stopped.
Early next morning she went to the house. Picking up a sledge hammer she hit the wall where the new bricks were a couple of times, there was a crack and half a brick fell out. She could see, what? Plastic behind it. Someone had wrapped a package up and stuffed it into the gap between the layers of bricks. She hit the wall again, the bricks shattered and fell to the floor. She reached in…. A bag full of ten and twenty pound notes! What were they doing there. They were new style notes, the ones that look like plastic not paper.
Should she keep them? Should she hand them in? The phrase ‘finders keepers’ came into her mind…. Should she?
When we went to the canal festival a few weeks ago we both sat and drew. My hubby did a quick sketch of the large chimney at the back of the museum. You can see that although he doesn’t normally draw he’s got the idea of perspective and the regular lines on top of the bricks are the iron bands supporting the chimney all the way up its length. He’s also included a roof and trees and a brick wall.
Art isn’t something he generally does. He will pick up an adult colouring book sometimes but he tends to colour in with lines rather than shading things in fully. I think that is because he has a lot of anxiety and his mind bounces about and he doesn’t settle to one thing. But he is willing to try. I think that’s important. Art should be for everyone. They might not be Raphael or Titian but who knows what might emerge? Art is, I think, very important to humans, for aesthetics or design, communication or lifestyle. Just do it! ❤️
Mallaband-Brown