Advice for Medieval Monks.

     Sorry I've been away, fell down a well again (as my friend the Labrat noticed). Whilst down the well I was thinking about my work and I realised that a lot of my images were ... err disturbing.  Not to mention the accompanying text.

    Well, they weren't disturbing to me, just to other people.

     Now, contrary to what it might indicate, this doesn't mean that I, personally, am disturbing. That would be like accusing my Wacom of being haunted, or my Cadmium Red Winsor and Newton pigment of being cruel.

    In fact I'm a fun loving guy who loves to grow flowers (dandeloins), vegetables (garlic chives) and rarely pulls the wings off flies -  unless they are really, really annoying me.

   It's just that I do medieval. I like to do Jungian Shadows. And I like teeth.

   Last week I did the Illustration Friday prompt "Duet". I'm sorry I didn't post it.

   It's at the end of this post - which is, you guessed it about the prompt 'Bottled".

   But in truth, this post is about thanking a few friends.

   I've turned off comments for this one. Instead of commenting, can you do me a big favour and visit   Ces and Bella who are organising a fund raiser for the recent Tsunami in Japan? It's a chance to aquire some of their amazing work and help people as well.

   You  can find Ces here. And Bella here.

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       And my conscience has been bothering me. People I have met through blogging have been exceedingly wonderful to me. I don't know why, I don't think I deserved it one little bit. I've been lucky enough to have been honoured bt being featured on a few blogs - and you know what, I've never said thankyou in the appropriate manner.

      Ugh.

        So here goes. First up I'd like to say thankyou to my friend Janne Robberstad, who in October last year named me as an artist inspirational. Now Janne, if you haven't seen her work, is one of those people who can do anything - and I mean it - and do it with flair. You can see her post here.   Thanks Janne :)
       Please take a look at Janne's work.

Next I'd like to say thanks to Amalia. Amalia's blog 'Art Memoirs' feautures artists from around the world. She featured my work in December last year. The post is here.  Thanks Amalia, that means a wonderful amount to me. If you haven't seen Amalia's own art, then you aint seen nothing!

       And thirdly there's the wonderful Bella. Now I can't really give you a link to that post for various reasons (the main being the opening line of the post), but I can tell you her work is so gorgeous that her last post attracted about 130 comments!

     You can find Bella here.

     Now the last artist I'd like to thank is Jack Foster. If you think my work is odd, strange macabre, well Jack Foster, who makes me laugh like a kid when I see his work (I laugh with it not at it!) has managed to make a small story about it that proves that I am a fun loving guy after all. Thankyou Jack!!!
     Please have a look at his post. It cracked me up. And it makes me look nice.

And lastly, thanks so much to everyone who commented on my last few posts!  You are very kind.



The Last Ball of Red Wool - Revisited.

I once wrote a very bad book called The Last Animator.

The book was about a chap (our hero) who was locked in a cell with a fellow named Newton. Newton had this habit of banging his head against the cell bars incessantly - and when I say incessantly I mean incessantly.

 Day in, day out. Minute after minute, hour after hour. Incessantly he banged his head. Adfinitum. Circum maximus nauseum, bigtimeus.

Eventually our hero, whose one heroic quality was that he could make wonderous fantasical animations with his mind, was driven mad by the constant 'boink, boink, boinking' of Newton's skull against the iron bars.

It was a sad book. A bit like 'War and Peace' meets 'Dr Zeus'. 

Sad or not, I'm sure it might have been a best seller had any of the fifty six publishers I sent it too been intelligent enough to have to published. It was a cutting edge novel that would have sent people to the shrinks in droves. The novel would have boosted the  global economy like a ripe progesterone inflated hen sitting on a small New Zealand geyser - and we would not have had the stockmarket crashes of 1987, 1991 and 2006.

But all jokes aside, writing  that book for me was either cauterizing, cathartic or cathetizing - depending on your viewpoint.

But one thing the book was most defintely not - was a 'coif'.

Now 'coif' is an interesting word.

"Coif' may sound familiar because it sounds like "coiffer' - like in hairdresser - partic. usage:  "to be coiffed" per example: "I was coiffed nicely at the ball by Roger de Vanderbongl".

