Monty Python!

What makes you laugh?

I wanted to find an image to represent Monty Pythons Flying Circus, but WordPress doesn’t have any pictures of it and I couldn’t find an image I was able to share from Google.

So I made my own up!

Monty Python was on British TV from 1969 to 1974. I wasn’t allowed to watch it when it was first shown because I was too young. But I saw and enjoyed it later on.

It’s cast, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, John Cleese and Graham Chapman, together with other actors and comedians created an anarchic, silly and surreal brand of humour, consisting of a series of  sketches, often with a running joke threaded through them. Often the sketch would peter out and a cartoon foot would come down from a precenium arch and squash the characters. That is what my illustration is about.

Notable sketches included the dead parrot sketch about a pet shop selling a Norwegian blue parrot which was actually dead, also a dance where two men dressed in uniform take it in turns to slap each other in the face with fish, one eventually falls into the sea. Hells grannies was about a gang of frightening grandmother’s who terrorise a town. They all made me howl with laughter.

Once the TV series stopped the pythons made films like The Life of Brian, The Meaning of Life, and Monty python and the Holy Grail. The cast aso made their own separate films for instance a Fish Called Wanda and Time bandits among others.

As this is a long time ago you might not of heard of them. Go look them up. It’s worth it!

Finished Green woman

Commissioned acrylic on canvas. A surreal abstracted spirit : Green woman. With antlers adoring her head. It’s taken months to finish because I shake even though it’s only about A4 size. I imagine her standing in a grotto of trees, hidden from mortal view. She is nature, watching carefully as the land changes through time. She fights for the natural world and environment.

Face in a landscape

Painting from a few years ago. I sometimes come up with ideas I like, but I don’t keep doing the same things over and over again. I’m not sure if I could keep repeating an image with just little changes. Once you start doing that you might as well be creating Christmas or birthday cards.

I like being experimental. I might not always get it right but if I continue I learn with each effort. This acrylic on canvas is quite surreal, but why not?

The Third Policeman

Have you read the third policeman? A book by the Irish writer Flann O’Brien.

It’s very surreal, with a cash box full of some sort of power, a nameless narrator who gets involved in trying to claim the box. Other characters are embroiled in a very complicated situation. I can’t remember all the plot because it’s long and entangled. I read it 40 years ago, and I know it’s somewhere in our house, but where?

There are three policemen in a barracks that are guarding machinery that change sound into light? And something about the atoms of men migrating into their bicycles and vice versa. You get so far through the book and then realise it is repeating itself. A bit like a sci-fi story of a repeating time line.

Flann O’Brien was the pseudonym for Brian O’Nolan who wrote the book between 1939 and 1940 but it wasn’t published until the 1960’s. I wish I could explain it better, but if you want a peculiar and though provoking book maybe look it up?

Flying ariels

Surreal image just created by mirroring a photo of an ariel in front of a cloud. The angles of the ariels make them look like they are floating or flying. I’ve seen other people’s photos years ago doing a similar process. The images they created looked like strange insects, with wing cases apparently made of windows and antenna from TV ariels. It’s fun to create odd images like this.

Imagined characters

We had to imagine some characters to add to an illustration so I drew these. I’m not sure whether they are OK. I did a large face so it comes forward in the image, a genie that eminates from the gas fire in the illustration and a fairy just taking in the view…

The resulting image is quite strange, with added fix, owl, horse, bug and cat. Then I added some flowers and plants..

Bad photos so I used filters on my phone then Instagram to bring out the colours, I need to find a way of taking pictures without shadows and glare on the page….