Art Gallery #6: Video Slideshow

Here is a video slideshow of my paintings and drawings from last year. I hope you enjoy looking through this collection of watercolours, oils and drawings, plus a few related photos.

So other than making a few videos, what have I been doing? Since Xmas the life drawing group which I attend has been suspended due to the organiser's ill health, but to keep drawing regularly I began a new daily sketch project. It's been fun to turn these into little slideshow videos which you can see in posts below or on YouTube. Do subscribe to my channel there, as more videos will be posted regularly and there are already over 70.

Last Wednesday saw me enjoying lunch in Southport with my sister Evelyn. We had a slow amble round the shops and between us bought absolutely nothing, excluding the utterly gorgeous orange and chocolate cake from a cafe in the Wayfarers Arcade. The arcade itself is a genuinely beautiful Grade II listed building with a lovely arching glass roof and ornate mahogany shop fronts which remain unchanged since Victorian times. The sad thing is that almost all the shop units stand empty. I have to wonder what the future holds for this genuinely elegant arcade which seems likely to become another victim of greedy rents and rates combined with a deflated economy and the changing face of high streets.

Britain is now teetering on the brink of the Corona virus outbreak. Some people seem certain this is a diarrhea virus rather than a flu virus, hence reports of panicked purchasing of loo rolls the world over.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that ordinary, everyday flu caused between 9 million and 45 million illnesses, between 140,000 and 810,000 hospital stays, and between 12,000 and 61,000 deaths annually since 2010 - and these figures are only for America, never mind the rest of the world!

Really, just chill out, enjoy some more orange and chocolate cake, and for goodness sake wash your hands properly.

Comments

A Cure for Aging?

"All that we profess to do is but this, - to find out the secrets of the human frame; to know why the parts ossify and the blood stagnates, and to apply continual preventatives to the effort of time. This is not magic; it is the art of medicine rightly understood. In our order we hold most noble -, first, that knowledge which elevates the intellect; secondly, that which preserves the body. But the mere art (extracted from the juices and simples) which recruits the animal vigour and arrests the progress of decay, or that more noble secret which I will only hint to thee at present, by which heat or calorific, as ye call it, being, as Heraclitus wisely taught, the primordial principle of life, can be made its perpectual renovator...." Zanoni, book IV, chapter II, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, first published in 1842. Oroboros keyring - Spooky Cute Designs The idea of being able to achieve an immortal life is probably as old as human life itself. Folklore and myt...

Remembering Richie Tattoo Artist's Studio

Richard in the street entrance to his tattoo studio in Liverpool. The vertical sign next to Richard is now in the Liverpool Tattoo Museum. Yesterday, my sister Evelyn, Richard and myself stood outside Richard's old tattoo studio and looked up at the few remaining signs, whose paint has now mostly flacked away to reveal bare wood. On the studio's window are stick-on letters which read, "Art", where once it boldly announced his presence as the city's only "Tattoo Artist". I can remember him buying that simple plastic lettering from an old-fashioned printer's shop. This was in 1993, not long after he'd opened the studio and before he could afford better signs. After he'd patiently stuck them onto the glass we realised that from the outside the sign read "Artist Tattoo", so we had to carefully peel the letters off the window and have another go, laughing over having made such an obvious error yet worried in case we spoiled the letteri...

Dear Diary...

Do you keep a diary? Why did you start it, and, if you started one then stopped, why was that? What sort of things do (or did) you write about? I ask as, as a long-time diarist myself, there is an interesting piece in The Guardian today which talks about one woman's diary habit, which she began at the age of fourteen. I started a diary around that age too, but destroyed it after my mother accused me of using cocaine. A stern scene followed, with both parents perched ram-rod straight in their armchairs, while I was subjected to a heated inquisition. Where had I bought it, and who from? Didn't I know such things led to death and doom? I struggled to decipher their bewildering accusations, until Mum blurted out, "I read it in your diary!" To find my diary, Mum would first have had to rummage through my dressing table, obviously when I wasn't around to protest. Her intrusion on my privacy was assumed by both parents to be acceptable, and now, with this handwritten c...

Search This Blog