Train

There was a man

Now please take note

There was a man

Who had a goat

He loved that goat

Indeed he did

He loved that goat

Just like a kid

One day that goat

Felt frisk and fine

Ate three red shirts

Right off the line

The man, he grabbed

Him by the back

And tied him to

A railroad track

Now, when that train

Hove into sight

That goat grew pale

And green with fright

He heaved a sigh

As if in pain

Coughed up those shirts

And flagged the train!

Bill Grogan's Goat

(Traditional)

Guilt's a weird feeling, isn't it?

I don't know why we have 'guilt'.

There must be some biological reason?

Maybe it's so we don't run off with the other fellow's bear skin cloak (or his missus) and that helps us all live harmoniously together in the one big cave.

At the moment I am supposed be doing my tax.

But I'm not.

So I feel guilty.

But I'm also waiting for a man to come and give me a quote on laying a new floor in my foyeur.

He's not here yet. I wonder if he missed his train.

If he did, I know where he'll find it. 

At the bottom of the yard near the old sepulchre.

I've been waiting for another fellow since February to lay the floor. He seemed real keen, a nice chap, a friend of a friend. He had honest eyes and a professional way with his tape ruler. After more than two months he rang up last week and told me he couldn't do it. 

If you look closely in the image you can see him too. 

He's not the child. ;)

See you next week :) 

Thank you for your visitation.

And just like in real life, everything gets bigger if you click it.

Wild

 

 

Holly came from Miami, Florida
Hitch-hiked her way across the U.S.A.
Plucked her eyebrows on the way
Shaved her legs and then he was a she
She says, "Hey, babe
Take a walk on the wild side"
She said, "Hey, honey
Take a walk on the wild side"

Walk On The Wild Side

Lou Reed, 1972

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Remember those "halcyon" days of our youth?

 

No, me neither.

 

 

 

 

 

The first time I heard the word 'Halcyon", was the same day that I heard the word "Luddite".

They came from the mouth of the same man, a friend of a friend.

  

I was a naive 29 year old. He was a worldly man with too much money and a world weariness that hung around him like the smell of a freshly boiled onion. We were on our friend's boat out on the harbour, drinking almost French Champagne and watching  the world go by.

 

Our mutual friend was newly very rich and enjoying his wealth by acquiring paintings, toys - (Sports Cars, Ocean Cruisers etc)  - and houses over looking the water. Even with all that, he was a "good bloke" - and very generous. We met when we were studying English Lit together.

 

 

 

 

 

Of course I had to ask what both words meant - and I've never forgotten what a Luddite was - because as I grow older, I feel like I am becoming one.

 

But Halcyon? I never quite grasped the meaning. 

 

So let me google it.

 

 

Ah, here it is. Halcyon:

 

A fabled bird, identified with the kingfisher, that was supposed to have had the power to calm the wind and the waves while it nested on the sea during the winter solstice.
 

Well I never knew that.

 

So the Halcyon days of our youth translates as: "those particular days of our youth that we used a fabled bird to calm the waves so we could nest on the sea."

 



And by some dogmatic coincidence, that is exactly what my illustration is about......

 

 

 

 

 

 

Verdaccio
 

Do you know the word Verdaccio?

 

Well, it's something the old master's used to use occasionally (not the word but the technique). It's where you paint a green monotone under painting - a dead painting) then glaze over it with translucent colours. The idea is that the green under painting glows through the warmer layers and gives that nice harmonious glow that suggests depth in human flesh.

 

I've been invited to a show with "Nightmares" as the theme - so I've been working up this painting.
for a few weeks. It's 90 by 120 cms on linen.

And in  that time I've spent a lot of time looking at anatomy drawings as well as Greek statues. It's all very interesting what they were doing a few thousand years ago. I've also been looking at Da Vinci's working methods and his sketches. How smart was he, eh? What a mind....