As you can see it's sort of French, and oddly enough is the thing that circa 1066 the Norman's put on their heads before doing their 'thing' at the Battle of Hastings. Consequently it was usually made of chain mail. Along with their hauberk and chausses, the coif was 'de rigger' in medieval combat.

But how does that fit in with my novel?

Well it fits in in all three ways!

Obviously a coif in itself, being a prophylactic device ( prophylactic def:  acting to defend against or prevent something)  was a type of anti-cauterising object - in that it negated the need to be cauterised because if you were lucky you didn't get any head cuts.

Also in it's way it was cathartic, because it helped heal old emotional wounds, expecially if you were the Duke William  of Normandy whose feelings had been hurt by the nasty English who didn't want to give him their throne.

As for 'catheterizing"? (def: to introduce a catheter into a body cavity.) For that we must turn to the English side. So in King Harold's (the English King's) case, you can say he was cathetrized orbitally with a Norman arrow. The Normans were the 'catheterizes", King Harold was the 'catheteree" and, finally, the arrow was the 'cathetererer". And in a way Harold was also cauterized.

Consequently, it all fits together. Catheter, cauterise and catharsis - especially if you know anything about the Battle of Hastings.

 If you know nothing about it, well you probably think I am raving on.

Now, while we are on the subject, another thing a 'coif' is not is a 'sweater."

So, though the Illustration Friday prompt this week is "Sweater' and though these dwarves appear to be knitting sweaters, they should in fact be disqualified because they are merely knitting 'coifs".

I guess the caption is something like:

"It was a bad night, the night of the fifteenth, when Gerald Drawblehood, Captain of the Dwarven Knitting Association (Men's Division) announced to his half brother Cedric, that they were down to their last ball of red wool."

Thank you for looking. I will come visiting tomorrow promise. As soon as I have seen my shrink. :_

Happy Tuesday. Err I mean Wednesday. And I apologise to all those people who have visited to see this post already, to find it vanished. :(


Oh and check this site out! http://martavicente-dibujos-pinturas-objetos.blogspot.com/


Which I found through Don Roberto's blog.

Fairies and Dwarves and Cheese Breathing Monsters

Well  as soon as I read this weeks Illustration Friday prompt "Reversal", my mind (of course)  immediately jumped to the concept of Critical Flicker Fusion Frequency.

And I can understand that most people probably thought of the same thing - so if I visit a dozen other blogs and find that most artists have illustrated Critical Flicker Fusion Frequency for their IF topic - then I won't be in the  least offended - dissapointed, but not offended.

Of course I, like most people,  jumped on the concept of CFFF (the standard abbreviation for Critical Flicker Fusion Frequency) to illustrate "Reversal" because CFFF is one of the adaptations that humans have developed to help us survive in the wild.

More specifically, CFFF not only helps us catch things like rabbits and worms - it stops us being eaten.

But how does it do that? (You see, even though I don't have a spell checker and can't type for chips, I try to end each paragraph with a question to encourage you to keep reading).

To be honest, now we are halfway into this post, I should also admit  that  CFFF does not only stop you getting eaten - you can also use it as a conversation filler. Just like I am now.

You see, CFFF, like lots of other seemingly boring concepts, has more than one use.

For example: in the middle of your next dinner party when there is one of those embaressing lulls in the conversation where every one suddenly stops talking at the same time, and then stares vacuously into the billowing convection current depths of their Salmon Soup waiting for someone else to take up the metaphorical conversational ball .... well with the concept of  Critical Flicker Fusion Frequency firmly under your belt, that person who takes up the ball can be you.

No questions asked.

So it doesn't matter which one of your dinner guests has been discovered having an affair with another dinner guest's wife, daughter, mother-in-law etc, you'll soon have them transfixed with spondules of giggleing joyful gaggling laughter once you introduce them to the miraculous concept of CFFF.


But why is CFFF so interesting, and how, exactly, does it stop you getting eaten?

CFFF  is all about the human eye, which is why it's so important for artists, hunters and human beings in general. (Next week I'll give you Mach bands and the concept of temporal and spatial summation to jolly your guests with.)

 So if your mind has already started to wander, it's now time to pay attention.

You see, in the human eye there are basically two types of photoreceptors - rods and cones.  Though rods are great for vison in low light, you can't see colour with them and they have lower resolution than the cones.

Cones are great for detail. You use the cones of your eye in the centre of your  vision so you can read, watch television, or spy on your neighbours' teenage pot smoking children.

