Having a 'Boy Look'

In  Australia we have what is called 'having a boy look'.
A good example is where a man goes to the fridge looking for the beers he knows he left there the day before.  Yet even though he stands in front of the fridge for ten minutes looking and looking, he cannot, for the life of him, find his beers.

Eventually he'll slap his thigh and shout into the next room to his wife:
'Hey love where's my beer? Ya didn't drink it did ya?'
And then the wife will shout back: 'Naah, didn't touch it'
'Well I cant see it! You musta moved it if you didn't drink it'

At this invariably the wife will sigh loudly and drag herself away from the TV (unless she is watching Oprah,  in  which case she will wait for an ad break), go into the kitchen, swing open the refrigerator door and lay her hands on her husband's beers laying in plain sight.

She will then say to her husband, without a hint of irony :
'Well love, you musta had a boy look, eh?'

I know this doesn't happen in other countries of course, just here. ;)

But seriously, thank you for the kind well wishes. I am still in my brace. The six weeks will be up on Monday and hopefully I will be back on the keyboard then.

At the moment I am still using my left hand for everything. Which is why I am writing rubbish.

But I had two epiphanies yesterday.

Firstly I discovered that if I hold a knife in my right hand (the one that is secured in the brace) and I hold a tomato in my other hand, then,even though I cannot move my right arm and shoulder, I can cut the tomato by swinging my hips so that my right hand goes back and forth like a pendulum- and with it the knife.

Go on, try cutting a tomato with only one hand - I dare you. And you'll see what I mean.

 Admittedly at first I tried to skewer the tomato in place by sticking a metal skewer through it and pinning it to a bread board - but that didn't work because it was a plastic breadboard and the skewer kept bouncing of it.

 I also tried holding the tomato down on the bread board with my nose while I cut slices off it (the tomato), but after ten minutes I only had two slices, neither of which I could convince my wife to put on her sandwich.

I don't know why.

After all I had washed my nose before hand.

I guess she just wasn't hungry.

Oh these images? They are Bo Peep.
She hasn't lost her beers - she's lost something else.
I guess she's just having a 'boy look'.

thanks again for your kindness.
I'll have to tell you about the other epiphany next time.....
ps if you click the images they get big

Oh almost forgot to say that the genesis for this image is Bruegel's The Blind Leading the Blind.
Bosche and Breugel being two of my favourite painters of course :)

The Perennial Gosling ...

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

AWAKE! for Morning in the Bowl of Night

Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:

And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught

The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.

Dreaming when Dawn's Left Hand was in the Sky
I heard a voice within the Tavern cry,
"Awake, my Little ones, and fill the Cup
Before Life's Liquor in its Cup be dry."

And, as the Cock crew, those who stood before
The Tavern shouted -- "Open then the Door!
You know how little while we have to stay,
And, once departed, may return no more."

(Fitzgerald Translation)                  

Did I ever tell you about my friends Bob and Siggy? I had the honour of having Bob as my painting teacher at college for four years.

Bob and Siggy are artists.

Artists in that they are both amazing painters. Siggy has just been in shows in New York and Tuscany. She starts painting in her studio at 8 am and finishes at 2 am. Every day. She paints large paintings that seeth with her own personal iconography. Her icons, mysterious and animalistic, are to her paintings like the aphabet is to a writer.

Bob on the other hand is a draughtsman like no other. His pen and ink work is wonderous, his water colours are .... are ... ahh how do you describe a watercolour that in one passage has all the resilient glow and beauty of the best  of traditional water colour then suddenly slides off the paper into an abstract swirl of Turneresque etherealness....  Think Modigliani meets the fauvista Andre Deran. But better. 

It's silly trying to describe paintings eh? Maybe I should just say that the Queen of England has the good taste to have one of Bob's paintings in one of her palaces.

So what's this have to with the Rubaiyat?

Driving along the beach drive, on the way to dinner the other night, my friend Bob looks up at the night sky and sprouts the first verse of the Rubaiyat. Well how beautiful are those words eh? And I had never heard them spoken aloud. I, supposedly an educated man! Obviously I am not.

I was astounded. Speak that first verse aloud the next time you see the first star in the twilight sky and you'll see what I mean.

Though I did not deserve the honour, I'm proud to say that I was in a show with Bob and Siggy a few years ago. You can see some of my paintings from the show here  if you ever wondered what my traditional landscapes look like. There's some reviews at the bottom of this post.

