Back to boats

Okay, so I was struggling with this house portrait and couldn't find any paper in my not exactly wide-ranging hoard of magazine pages and clippings and these colours kind of came together into these shapes to make this design.

The local harbour is after all second uppermost in my mind these days.

Something tells me it's going to be hard to find stand-ins for Lake District slate roofs within the pages of Vogue, Glamour and Cosmo. Even though I have some fine potential sheep-y clippings. 

What I really need is a windfall of architectural magazines ...

Bits, pieces and sticky tape

This is a bit of a mess, I know. 

I painted this picture, see, and after spending about a couple of hours tore it up in disgust and binned it. 

The next day I could be seen picking through the rubbish to retrieve it, cut out the re-usable bits, stick them together mosaic fashion and add bits, subtract bits, until I got an idea of what I wanted.

It is now pinned up for use as a working sketch.

Reality re-ordered

Sometimes, just stumbling around from site to site on the Wonderful World of Internet apart from wasting precious time, you come across somewhere really exciting and thought provoking that sets you off on another series of stepping stones. In the end you forget where you were, which in the case of the interesting blog I came across this morning I have. I shall try hard to retrace my footsteps later on.

But I did note down a quotation that popped up on the first page:
"Art, no matter how minimalist, is never simply design. It is always a ritualistic re-ordering of reality."
I love that. I have inscribed it into my sketchbook
Camille Paglia came up with that gem. I had never heard of her before but will now make it a mission to find out more about her.

In the meantime here is one of my re-orderings of reality, a largish (for me!) (21x26 cms) mixed media on paper which was a take on a tiny (7x10) fragment of another.

Gulls and Bunting ...

and stress.
A lot of stress.
I am eating too many biscuits.
This must mean something.
It does.
I am stressed.....
About the exhibition.
So of course I paint a jokey picture.
It must be a compensatory mechanism of some sort.
There is probably a word for it of which I am unaware.
Golly, what a miserable post.
I'll shut up now and roll myself up into a biscuit-eating ball.

Where seabirds soar

I was reading my pencilled in notes in my sketchbook and decided to have another go at the Snowhill mudflats according to the colours I saw at low tide on a darker afternoon.

I am still missing out that almost violent acidic green of the lichen-like seaweed (which probably isn't seaweed at all - I'm not very good on plantlife) that clings to the grasses, pebbles and rusty chains. It's a very difficult colour to cope with so out it went.