New paintings and regular art updates.
Digital manipulation of paving blocks. The colours are from water and green algae on the blocks. The perspective of them means that because I have mirrored them both side to side and up and down there appears to be a bulge in the centre of the picture. I again used the Layout app that comes with Instagram to do the mirroring.
Abstract digital finger painting I have called ‘pulled’…
Tension twangs
Pulls me three ways
How can I help?
Who needs me more
Stress hold my hands
Pulls my heart out!
How to split
Yourself between
Three different problems
Three people stuck?
If I’m pulled one way
I’m lulled into
Security,
But then it comes again
Another pang of guilt.
So show me a way to help
Them..
But me too!
Walking home, Stoke-on-Trent, about 3.15pm this afternoon. The low sun barred by dark clouds. It didn’t rain but the bright sunshine really shone out behind the clouds. The lamp posts give a sense of scale. You can see the shadow of the cloud on the right cast at an angle so it gives an indication of where the sun is. It never emerged as I walked as the clouds were really slow moving.
Why do I feel hot? I’m melting. Not my age? It’s winter, I’ve got the heating on. But I’m hot. I’m not ill, I was, but I’m getting better. I guess it’s because I have been standing in front of the cooker making tea (evening meal). I was looking for a drawing to show how I feel and this one from a couple of days ago illustrates it well. As you get older life seems to get more complicated. I swear I think bits are going to start falling off me!
Anyway, I’m feeling a bit better. But even so, I think I will have an early night. Life, its wonderful but complex.
The trouble with blogging is that you make friends and then after a while they might disappear. Suddenly they go into the fog of the Internet. It’s not clear if something has happened to them or if they have just left. Thankfully people do write and say they are going sometimes. That’s not as bad. But it leaves a hole in your life when you’ve got used to reading their words. You can go back and look at previous posts but it’s not the same. Or you can find them on other platforms. I remember finding someone on Instagram after they had left here. But a few months later they left there as well.
It’s also a shock when after losing touch with people over the years you find out they have died. It happened last weekend, someone I had known for a while had passed away. I asked her husband how she was and he said she had died two years ago. He said everyone in the town knew she had passed away. I had to explain that I don’t live in that town so had not found out. I was so sad to have discovered she was gone.
The worst thing I think is Facebook memories. Someone who has died will suddenly appear on a memory. Or their birthday will show up. It can be disturbing. There should be a memorial button. A way of closing an account without erasing them. Meanwhile. If I decide to leave WordPress I will try and remember to let people know. X
Flames of light
Lick the canvas of sky
Bright gouts of pink
Orange, red, purple
Watercolour wash
Or oil paint smother
Icing on the cake
Of the day.
Fire in the sky
A beautiful tie dye.
How do I draw from imagination? I talk and think my way through things, by describing how they should look in my mind or verbally helps to make me think more about details of the image I’m drawing.
For example, this drawing was based on a memory of my walks in a local park as a child. There were trees that seemed to have faced in them. They were probably Ash trees, they seemed to have long spidery branches with tipped up ends like fingers. The path wandered around past stone walls that I used to balance on. Behind me was a play area with a slide, swings and a roundabout and seesaw. This is a memory drawing so it isn’t exactly accurate and things have probably changed a lot. I haven’t been back for years. But the face in the tree gives me a bit of a feeling of nervousness I used to get as a child.
A banner for one of our Penkhull Mystery Plays. We hold them most summers and the one this was painted for was about the pottery industry and its history. This banner was based on the willow pattern famous in the potteries. Spode was one of the factories that made plates and pots with this design, but if you Google ‘willow pattern’ you can find lots of images from many manufacturers.
Blue acrylic paint on a canvas cloth. It took me a while to paint. I also painted the local church and methodist Hall as they would have appeared in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Pandemic=lockdowns=not going out=buying online.
But if you wear a mask and social distance, you could go into local shops. You could spend money at places that are hitting brick walls when it comes to trading and selling. Local shops bring trade into towns and cities. Money spent there is shared round the local community and can be reinvested. You can spend online but that money just goes to massive industries and into the back pockets of billionaires.
Think first, buy local if you can or buy from independent makers. X
I added my easle yesterday. Today I’m showing you my easle two years ago, I did a painting of Etruria Flint Mill. It’s also called Jessie Shirley’s Bone and Flint mill I think? It’s the only working Steam driven Flint mill in the country and the flints and bone were crushed and ground using the power of the steam driven beam engine there.
The buildings are part of Etruria Industrial Museum, a complex of cafe, the museum displays, and the Flint mill on the Trent and Mersey and Cauldon Canals at Etruria, Stoke on Trent. I’m not sure of its opening times. But once a month it used to be fired up and you could watch the fly wheel rotating round and the pans where the flints were ground rumbling as the engine turns them. Its amazing to see the industrial archeology of the potteries in action.
Mallaband-Brown