New paintings and regular art updates.
I’m doing a project about dragons for college and suddenly I keep seeing them. Today there were two dragon sculptures in our local garden centre. It’s like if you own a certain type of car you will see that type everywhere. Own a mini? No doubt you will see them. Just mentioning a type of car and I think it prompts your brain to notice them.
Anyway I think dragons I will be spotting all over the place for the next few days.
Tired, shaking, aching. Can’t rest, can’t get comfortable, can’t sleep. Too hot, too cold. Got a slight cough. Feeling miserable. Not ill. The injured calf muscle is difficult to position, too painful after three weeks. I’ve slept on the settee with my legs resting on cushions on a stool because straightening my leg makes it cramp up. My sleeping mask that I have to wear to keep my throat from stopping me breathing is rubbing on my nose and puffs of air from it disturb me as I try to nod off. Occasionally I’ve slept in an armchair instead, cushioned up and curled in a ball. I want to go to bed, upstairs. But I’m scared like the Grand old Duke of a Yorks men I will end up halfway. Neither up nor down.
Injury is not only frustrating, it’s confidence sapping too. You don’t trust yourself incase something happens to make it worse. So instead I’m sitting tapping on my phone. Dithering in the cool night air, wanting to be snuggled and comfy. Feeling fed up.
We’ve had a bad couple of months. I’m expecting the fridge freezer to break soon, it keeps filling up with water in the chiller compartment and the freezer gets too cold. Then the bearings in it make loud rattling and creaking noises….
Other things have happened. The cat going missing and being injured, and me pulling my calf muscle. Family and friends have had problems too. The pandemic has hit their incomes. They are working hard against almost impossible conditions. I don’t know what will happen, I just want things to be better for everyone, not just those closest to me.
I would help many people if I could. Love to you all…
1 in 5 teenagers experiment with art….I don’t know who created it, but I love it!
I shared this meme three years ago on Facebook because it spoke to me. Art is so important to the world. You need art to design things, to have an idea of what clothes, cars, white goods, trains, homes, workplaces will look like. Cutting funding for the arts hits theatre, performing arts, music, computer aided design, surface pattern, and so many other services that bring income into countries. It’s not just painting and sculpture, printmaking and textiles, ceramics and surface pattern. Artists and designers help support the world. Next time you use a plate to eat off, cutlery to eat with, use a table to sit at, wear clothes that fit you and are not grey tubes of rough cloth, then remember art helps to design out world.
A friend painted one of these and wondered what it was called. I thought it was a codswallop bottle, but looked it up and codswallop is a word for nonsense, for instance used in a phrase ‘a load of codswallop’ meaning a load of rubbish, or inaccurate, or something that isn’t true?
Then when I looked up codswallop bottle it came up with this: ‘A Codd-neck bottle is a type of bottle used for carbonated drinks. It has a closing design based on a glass marble which is held against a rubber seal, which sits within a recess in the lip. Wikipedia‘.
Thinking about it, could this be a cleaner, greener method of closing a bottle? I think it’s an interesting design. I think it’s Victorian?
I saw a post on Facebook today saying you have to have a high IQ to read upside down. I don’t think that’s true. I learnt in my childhood. I can’t remember exactly when. I can remember seeing my teachers notes, which was useful and I guess that I practiced doing it later on. I also used to look at text in the mirror, probably after hearing about Leonardo Da Vinci. Strange what you do as a child. Maybe it’s inquisitiveness, maybe pattern recognition?
I just remembered this word ‘Maw’, it sometimes feels like social media is a voracious maw, gulping down tons of information and generating a lot of waste or rubbish alongside useful information.
Take the moon landing for instance. There are people today who think it didn’t happen. Some of those people were not born when it happened.
I remember being allowed to stay up to watch it. The grainy pictures, the slow step of Neil Armstrong off the lander. Later visits where other astronauts drove the lunar rover. And bouncing across the surface and one of them tripping over slowly in the 1/6th gravity of the Moon.
Talking about Maws, I remember a Star Trek episode where a giant world eating machine threatens to engulf the Enterprise. Somehow they defeat the monstrous killer.
So why write about Maws? I guess it’s because I keep blogging here. I feel like I’m feeding an insatiable need. Perhaps what I churn out is rubbish? You decide X
You can’t always navigate life in a straight line. Sometimes we search for treasure and cannot find it. There are side roads and cul de sacs that hold us up or block our paths. Sometimes that is our fault, sometimes it can be others. I think somehow you have to accept things and then carry on. It’s been a sad week and I’m not over it yet, but I’m coming to terms with it. I won’t go on about things, you just have to realise that there are people who are far worse off than you. Try and help them if you can x
I went to a gathering earlier this week and met up with other creative people. I’m not saying where because I don’t know their communication protocols. Anyway we were advised someone had tested positive for Covid. The work we did was in large spaces and with social distancing, but we are all going to do lateral flow tests to ensure it does not spread. I suppose I should be OK because I have been double jabbed but I’m wearing a mask if I go near people. If I do catch anything I don’t want to share it.
Have you ever heard the phrase ‘I was dragged up to be polite’?
But I think I was taught to be polite from an early age. Things like being told not to answer back, don’t speak until you’re spoken to, children should be seen and not heard. In some ways those are very old fashioned values, but then I was born decades ago. I was the child of parents born in the 1920’s a different era. Me before Thatchers children were born, my parents before Churchill.
Politeness is important to me. Caring about things, being or trying to be aware of things, but sometimes I don’t notice. I don’t always pick up on what has happened, but at least I have politeness to fall back on. Politeness and politics must be verbally linked. Police is to do with being of the people, perhaps polite has the same root?
Mallaband-Brown