In verdaccio  you are supposed to paint two tones lighter than the finished painting is meant to be.
So I still have a lot of work :)

The big advantage is that, in taking out the colour parameters, you just need to be making tonal decisions for the underpainting stage. It's a learning curve -  but not very steep. I'm also changing the characters as I go, slimming them down, changing hand positions etc.
 

Above and below are pics of  it as a work in progress in situ in the studio. If you look very closely you may recognise some of the characters.... :)

PS: Whoever invented the saxophone obviously thought no one in their right mind would ever try to paint one.

 

 

 

 

And finally, below, a self portrait (the big guy, not the rat).

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks for looking. Hope you are well!

 

 



Urban Sprawl

Oh dear,

This weeks prompt for Illustration Friday is "Urban" - which you probably know now, but I'm guessing that, at some time in your life you will probably forget.

So it's important for at least one of us to write it down somewhere - just in case.

In case...

In case? Of what?

Oh I don't know, it's like, it's like... don't you ever have the urge to save your bus tickets and file them away alphanumerically in the top drawer of the manteau in the second bedroom where your Auntie Agnus used to sleep in the eighties  ?

Go on, admit it.

You never know when some black suited men are going to bang at your door one Friday night wanting to know where you were at exactly 8.15 am on July the sixteenth 12 months ago. Well, if you have a carefully arranged drawer of bus tickets (like myself) you will be able to tell them exactly where you were - that is if you happened to be on a bus on that particularly morning and kept the ticket.

So there's a moral there. I'm not sure what it is, or how important that moral is, but it's a moral all the same.

Well now that's out of the whey (my wife has started making cheese)....

This image is enthusiastically dedicated to the encephalitic dog-hearted varlot (EDHV)) who threw an empty beer bottle on my front lawn last Friday night, hoping the cover of darkness would shield them from retribution.

Well, it (the cover of darkness) failed.

I have a good description.

This EDHV was between seventeen and fifty, either a male or a female, probably somewhere under 180 kilos and likely to be under 250 cm in height. They were wearing some kind of footwear and staggering slightly. They were probably also wearing a black bra and a striped ladies cap - but are no longer, cause they are the two items of apparel I found by the side of the road on my way for a surf the next day.

No to mention the half empty coke bottles and the suspicious looking resealable plastic bags that, judging by their size and emptiness, must have previously held something.

So dear beer bottle-less, black-braless, brainless twit (I left out the double you the first time I wrote that last word), you should be shaking in your size 6 to15 shoes, waiting for retribution.  Myself? I'm going to get dressed in my new shiny black suit and come banging on your door this Friday night.

You better have your bus tickets ready....

Err, while looking for a definition of Urban in case I was getting it mixed up with Urbane, or Suburban - as opposed to the antithesis of "rural" I found this defintion of "hipster".

Hipsters are a subculture of men and women typically in their 20's and 30's that value independent thinking, counter-culture, progressive politics, an appreciation of art and indie-rock, creativity, intelligence, and witty banter.(snip). Although "hipsterism" is really a state of mind,it is also often intertwined with distinct fashion sensibilities. Hipsters reject the culturally-ignorant attitudes of mainstream consumers... etc etc etc

I think I'm going to be ill... ;)

Thanks for looking. I hope you are well and sharpening your pencils to good points.

Edit: hah, I just read this and realised I sound like a cwanky old twit ;) Well, that's okay....

Don't you love cranes? So elegant arent they? Just like ballerinas- but they (cranes) don't wear tutus. And they don't make really big crashing noises when they land on the stage after doing a ronde de jambe grand jette pas de tout grande and peitit mal coup de grace avec escargot.

But seriously, have you ever sat really close to the ateg (that's an anagram for "stage") when ballerinas are dancing? They sound like elephants. That's why they need the orchestra - not for the music, but to drown out the noises of those wooden stuffed ballerina shoes landing on the wooden floor of the stage.

See what you learn when you visit? Amazing isn't?

