Skip to main content

Confused Flowers and Reincarnated Paint

 

In-progress oil pastel sketch of Birkenhead Park

It has been a very long time - years, in fact - since I had used oil pastels. I'd been tidying up my art studio when I came across them stored away in a wooden box. The photo above shows a nearly-finished piece based on a sketch done on location in Birkenhead Park, where I've been regularly sketching for six years or more. I quite enjoyed using the oil pastels, and so may well turn to them again. The drawing is on dark grey A4 Khadi paper.

While tidying the art room I also found two tubes of watercolour so old they'd gone solid. Rather than throw them away, I carefully cut open the tube, scraped the pigment into a large-sized palette, ground it into powder then mixed in some water. This has since dried into two pats of paint, one yellow ochre, the other crimson, which will be put to good use now they've been given a new lease of life..

Our garden seems to be confused. The winter jasmine is now in flower but so are the fuchsias and dianthus. The lawn has devolved into a saturated quagmire as we've had so much rain. The temperatures have been mild for December, with only one frost so far all winter.

Mum's settled into a new nursing home in Southport, following the closure of the place where she had been living for the last two years. The new place is a modern, purpose-built facility which offers several community rooms including a bistro.

While typing this, I'm waiting for a man from a guttering company to arrive to inspect our leaky gutter. Yes, the same one which was supposedly fixed earlier this year by another company but clearly wasn't. When I grumbled, the company owner came out to look at it again, agreed that it was still leaking but said he'd "done all he had said he'd do". Erm, didn't that mean actually fixing the leak?!! End of interest, on his part. So, the person due this morning is from a different company, (and we'll simply never use the first company again, even though we'd originally planned to).

Rosie and Jim.

Rosie and Jim have now been with us for one week and are settling in well. They're very playful and friendly, and almost housetrained. They clearly love having a garden to play out in, and have been exploring a huge pile of dog toys. Rosie's the feisty one of the pair - half the size and twice as yappy as Jim. They're both absolutely gorgeous little buddies - 15 month-old siblings from the same litter; chihuahua crossed with an unknown breed. They're both very reactive to other dogs when out walking, so that is something we'll have to work on to improve.

We adopted them from Freshfields Animal Rescue, who have a no-kill policy and who offer sanctuary to both domestic and farm animals, look after any health issues and aim to re-home them appropriately. They're always in need to funds, of course, and are a registered charity. You can read more about their work on their website.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
15 comments
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Falling Trees and Blue Portraits

Birkenhead Park Visitor Centre, 7th April 2019, by Adele Cosgrove-Bray. My ongoing series of sketches in the park continues unabated, as is evident. On a few recent sketches I've added some simple washes of watercolour to bring another dimension to the scenes. I've long grown accustomed to sketching in public, and the few people who've passed any comment have always been encouraging. I've even unintentionally captured a tiny bit of park history:- I drew this lovely arching tree in February this year, and since then its own weight has pulled its roots out from the ground. Probably due to safety concerns, it has been brutally cut back so it's now little more than a stump, and the horizontal section, with all its vertical branches, has been removed. Hopefully the tree will survive this harsh treatment. "How can walkies please, when every step's a wheeze?" by Adele Cosgrove-Bray. Portrait by Adele Cosgrove-Bray; chalk and charcoal...
11 comments
Read more