Tag: Life

Panto

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Have you heard of Panto? Or better known as Pantomime?

No? It’s something that goes on here in the UK around Christmas time.

Usually seen in a theatre it consists of brightly coloured sets, with brightly clothed people, messing about, telling an adventurous story while telling awful jokes and singing contemporary songs.

We do this in Penkhull, but for the at two years someone from the group has written the panto/pantomime, rather than buying in a script.

We started rehearsing last week. Lots of people who have done it before, greatful to get a couple of lines and be able to play act again. Most modern pantos seem to have commercial sponsorship, but in our case we just mention local shops. We don’t have advertisements in the panto, unless it’s jokey ones in the programme.

This time we are doing Aladdin. Set to open for four performances (too many for’s?) in February 2020, so the cast can take Christmas off!

Oh yes we can!

Greif

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I just unlocked some grief, from long ago. It was hidden deep, the reason why I don’t buy many clothes and shoes for myself. 

Why I feel guilt, and hurt, sad to be left behindy by my dad. 

Father died and we had nothing but his bequest to buy clothes for his funeral. That set up the guilt, Mom needed the money more than us. But she insisted, we had to be smart. Look nice. To choose our own outfits. I think that has always stayed with me. Grief and guilt mixed into a behaviour. Still sad now all these years later. 

Too many photos

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Anyone who follows my blog know I illustrate it with my own images and not stock illustrations. But my images are a bit too large and I keep getting memory too low messages again.

Previously I paid extra to get more memory, but I really can’t keep doing that. I am not sure how to reduce the image sizes so all I can do is delete pictures off my earlier posts here. I’m not taking them off the site pages, but from the blog posts. I’ve several thousand to go through, and I don’t think it will seriously impact on the posts….

 

The little Goldmine

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Saw this in Burslem today. On the main road from Cobridge up to Burslem.

Arthur Berry was an artist based in Stoke-on-Trent where he produced pictures of everyday figures and landscapes with a style of his own. Charcoal and pastels are used to chisel faces out of blackness, strokes of grey and white float on top of murky reds to bring out the dark shapes of buildings.

Arthur was also a writer and poet. We attended several of his plays when they were performed at the Victoria Theatre in Hartshill, Stoke-on-Trent in the 1980’s. We have a copy of a couple of his books. He was a very creative artist.

Having a sketchbook

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I’ve been taking my sketchbook with me recently because of doing the one inch drawing challenge. That’s meant that I have drawn pictures as well as photographing them.

Yesterday I was looking at autumn trees in front of black and white buildings (the architecture looks like its from the 1920’s or 30’s.) Sturdy, tall trees were starting to colour up as autumn starts to bite. The branches were swaying and soughing in the wind. This is a season I can relate too. It’s sometimes quiet and misty, other times dramatic. That’s what I enjoyed about drawing it. Trying to bring a bit of that drama into it. You can’t draw every individual leaf in a ten or fifteen minute sketch, but you can try and add movement.

For information I used an a6 sketchpad and a unipin fine line pen size 0.8.

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Gone

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The room was empty, their belongings? Gone. She looked around in disbelief. All of their stuff, years of accumulated debris, old cd’s, videos, books, clothes. Everything, even the plates out of the kitchen. The knives and forks, her old egg timer. It was like someone (him) had magiced everything away.

She had been away for three days, a course in Devon. After a long drive home she had been looking forward to coffee and an early night, not this?!

She walked slowly up the stairs..

The only things left were a wardrobe, a clothes rail, and the bed. Nothing else.

She lay down on the bed, confused. She didn’t know whether to ring the police, his parents, or just wait. How long did you have to wait to report someone missing? If he’d taken everything he must have left deliberatley?

A knock at the door….. What? She walked downstairs. She saw his face through the window. Why? She opened the door, ready to scream at him. He held up his hand. Sorry I wasn’t here. He said, everything happened too fast! It was meant to be a surprise….

Im sorry he said again. I’ve bought a new house… What? Where? How? Was what she said..

I won the lottery, he said.