On the other hand you use the rods for your periphereal vision.

And that's where CFFF comes in.

Basically Critical Flicker Fusion Frequency is (from Wiki) : "the frequency at which an intermittent light stimulus appears to be completely steady to the observer. Flicker fusion threshold is related to persistence of vision."

So....  have you ever noticed that a flourescent light will flicker in the corner of your eye and drive you nuts? Or the same with old fashioned Televisions?

But when you look at it directly, there is no flicker at all?

Well that's because of the CFFF! How exciting is that eh?

Well, it even gets better.

The reason you see the flicker in the corner of your eye and not in the centre is because the CFFF in your peripheral vision is lower than your central vision. That means you need a higher frame rate (flicker rate) for the light to be seen as non flickering in your peripheral vision.

So although the rods in this area are low resolution, they make up for this by being able to see movement much better than the central of your vision. They will pick up a quick movement in your side vison because of their higher CFFF (or was it their lower CFFF?).

Now isn't that wonderful? Can you picture in your minds eye your otherwise moribund dinner  guests wriggling with excitement over their lime sorbets as you regail them with this titbit of data!

But wait. There's more!

So why is a higher peripheral CFFF a handy thing?

Well, basically it means that you can see a small movement out of the corner of your eye.

That means  CFFF helps you see small edible animals (worms, rabbits, guinea pigs, dragon flies) when they are not directly in front of you.

But the other thing was with this wonderfully interesting and endlessly fascinating visual phenomena, is that, with CFFF human's can also pick up, in their peripheral vision, the rapid movement of mean things with sharp long teeth - mean things like lions, tigers, wooly mammoths and 'no name' brand monsters.

And that brings us directly to the IF prompt.

Reversal - in that, in the time you have been reading this post, the hunters in my images, have become the hunted.


Obviously they need to train up their CFFF a little more.

Did you know that Hercules Poirot is on at 8.30 PM Sunday Nights here in Oz?

He'll be on in another twelve minutes.

Which is a bummer.

Because I still had to tell you about the Blue Fairy, how she also fits into this week's theme.

Oh well. Maybe I can work the Blue Fairy in with Mach Bands, and Temporal and Spatial Summation - the subject of next week's potentially rivetting and award winning post..... :)

Please click the images for BIG.

As always my apologies for raving on. I just needed some text to separate the images. Otherwise they look too crowded.

(Don't forget to have that dinner party next Saturday night. Invite lots of boring people so you can practice all the new techniques you learnt here today.)

 

The Transpotated Joy of Being Cessinated

(Warning: Rambling post ahead)

Did you know that English is a language of relatively few words?

Yes, hard to believe isn't it?

If you are a native English speaker, your personal vocabulary is only about 20,000 words. And, of these words, you probably only use 2,000 on a regular basis.

Two thousand? It's not much really, especially if you spend a lot of time talking, or blogging, or even commenting on art work. Using myself as an example, just listen out for my use of  nice, wonderful, gorgeous, colourful, super, beautiful, excellent, congratulations - these and serviceable words like them come up over and over when I comment. And over. 

Not that there is anything wrong with them. On the contrary, they are all positive words that make us feel good and should be used more often. But they are just prime examples of the chosen few - some of the 2000 old faithfuls that I rely on in our communications with fellow beings.

Hola gente maravillosa, siento que no hay traducción al español. Voy a tener que traductor Google buton dispuesto lo antes posible. Pero este mensaje tiene un montón de palabras que (I made up the words!) he aprendido de memoria - por lo que no tendrá sentido. No tiene sentido que los hablantes de Inglés - pero no se lo digas a nadie. Feliz hacer arte! (be Happy in your art making)

Okay, well that's the one sided story. Admittedly, as English speakers we have a whole lot more than 2,000 (or even 20,000) words to choose from.

In fact, according to The Global Language Monitor, at this present second, there are exactly 1,007,711 words in the English language. But wait! By the time you finish reading this post there will be 1,007,711.5 words in the English language - depending on how slowly you read. (Of course you may not read the whole post and that means your vocabularly will be sadly depleted - because I have a surprise at the end, and it's not just that Eves' palm in the next image is missing.)

