more death, only slower, and more free easels

Further insight into The Book About Death yields this, a less hurried way of looking.

Also, you may be pleased to know that I contacted Winsor & Newton about my missing easel parts and, following two weeks of pleasant email ping-pong to establish exactly which bits were missing, they posted the missing parts, absolutely free. Now, you can't say fairer than that. My thanks to Alison at W&N.

underground art

This thing I have about the web, well, a friend once told me when talking about work, ''you only get out what you put in!''. (He must have changed his mind because recently he was telling me how much he hated his job, working long hours, but that's a story for another time.) Well, I don't know about work but it seems to be true for trawling the web. I'm on a mini-roll here...

This is a find: Linear, a series of pencil portraits found at Art on the Underground. It's unusual as the drawing process is captured on film and accompanied by conversation with the subjects as they're being drawn. There's also background noise that makes up the working environment, hence the idea behind Linear. The artist is Dryden Goodwin. He tells it so,

'Linear exists as a repository of insights and histories, anecdotal and factual, revealed through the interplay of the drawn line and conversation, that is unique to the Jubilee line at this particular point in time. Drawing someone you've never met before results in an intense encounter and enables a unique intimacy to develop. As the portraits unfold, so too does openness in the conversation; Linear is all about different types of connection.'

To me, it's a wonderful example of drawing as performance art.

art strip

As the web expands it naturally thins out. This is, no doubt, why I've let my interest in some areas lapse. Like Flickr. However, one of the resilient wonders of the web is the way people from far off make casual contact. I find this heartwarming. The human race is a good thing.

In my inbox this morning is a Flickr notification of contact from Alan Cichela. Finding his comic strips based around artworks is love at first sight. I wish I understood Portuguese - Alan hails from Brazil. The google translator is a bit ham-fisted, I may have to persevere, but as they stand they are delightful images.

I iGoogle.

It saves time, sometimes.
You never know what it might turn up.
Wiki-How is a feed.

How to Live with a Perfectionist
(do they mean me?)

How to be Active Before Work
(steady on, now!)

the funny thing was the image that greets you on the perfectionist page (see right), well, I'm sure it's by fellow Moleskine Exchanger Mike Kline! Small world.

hi-ho

Spring is here and I'm bored with working inside. This time, last year, I was free to dedicate 100% of my hours on the allotment if I so wished; now I have to work.

It doesn't help that I can't seem to get the measure of the brief for the job I'm currently involved in. One day you can't do too little, the next too much is not nearly enough. It's the business-political aspect I never get; I'd much rather set-to to do the best job I can, regardless. Still, I quietly remind myself of the mantra: nothing lasts forever. There's light approaching clearly from the end of the tunnel. All I need do is steady myself on the footplate and keep shovelling in the coal...

someday my prints will come

Many moons past, I made a multi-media illustration inspired by a prompting website called, I think, Artwords. I can't remember what the prompt word was either but the illustration featured a doodle of a fisherman pulling a net amongst newsprint waves while being assailed by a shoal of flying fish. What troubled me was where the idea of the fish came from. I wouldn't want to argue that anything in art is original but these fish, though not copied, were naggingly too familiar. Last week, I found the similarity with MC Escher's flying fish. Case solved.

I'm 97.3% decided to enrol on a printmaking class, particularly one involving block cutting. I'm fascinated with these things. From my naive point of view, the success of these comes in two directions which, in my ingorance, I call the illustrative and the geometrical. The illustrative tends to have a laboured, old-fashioned feel, so I'm drawn towards the simpler looking geometrical. I've also been charmed by the effectiveness of these simple designs using MDF board, by Nat Morley. I'll have to get a head start on any course and get my thinking cap on about subjects and designs...

missing the point

The Beauty of Wind Power. Nice!

vs.

Rubbish Photography. Er, nice too.

The camera always, always lies.

barking

The remarkable thing about Percy Edwards was his ability to mimic animal noises convincingly. Accurate enough for the film industry to regularly employ him to overdub sound effects for countless movies over three decades. If this ability wasn’t special, no doubt he would have passed away in relative obscurity. He could have been the exception which proves the rule: why keep a dog and bark yourself?

The smartest riposte I heard a colleague give to a meddling architect was; Please allow me to know my job.

when you mention death, I hear violins

Life class isn't going well; I'm just not in the zone with it this time. I console myself by picking up a pair of studio easels, gratis. They'd been removed from their usual corner and placed in the naughty corner opposite, one bore a roughly penned note warning, ''broken, do not use''. Well, I asked if I could have them, to save them from being thrown away. That was last week. This week, after spending a half hour simply dismantling and reassembling, I have one perfectly good easel, albeit mucky with old paint, and a second mucky easel with only one missing bolt and wingnut, and a small wooden clamping piece which any numpty can fashion from a common or garden offcut. Brand new they'll cost £85 a piece. I'm as chuffed as a chuffed thing can be.

Trawling (I'm lately regarding this as a more suitable adjective than surfing) the net for inspiration, I stumbled upon this project from last year. 500 artists submitted a postcard-sized work to be included in a book entitled, A Book About Death. Brazilian artist, Angela Ferrara, compiled this superb video-slideshow of the exhibits. It runs a little fast for me [old codger!] but you can pause if you're quick [I should've kept up playing vid games!], and the music, though not unpleasant, wasn't what I'd choose when looking at pictures about death, or artwork of any sort. It's a bit full-on. You can always mute, of course. It's worth going to Youtube and watching in HD rather than this little embedded view.

perspectives

Illustration friday's topic this week is Perspective. Here's a strip I did for Moleskine Exchange. The height of a tree is inversely proportional to the distance the observer is from the top. This is exactly the same law that governs time travel: the closer the observer is to their youth, the longer things are. I was reminded of this when I remembered reading Brave New World at college; I must have been eighteen. Yet I knew before I was sixteen I hadn't started reading anything significant. At the time, I clearly remember I was sure I had wasted half my life to illiteracy yet now I realise it was barely two years....

The Three Trees: an allegory of the three worlds?

(I don't know)

click for a bigger view