I don't get a chance to brag much :) But as the next stanza suggests, life's short. Thank you for reading!

Whether at Naishapur or Babylon,

Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run,

The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,

The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.



Death of a Pushbike

Okay, sorry I've been away so long. I've spent a month making an 'artists' book.

Ahh, before I get jumped on..... that doesn't mean that I'm claiming to be an artist. It just means that I am making a book in the style of an artist's book. They are quite fashionable here. I can tell that because my local art shop no longer sells much art stuff like paints etc. It sells craft things. And all really, really, really really expensive. So expensive that us poor people can no longer afford to be painters - so it's lucky they don't sell paint.

See, it's a self fulfilling prophecy.

Now of course the book is fantastic. As you no doubt guessed from the above image, it's a rewrite of the Hansel and Gretel story from a feminist perspective with particular emphasis on diverse destinies and the intimate relationship of the the melodious noise the witch makes (as she is being burnt to death) to the alto tenor solos heard in many Post Modernist operas....

Before I started this 'artist's' book, I realised I didn't have a clue what I was doing, so I spent several minutes on an intensive internet search of book making methods. After much aaghing and ooohing and bottom scratching I decided to go with the Japanese Folding style book (JSFB). 

Now why a JFSB? 

Well, to my simple mind it looks easy. No fancy doody Coopernook stitches, no expensive book braces, no arithmetical challenges trying to work out how many folios of  blindfolded flour pages I would need for a 17 and a half  tonne tome. All I needed was a realy, really, really, really long piece of paper.

Well, the best laid plans of men and mice doth go astray.

Now if you don't know Japanes Folding books they are one step removed from scrolls. The difference being is that the JSFB is not rolled, but folded like an accordion. 

The book is about 5o pages long (not bad for four weeks work) and each page is landscaped A4 at 297mm long. So that means, from beginning to end, the book is approximately 15 metres long.

15 Meters? That's where the fun starts. 

Now the last time I played with glue and bits of paper I was about six and young enough to make the discovery that glue tasted pretty good. Apart from that, I recall that I was master of the wrinkle stick, the bubble grab, and the 'oh my thumb's stuck to the back of my ear' move..

Now a lot more than forty years later I have rediscovered that, although I can no longer lick the glue off my toes, I am still am a crappy "gluer."

Ahh, but why am I telling you this? It's because I have this theory that I need to put stuff in the blank black spaces between images.

But the really interesting part about making this book is this: You see,  I have discovered that only people who live in really long houses will be able to read it.

Okay, enough rambling.

About this image? 

Okay. To be truthful it's Giselda. You know, that  girl who was imprisoned in the tower and forced by an old witch named Mary to spin gold into straw. 

In this image Giselda has discovered that, by deconstructing her brother's push-bike and adding the pedals to the Spinning wheel, she can do the job in half the time.

 The raven's are, of course the witches pets, left there to spy on the girl's technique. 

Soon, courtesy of her push-bike pedal discovery (PBD), she will soon be replaced by machines and lose her job. She will then be given in wedlock to the first woodsman who wanders by. The woodman will feel sorry for her because of her left eye traumatic cataract, and the really bad scar she has at the base of her neck. They will have eighteen children, all of which will eventually become associated, in some way or the other, with various medical professions.

:) :)

Thank you so much  for looking at my work. Recently I had the honour of having some work posted, along with the wonderful image maker  Ces, on Illustration Poetry. 

One of the images from my artist's book is there.

Thanks Mita, you rock :)

Phenomenon

Oh dear, just got back, the surf was rotten, the sand is stuck in my right ear, I am brown as brown toad and have lost so much weight that my head reminds me of Iggy Pop (on a bad hair day).

Anyway, thank you for all those great comments on that last one. You are very patient to read my ramblings.

Checking out  everyone's blogs now and I see I have missed some zingers  whilst I have been away.

You know, the thing that gets me about blogging is how I see all the artists improving so much. It's like : "hey, there is an audience, some one is looking, so I better pull something out of the hat."

And so hats off to you.

You know who you are. I bet you can feel it in your bones.

Gee I'm getting a  warm fuzzy feeling in my left ankle. 

Better quit  while I'm a head. (What image does that last sentence make in your mind?)

Oh, this is my image for Illustration Friday "Phenomenon".

Originally I had a bunch of kids playing with a Ouijie Board summoning up Uncle Arthur wrapped in a sheet and looking like a primal Ectoplasm. The file I was working with was about 2.5 Gig - and takes about fifteen minutes plus to save. So, of course, being a boy, I only saved it once in the course of the morning.