Just think, next time there's one of those embarrassing pauses at your next dinner party you'll be able to say:

"Guess what Lady Lord Mayoress? Did you know that the most common cause of ballerina death is by foot septicaemia? Remarkable isn't it? But even more remarkable is that, in 90 percent of cases this is caused by infected splinter wounds traced back to the wooden inserts of their ballerina pumps? That's why I'd like you to sign my petition against wooden inserts used in ballerina shoes. Not only are they causing frequent deaths in the u nder eighties age group but they are putting a reprehensible strain on our health system. With this I will not up put!"

Or something like that :)

Whisper

THE RAVEN

ONCE upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"'T is some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door;
    Only this and nothing more."

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore?"
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore:"
    Merely this and nothing more. 

If you are a highly educated, refined and intelligent human being like myself, you probably recognise the above as the first and fifth stanza(s) of Edgar Allen Poe's poem The Raven.

It may surprise you to learn that I have not always been the well educated, highly cultured, smoothly debonair blogger that you see before you today. In fact.....

In fact, there was a time in my life when I thought "Poe"was the kind of face that you pulled when you passed the neighbour's kids in the street.

In double fact, the first time I was exposed to The Raven I was about 19 years old.  (I guess that explains everything really...)

It was winter. I was home from uni with a miserable cold. The sofa under me was brown striped. Both the sofa and myself were in my parent's living room. From where I sat, I had a good view through the mesh curtained window at the cream coloured weatherboard wall of the house next door.

The sofa really couldn't see a lot because I was sitting on it and blocking its view.

Brian, our tortoishell cat was sitting on the window sill in the sun, staring back at me. (Well, to be perfectly honest, he wasn't really looking at me - he was actually looking at the object in my right hand.)

You see, in my right hand I gripped a half full bottle of a cough mixture called Actifed CC.

The other hand (the left) was slightly numb and held nothing.

The bottle of cough mixture was half full because I had been swigging on it for the last few minutes, waiting for the cherry flavoured cough medicine to reduce my horridly rough throat to something smooth and serene . Something smooth and serene like... like - well a baby's bottom comes first to mind but there seems to be something politically wrong with that metaphor so I am going to choose "like melted butter mixed with a good helping of very warm rum and raisin icecream".

In a nutshell, the effect of the cough mixture was very interesting.

After a few more swigs I noticed that the room seemed to take on an unusual perspective, as if some mad photographer had attached a 28 to 400 milll zoom lense to my eyeballs and was twisting it from one extreme to the other every few seconds.

Of course the moral is, always read the directions before you drink more than half a bottle of cough medicine.

What's this got too do with Poe's The Raven?

Well, usually it wouldn't have anything to do with it all, but it so happens, that, at the exact time that the cough medicine bottle was in the throws of being emptied, playing on the tape deck on my father's stereo (at full blast I am ashamed to say) was an album called Tales of Mystery and Imagination, by the The Alan Parsons Project.

And it had a song on it called The Raven - basically Poe's poem put to music. You can hear it here if you like.

But the really very interesting thing about the song is that it was the first song in the entire big huge  humungously large world to feature a digital vocoder - which means absolutely nothing to me, but Wiki seems to thing that's pretty neat so I thought I'd throw it in.

So now you know.
And if you ever tell anyone then I will just have to go back and finish that bottle of Actifed CC.
So consider yourself sworn to secrecy shhhh. :)

Gah, I just realised that I have written my three hundred words for this post.

And I was going to tell you about how I turned one hundred and seventy eight last week and for my birthday I received an amazing Olympus Camera. 

And I was also going to tell you about how I won the crazy talented artist Janne Robberstad's January give away!  http://www.spindelmaker.com/ Thank you Janne I am honoured!! I'm not kidding about Janne's talent, take a walk through her blog and you will be inspired by her grasp of so many artistic techniques and her never waning enthusiasm for learning - not to mention her oeuvre. 

But more about that next time ;)

See you. I hope you are well and your life is full of joy.

PS everything gets big if you click it.

Myth

The first step in a journey is always the hardest, eh?

Ah did I mention 'eternity'?

