There must be many versions of what it means to be a good person. Way beyond my level of pondering. I think a good person needs a percentage of a bad person. The tension of bad in a good person provides texture and tenacity, creates balance and perspective. Too much goodness can be pappy, flimsy…. dull.
With no bad how can you even gauge goodness.
This water colour sketch works because the pristine white pebble is both cracked and reflects the colours that surround it.
Remove the crack and something vital is lost to the overall vibrancy of the image.
The image becomes pleasing but with less of something intangible.
A good person with no bad is the same . Pleasing of course, but with no tension to frame and enhance the good.
I think Autumn has properly arrived, I have cooked a crumble.It was either an accident or serendipity.
This fabulous collection of beach findings caught my eye in the sharp shafts of sunlight that are indicative of this time of year. They were collected in the summer by one of three granddaughters and stored in the studio which they also use as a playroom. I found it when I had to change the position of the blinds in the room. Just 3 mussel shells an oyster shell and a cracked pebble. But the composition is so lovely I will just return it to the windowsill where it had been placed for safety
An unplanned autumnal arty moment.
The actual autumn project was a still life of a coffee pot with a plain white coffee cup. The coffee in question, Ethiopian Sidamo is new to me and I am quite obsessed by the flavour of it
As part of my still life painting plans, I posed the flavours that I get from rhe coffee. Which we bought in France two weeks ago.
Milk chocolate, Orange and cherries.
The cherries were the inspiration for the crumble. Which is a slightly curious pairing,.Apple and Cherry crumble anyone?
My plans for today.
Domestic Admin
Prep/planning for a still life representing the flavour of Sidamo Coffee.
Walks with Lola
A painting started
What have I actually achieved ?.
Domestic Admin
Prep planning for a still life representing the flavour of Sidamo Coffee.
Walks with Lola
An unusual crumble.
No painting. And now two to do instead of the original one.
Breakfasts are very predictable in this house on a Monday. Here we are eating pre-breakfast in the book corner ( left over weekend croissants) while the eggs scramble. But all is not as it seems @theoldmortuary. Breakfast was served early in the yard!
There is a passing resemblance to scrambled egg but we tend not to perch on our breakfast whilst eating.
A late blog for a Sunday . We had a birthday party to attend and an overnight stay for the birthday girl.We are all over the excitement now so time for quiet contemplation of old images featuring words used in previous blogs.
Every morning on my way to do Jury Service I passed this street sign. No need ever for jury service if everyone adherered to this simple request.
Natural comedy.
A question of Letterpress.
Something for a Sunday . ( I know I used the last two images yesterday but good text is always worth repeating.) And I am on the flip side of a sugar high.
Every picture tells a story. Yesterday any pretence that Summer was still with us slipped away. An autumnal greige day with rain and grunginess, marked that a line has finally been crossed. Another line that was crossed, was the image storage provided by my blog hosts. Time for me to take some immediate action. 10 years of images to go through, clearing out duplicates and images that had been stored, but never used. A job much more pleasant than clearing out the garage, that had held a five year archive of 18 years of my arty, but no longer relevant stuff. But clearing the garage taught me that arty clear ups are a good thing. A digital clear up involved no dirt, no trips to the tip and no spiders. Just an hour or so with a cup of coffee and some digestive biscuits, and some lovely memories, not all of them the smiley sort of memories, some were sad as memories can be. But life is a blend of happy and sad which every sentient being has to navigate. Going through the pictures was a record of where I have been, which has put me on the path of where I am now, and ultimately where I am heading off to. Although that of course is somewhat unknown and I like that about life. One picture I retrieved does accurately reflect the end point of all of our journeys.
Clearing out the garage was such a good thing. My whole creative life feels lighter without all the stuff that was, at times, essential to getting a Fine Art degree as a mature student. Sometimes I just go in,look at the empty space, and enjoy the almost nothingness of it. It also attracts envious gentleman callers who would do all sorts of things in there if they had the opportunity.
Nobody is going to stroll into my more spacious digital archive and have fantasies about sprockets, lathes and vices. But I know there is now ample space for more pondering illustration and that feels good.
Sunday’s blog will be a trip through the cleared out archive in no particular order. But if a picture of a pre-paid grave ( not mine) is a low point, then the sign outside a Chicago Church is surely a brightener for a Saturday morning.
In fact yesterdays morning routine was a monthly routine. Once a month a group of artists get together to chew the fat , plan exhibitions and share tips. We are encouraged to be creative at the same time. Multi tasking, with cake eating and coffee drinking is also integral to our decisions.
I was painting a water-colour layer to enhance a photograph that was taken two days earlier after a really lovely swim in Firestone Bay.
Water colours* combined with a photograph are how I produce my Hybrid prints. The watercolour is how I add emotion, atmosphere and vibrancy to the experience of being there in that specific moment. I also use watercolour to add the complexities of the weather and temperature of that moment.
*I mostly use a watercolour layer but the additional layer can be a monoprint,another photograph, textiles anything that can create the essence of what I am striving to capture.
