New paintings and regular art updates.
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….
My friend Apple has a restaurant and also a coffee shop. The shop has been closed for a while because of the pandemic, but now things are calming down she’s trying to reopen it. After three years she’s putting a lot of work into creating a social and friendly space for people to meet up. She’s given herself a month to get things sorted out. I was talking to her and found this photo of an old painting I did based on the painting Proserpine by one of the Pre-Raphaelite artists. I can’t remember the actual artist.
What I did was to try and copy the painting and add an apple instead of a pomegranate to relate to my friends name. You can’t see but I also painted Apples coffee house at the top right on a sign. Sorry the photos a bit blurry!
Pottery head I made over twenty years ago. It’s planted up with straggly snapdragons this year but this photo from two years ago looks better. I really need to get out in the garden but I don’t seem to have the strength to sort things out at the moment. I’m fed up and I know gardening would help but the heat over the lost few days has made me really weary. It’s been close to 30°C. At least my hubby has been watering plants. Today? We are expecting heavy rain showers, so the plants will get a little water.
How do I reduce the size of my saved photos? I’m getting close to my limit again, so I’m still deleting pictures off blogs. But ideally I want to keep the photos. I could go into a post and edit each individual image, reducing the file size to medium or small? I’d only have to go through thousands of posts? I can’t afford to increase my WordPress /Jetpack package. So I’ll keep fudging things and deleting my most fuzzy or boring photos… Maybe I’ll win the lottery?
Don’t dip your brush in your tea!
It might make it taste foul..
You’ll see!
Oil and water doesn’t mix
And you’ll be in a fix!
Cos your tea isn’t water
Remember you ought’a
Put your mug somewhere else
Linseed oil, or turps taste
Vile, what a mistake…
Take it from me!
When it’s quiet here I can still hear the birds singing in the garden. Blackbirds and Robins seem to sing the loudest, but I can also hear Pigeons cooing and Magpies cackling in the morning as they dive and swoop around the trees.
The blackbirds were singing on top of our neighbours chimney pot, long and varied songs to call for a mate and to display where its territory is. Now they have become a bit quieter, they may have raused their young by now. The Robins still flit about but with the heat I think they are quieter too.
The world keeps spinning and the birds keep singing. I hope the birds keep coming back. X
Three years ago our cherry crop was already picked. The tree came from the old Woolworths shop in Stoke about twenty five years ago. It must have been happy because now it’s about thirty feet high.
The cherries are starting to ripen, but they are not ready yet. Maybe next week we can reach the lower ones. The rest we donate to the birds. One thing I need to do is buy a big umbrella, it really helps to stop the cherries we pick from rolling off into the undergrowth!
I just drew this… I saw a red admiral butterfly outside and wanted to take a photo of it, but it flew off. I decided to draw something against a dark background to make it stand out more. This was drawn in the Artrage app I use, it gives nice metallic effects, hence the abstract look of this butterfly.
Mother and baby macaque Monkey sculpted from an old tree stump. This is at the entrance to the Trentham Monkey Forest. We went a couple of weeks ago and saw a few babies, a bit older than this one. They were swinging off branches and twigs and learning to climb. I think the guide said there have been eight babies born so far this year.
They are happy in our climate because they originate high up in the mountains in North Africa so they are used to wide temperature variations. The monkey forest is part of a group of parks, the rest are in France, and they are working to conserve the Macaque population. Worth a visit.
Mallaband-Brown