Ugh. No need to tell you what happened.

Thanks so much for looking.

See you at your blogs.

:)

PS: yes the image has something to do with Phenomenon. I had to make, let' see, one two three four five ... ten new kids for it. 

Should have been eleven eh? :)

Illustration Friday: Paisley

Paisley: An Ancient Swirling Pattern from a Town With Celibate Brythonic Origins?
Or a Green Summer Leafy Vegetable?

from our National Geographic Consultant, George Carrey-Urdu in Urkanistan

Well, for a start, why celibate?

 Hmm --- my personal feeling is that paisley (the design) is what people who are inordinately attractive to the opposite sex wear, to ameliorate the possibility of them reproducing.

That is, to me a 'paisley' design on any item of clothing - especially if it has the colour green, or red, or yellow, or blue - is the ultimate anti-aphrodisiac. Unless of course, you were into "gamete fusion" in the swinging sixties - then paisley is 'hot' - especially when combined with LSD, mari-juana and BEX.

Meanwhile, back in the swinging 400's (AD) in Britain just south of
the Firth of Forth, apppeared a group of languages called the
"Brythonic languages" - which eventually evolved into the Welsh,
Cornish, Breton, and Cumbric dialects.

"So," you ask, "what's that have to do with Pailsey?"

Well, it just so happens that Pailsey means paddock in the Brythonic lingo.

So if someone comes up to you and asks you in Brythonic, "Where are my cows? (Tá áit mo bha?). A great answer would be "In the Paisley." (sa Pailsey) - assuming the cows were actually in the "Pailsey'.

"Okay, okay, but what's this have to do with 'pailsey' design?"

Well, if you've researched this weeks illustration prompt as I have, the first thing you would have googled is 'paisley' (well I actually googled 'parsley' because of my dislexia -which made me was very confused for a while).

If so, you probably already know that the paisley design originally came from Titszxatasgan in Persia where it was known as "mankolam". For some reason, historical design kind of people think paisley designs from Titszxatasgan resemble a mango.

Consequently they relate the paisley pattern to Hinduism (the Kalasha – coconut circled by mango leaves on a pot - is one of the ten most important symbols in Hinduism.) Wow, what a jump in thinking.

To me, as a post modern abstract expressionist, I find paisley designs look like, not so much a bunch of mangoes, but a bunch of dried eggplants that have been flattened by a bulldozer then ornamented with a pattern of flowers sprinkled artfully over the remains, the whole lot being coloured in Neo Magic Textas by a colour blind chrom-satyriasis, (from the Greek σατυρίασις, from σάτυρος - meaning an unatural excess of colour-lust).

Leaving the Hindus aside and fast forwarding to the 17th century,
when the East India Company bought paisley and other Indian
patterns into Europe. There they became so popular that the poor starving Capatalistic East India Company was unable to import enough to meet the demand.

Hence, on 7th May 1640, smart locals in Marseilles hopped on the 'paisley' bandwagon and began to mass-produce the patterns via early textile printing processes. England, then Holland, soon followed (in England it was the House of Lords attempt in population control by way of introducing the "anti-aphrodisiac paisley pattern for poor people act" - AAPPFPPA for short).

So, in keeping with the AAPPFPPA, exactly 100 hundred years later, on 2nd March 1859, the overpopulated Scots stepped into the 'paisley scene.".
Not content to just let their men wear dresses or get slaughtered by the
English at  Battle of Culloden, the Scots actually volunteered to make
cloth in paisley design.

Hence, in honour of their sacrifice, the sleepy town of  "Swamp-ben-loch" in Scotland was renamed "Pailsey', after Sir Ian Pailsey, who invented the washing machine - and hence made washing garmets like Paisley less of a nightmare for the modern child less woman......

And so history was rewritten on my blog.

Tommorrow I'll tell you how, on the 12th March 1964, the world famous "Chinese Gosberry" was grabbed by three wily New Zealanders, who after a remarkable marketing strategy which lasted fourteen days and fourteen nights,  released it back into the world as --- "The Kiwi."

Stay tuned, and thank you for looking. Sorry about the formatting.

Sunlight and Shadow

 

I did this one to illustrate the concept Sunlight and Shadow. Initially I had a "bad man" in the shadows in the background, but it looked too creepy - so I took him out. Poor bad man.... Thanks for looking.