The photograph this watercolour needed to enhance was good enough in its own way.
But it was bleak and chilly as is entirely normal for 5pm in mid-October. The swim one hour earlier had been unseasonably warm. We had all stayed in longer than you might expect for October. The whole experience felt like a warm summer evening, lots of chatter, a good bit of exercise.The harsh reality of the landscape felt softer and more vivid than it really was.
I trace the point where I will register the two images and then forget all about the photograph. Painting entitely from memory/imagination the sensation of the moment. Everything flows from the register point. In this case it is also the vanishing point but that is accidental
Then I just have to photograph the water colour and stick the two* images together.
*Sometimes I create three or four images to stick together. Nothing is guaranteed, the whole project can be a disaster or turn out nothing like as well as I had hoped. This one came out just as I had hoped.
The Watercolours are not wasted. I can work into them later with pen and ink.
The reason I am sharing the somewhat ponderous technique I am evolving was an on-line conversation I had yesterday with a schoolfriend.
Funny how a chat with a lovely man that I have known since we were both 11 made me distill my thoughts.
Even funnier is the realisation that only came from that conversation.
At no point in my medical imaging life did anyone accuse me of not being a ‘real’ radiographer or not giving them a ‘real’ diagnosis because I was using digital skills.
Plenty of people have exactly that opinion of using digital skills to produce art…
Plenty of people are incorrect.
The finished article.
3pm The Swim zone.
And because digital can change a mood.
5pm An early evening dog walk. Reflecting on an unexpectedly lovely swim.
This was the scene for my first cup of tea of the morning. A crescent moon still slumbering in the sky.* Millbay is the port that lies to the front of our house. Best known now as a ferry port and leisure harbour. But it has quite the history, one of the the lesser known events was the secret arrival of the survivors of the Titanic.
Two hours later this was the scene at Firestone Bay whilst I walked Lola and drank the last mouthful of the first cup of coffee of the day.
In between I had breakfast, a shower and sketched out an arty idea that has been taking a good old bit of pondering over the last two days.
I was even caught pondering it in the street yesterday. I had failed to notice a friend who was aware I was mulling over a gnarly old admin problem.
She thought I was deep into the gnarly old problem when in fact it was nothing more serious than arty farty ponderings. Once I had got it out of my head and onto paper there is no need to ponder it until the next stage. Did this sudden mental freedom immediately fill up with problems of the old and gnarly sort? It did not. I would say beyond the delight of a gorgeous morning and a fine cup of coffee my mind was completely blank.
I went swimming with some neighbours about an hour before I took the photo that I based this image on. It was a memorable swim because the water was crystal clear with gentle waves and still warm enough, for staying in longer to swim and chat. 17.2- 17.9 according to satellite measurements. The air temperature was about 12.3, 5 degrees lower, which made changing a little chillier than we have become used to. The weather station is not too far, as the seagull flies, from where we swim. So I am able to get my science facts to sit alongside my experiential reactions.
Yesterday was the first time since early May that I had to hunt out a pair of socks to go for a dog walk after my swim. I may also have been feeling cooler because, after the domestic admin of the day I had been working on the painted layer of one of my hybrid images. Trying to represent the different energies of drinking mint tea in the garden of a bookshop. Located in the Gulf of Morbihan, 200 miles south of Plymouth 10 days ago.
We had anticipated cooler days but Brittany was experiencing a glorious Indian Summer which had us hunting out shady spots.
How will we remember the glorious, extended summer of 2026?
I am uncertain if being kind is the most underated life skill, or the most easily forgotten. Many people view it as a weakness or something that need not apply to them. Others think it is a selective skill used sparingly at times and then gushingly like an incontinent water main. I find this sort of person somewhat awkward to interact with.
That being said I do possess some unkind bones in my body , everyone needs just a few for protection or good comedic moments. But a whole skeleton of them is not a good thing in my opinion.
People with full skeletons of unkind bones see kindness as a weakness. I think of it as a bit of a superpower. Kindness brings warmth into most situations.
Humans are funny old things we tend to remember the bad stuff or the sad stuff: the unkind words and deeds much more readily for some reason. Which is why kindness is just so important, used effectively it can make the sad and bad stuff just a little bit more tolerable and balance, where possible its nemesis, unkindness.
I’ve been playing around a bit, with colour temperatures for prints created using photographs and digital manipulation as my practice place. This cool hued image above represents the early morning of a day that turned out to be the most delicious Indian Summer day in early October. But I stood in the exact same place searching for a breeze in the midst of the summer heatwaves. Looking at the actual photographs there is not a huge amount of difference but by changing the colour of a future print version I can get the essence of oppressive heat in an open space.
Similarly on a very hot day on our recent trip to Brittany. We sought refuge in a bookshop with a cafe.
This is what we got, but what we hoped for was more like the image below.
But sometimes there is no escaping extreme heat. And as October wends its ponderous way towards November I will be dreaming of those over-hot moments soon enough.