Well, 1,007,711.5 words seems a real lot doesn't it? But hold on to your horses, don't let the clappers go, nor spill your milk before she is counted.

Given that there are 508 million people who speak English as a first or second language, simple mathematics tells us that we have only 0.001968th of a word each to call our own. That's not even a single letter each in the longest word in the English language which, as you probably guessed is something like Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsano...pterygon at 183 letters (it means a long legged crustacean who eats Chinese takeway every third Sunday of the month).

Well how can we fix this problem?

Obviously we need to invent new words. We need more words to share around. At the moment a new English word is magicked up out of thin space every 98 mins.

One every 98 minutes? Not much isn't it? Considering those 508 million people, I reckon that that is a poor effort. While some of us are inventing new words, what are the other 507,000,956 people doing?

But the theory that a new word is magicked up every 98 minutes is merely a theory - just as it says.

And like every theory, it has its faults. And not surprisingly a  brief analysis shows up its faults quite quickly.

The most obvious fault that I can see is that the theoreticians over at The Global Language Monitor didn't figure on me.

Yes me. (I'm the guy hugging the tree on the left at the back in the next image)

Poor humble me. I mean it's obvious to me that if there were more people like me in the world that the gross rate of new words being magicked up (the NWBMU rate) would suddenly inflate to a massive three words an hour - which, by amazing coincidence, is exactly the speed that I type at.

So, with this in mind I had a walk on the beach today. And while I was dodging the tentacle blessed Bluebottles and the scurvy scum cusking bottom creatures' dehydrated washed-up bodies that littered the hide tigh mark I came up with several new words - the most magick of them being "transpotated."

Now 'transpotated' by another amazing coincidence, isn't the Illustration Friday prompt this week.

The word for IF is, in fact, "Transportation".

Transportation? Yes, I kid you not. Transportation - a particularly weak, assidious and denostrating word. 

Where is the assonance? The consonance? The sybillence? (okay I admit it has some assonance and consonance - but only a twiggle of each).  Where is the kink in its armour that will allow people like myself to easily mispell it?

It's all too easy a word. "Trans' the preffix meaning 'across'. "Port' meaning 'to carry'. The suffix 'ion' indicating that it is a noun. And so we have from 'trans' and 'port' the words 'transported', 'transposed', 'transporation' etc. All bland, billious and beltany. Not much is it?

But as I said, the the theoreticians who came up with the NWBMU rate didn't figure on me.

And so, after my walk this morning I would like to proudly announce that English has four new words. Yes! Not one, not two nor three but four!

Since this morning English has the new words 'transpotated', 'transpotatederd', 'transportater' and last but not least:  'transportadeness' - which is the art of being ready to be 'transportated."

And so finally, at last, and not without time - to the guist of the matter.

These four new words  ('transpotated', 'transpotatederd', 'transportater' and 'transportadeness')  I would like to dedicate to my friend Ces, who, with her generous gift of a nut, has recently 'transpotated' me from my usual state of 'untransportadeness' into a world of otherworldly Cessinatedness.

It will be of no surprise to you that Ces's gift of a nut was not just any nut. As you can see in the leading image of this post it was a nut, not only worthy of the invention of four new words, but a nut ideally suited to be the new Goddess figure of the inaugral Ces Nut Dwarven Appreciation Society of New South wales and the Southern Highlands - of which I am the newest founding member....



Do you know Ces' work?

If not I would highly recommend a trip.

Ces is inspiring, brilliant, concaphanous, a great artist, generous and just a little nutty.

She has also just founded (with others) the BBB society - which a little bird informs me is short for The Big Breasted Budgerigar Society.

Her artwork rips. Which is good.

Is any one still reading? If you are still here I would like to thank you for your time. You are very kind.

Below and above you will find some of my weeks work. Cinderella's Chariot,  renditions of a Cramer induced Adam and Eve, and also something for Creative Cup, which has just announced it's first challenge. If you look closely you will find that the apple in one scene transports Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden, that the Pumplin Carriage transports Cinderella to her father's home, and that the tea pot in the Creative Cup transports me into a world where tea tastes nice, and the surf is great every day.

Thankyou for reading. I enjoy typing and I must get a spell chicker one day....

And thank you SO MUCH for all those people who commented on my last post. I'm off to visit your blogs when I get back from the studio and thank you personally. Watch out, I have some new words in my armoury!