I guess I should explain about this fellow.

As you can see, he is not exactly in Heaven.

 In fact when he was on Earth he did bad things. He told lies, he didn't go to church on Sundays, and when he was a really little boy he used to pour the milk that his mum and dad thought he was drinking down the sink while they weren't watching.

But you see they "knew". 

Thanks to Breughel, H. Bosch and the paintings on the back wall of  that medieval Cathedral in Toulouse - paintings designed to scare the daylights out of the peasants so they handed over their tythe.

Thanks for looking. Clicking makes everything bigger.....

see you :)

The Man With The Red Ball Head

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hello? Hello? Hello? Is this thing on? Tap Tap tap.

Thank you for everyone's well wishes! The show went very wonderfully well :)


And now it's Christmas, and what have we done?
Well, we done aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh.
The same as last year.

Do you know the secret to a long life?
The answer is to park your car in a differnt spot every day.
Seriously.
Well metaphorically seriously.
That is, the trick to making your life seem longer is to do something different every day.

Isn't it curious that we always remember the pain filled days? The days when something obnoxiously horrible happened. As opposed to the days where nothing happened, where we went about our business and weren't run over by a truck, or the world didn't end, or we didn't drop our ice cream cone in the gutter before we even managed to get a lick in.

So my advice to you is, apart from parking your car in a different spot everyday, is to lick your ice cream cone as soon as possible, before something obnoxiously horribilllious happens to it.


Have a wonderous New Year and a marvelous Christmas and a joyful Mawlid al-Nabi  if I don't see you before hand.

By the way this post is for Illustration Friday's "Glow" :)

But before I go can I leave you with Wallace Steven's The Emperor of Icecream  ?

 

The Emperor Of Ice-Cream

 

 Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

 

Take from the dresser of deal.
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course, though many commentators  much smarter than myself feel that the implicit theme of The Emperor of Ice Cream is "seize the day", I personally still feel that the real theme is "lick the ice cream".

 

So there.

Take care :)

Hugs from Oz.

 

Thank you for visiting my blig by the way (okay, okay I meant to type "blog" but "blig" has such a ring to it.....)

Tree

 

A.Finnie. "Birdie Park" (detail) 2011, acrylic on canvas 40x50cm

Well, guess what I've been doing? 

Yes, I haven't been visiting blogs, I haven't been surfing. Instead I've been ringing up news papers, designing posters, thinking up wonderful things to say about myself that slightly resembled the truth, I've been trying to buy bottles of wine for less than three dollars that don't have the distinct aroma of Eau de Chat Derrier, I've been addressing envelopes, googling addresses, licking stamps (some of them taste like strawberries) and , above all, trying to find a pair of trousers to fit me on opening night that doesn't make me look like an upside down version of one of those people who blow up a washing glove and stick it on their head so they look like a chook on steroids (chook is Australian for chicken eg Hey Bruce! Get aload of that old chook over there sitting near the bill a bong)

This for Illustration Friday's "Tree". (So wasn't the Tree of Life half tempting, aye?)

I hope you forgive me for not visiting :( Life is due to return to normal any year now....

Hugs from Oz!

PS we even scored a segment in the Trevisan International Art newsletter :)

A.Finnie. "Yellow Chrsyanthemum"  2012, acrylic on canvas 40x50cm

Jennifer.Finnie. "Lazy Summer" 2012, acrylic on linen 30X25cm

 

 

 

 

Robert.Birch "Baraka 1" acrylic on canvas 40.5x40.5cm

Practicing one wall of the "hang" in the studio.

Haunt

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Okay, I admit it...

I do have a skeleton in my closet.

It's my Aunt Mabel's -

She wasn't using it so I borrowed it.

Took an awful lot of digging to get it though....

 

Thank you for commenting on my last Haunt Ces :)

Yes I got dragged to the anatomy library once.

 

All those heads in jars, flayed, spliced, boiled and diced....

 

I'm sure they are all

very nice.

 

But it just wasn't my thing!

 

see you! :)