One for Peter Speight

This is an image I made in memory of my friend Peter Speight.

Sadly the first part of Peter's journey came to an end last week. He was 46.

His eyes always sparkled with the light of life.

It seems impossible that he is dead. 

 

I feel sick.

Here's his blog - he was an anglo saxon sculptor, in the spiritual sense of the word.

There is an adult warning on the blog.

http://peterspeight.blogspot.com.au/2011_09_01_archive.html

The photographs in this post are not mine. They were borrowed from his face book page and also from the face book page set up by his friends.

 

 

 

Some burn damp faggots, others may consume

The entire combustible world in one small room

As though dried straw, and if we turn about

The bare chimney is gone black out

Because the work had finished in that flare.

Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,

As 'twere all life's epitome.

What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?

 

W.B.Yeats,

 

 

 

 

Peter with of one of his sculptures at our place at an after opening party. He was particularly proud of this one, wanted to have his photograph taken with it. I'm so glad he did. We have three of his works - this was his favourite, a circus acrobat,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Harry and Ralph, Almost Identical

Harry always knew that he and Ralph had something in common. Not only were they born on the same day, in the same hospital and to the same parents, they both (later in life at least) shopped for their clothes at the same snappy Barnaby Street Shoppe.

But it wasn't till one Saturday afternoon in late August 1999 that Ralph, the younger but vainer of the two, accidently used too much vanishing cream on his wrinkles.

Tragically, when he realised his mistake, he only rubbed harder.

This, as you can see, not only made things worse, but it made things worser, worsest... and finally, worserest.

I kid you not.

 

 

Hello. See you soon... unless you go the way of Ralph ;)

Thank you Karen et Bella and Art and Rossicheeka :) and Trudy for commenting on my last post - even though I don't deserve it.... Hugs from Oz :)

Oh please click the pics if you like it bigger

Dad Jokes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'm sorry I haven't been around. Recently I've had  remarkable good fortune that is, unexpectedly, taking up all of my spare time. By all, I mean all.

 

Which, by a remarkable coincidence, happens to rhyme remarkably well with this week's Illustration Friday prompt which is of course, Goanna....

 

Err, I mean Tall...... 

 

This image was in a book I made just after my accident.... about a little girl who loses some 'things' (not just her hair)  and goes looking for them.....

  

Thank you so much to all those who commented on my last post.

 

And made suggestions for books. I appreciate it very much.

I'll make a post about the books I managed to get my hands on soon.

 

And thank you for looking at  my work.

 

If all goes well I  will be back on board shortly.....

You can't get rid of me that easily :)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Suspend

Ever think of burying a toad in limestone for a year?

No, me neither.

Interesting thought though. If I ever decided to bury a toad for a year, I bet I could never find him again when it was time to dig him up. Poor devil.

Of course it wouldn't be for lack of preparation. I'd use a marker and mark a giant 'X' on the spot where I buried the toad in the rock (hence Toad in The Hole). I think I'd even use GPS.

But with acid rain, global warming and my innate inability to find at least one pair of matching socks in my own bedroom, I'm sure any poor toad I buried in a rock would be lost forever - GPS or not.

That's why I'm so impressed with William Buckland, who during the 1820's attempted to rid his Auntie's garden of toads by conducting a 'scientific experiment.'

In that experiment Buckland decided to find how long a toad, encased in rock would remain alive.

But that's not the impressive thing.

The impressive thing is that, after burying dozens of these warty little amphibians in his  own back yard (that's self sacrifice for you) he managed to find them all a year later.

Incredibly, (that last word says 'incredibly' in case you can't read it) when he dug them up a year later, most of them were dead.

But fear not, toad dislikers of the world, those that had survived he put to the 'acid' test.

Yes, you guessed it.

He reburied them for another year.

A year later, when he dug them up again it might surprise you to learn that the 'surviving' toads were also dead.

After these two rigorous experiments (he must have grown very bored hanging around his garden for an entire year making sure none of these toads escaped) Buckland concluded that reports of toads being entombed in rock and surviving were not only wrong, but licentious.

Of course, as outsiders we can see that Buckland's hypothesis had some holes. For example, it says no where in the record that he fed any of these toads. Nor does it mention whether he washed his hands both before and after the experiment. And while we are on the 'nors' - nor did he tie his hair back in a bun - as recommended by the Toad Handler's Association of Northumberland. (THAoN article 7 paragraph 19 - a member of good standing will not handle a Toad without first and forthmost as said member bunning his hair, preferably in a thilken thock - my Bold)

I think Buckland's conclusions should be amended to: 100 percent of toads buried in misc. rocks for a year or two by William Buckland in the 1820s, without food, water or proper shelter are likely to die - most probably from infections they picked up from Buckland's hands, or of secondary complications brought on by being in the presence of 'unbunned hair'.

They talk about 'Man's Inhumanity to Man'.

What about 'Man's Inhumanity to Toads', eh?

And wait till my hair dresser hears about this.
He will be inthensed at the lack of bunning, I bet you..

While we are not on the subject can anyone recommend some good 'wordless' books? I'm onto Weisner, Lehman, Tan's The Arrival  etc. Here is the list I ordered (not all wordless books) . Any recommendations very welcome. :)

See you!


The Snowman : Raymond Briggs

Sidewalk Circus  :Paul-Fleischman-Kevin-Hawkes

The Polar Express:  Chris-Van-Allsburg

The Garden of Abdul Gasazi: Chris-Van-Allsburg

Sweetest Fig:  Chris-Van-Allsburg

June 29, 1999: Weisner

Tuesday

The Three Pigs: Weisner

Flotsam: Weisner

Free Fall: Weisner

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day: Judith-Viorst-Ray-Cruz

Good Dog, Carl: Alexander Day

A Boy, A Dog & A Frog: Mercer Mayer

Noah's Ark: Jerry Pinkney

Chalk: Bill Thomson

Museum Trip: Barbara Lehman

Rainstorm:  Barbara Lehman

Trainstop:  Barbara Lehman

The Red Book:  Barbara Lehman

Jumanji 30th Anniversary Edition: Chris Van Allsburg

The Lion and the Mouse: Jerry Pinkney

By the way, here's the Wiki. 

Refresh

Yesterday we had the coldest day in several years here. It was so cold I had to get down my winter board shorts and pull out my thick rubber thongs. We even closed some of the windows to keep the chill air out. And I let my Aunty Mabel, who has been staying us for more than a year, come out of the back yard and sleep in the house....... Next thing you know she'll be wanting to ride inside the car on our next trip to Sydney. Don't know what's wrong with the roof racks - but I admit it's always a problem decideing which way to strap her - face first or feet first.

Usually it comes down to what she is wearing. After all we don't want her ending up with any 'wind'. And of course we don't want to scare any of the oncoming traffic..... Besides, Darren (The guy across the road) doesn't even strap his aunty on the roof racks. He just lets her hold on by herself.

Sheesh. How mean can you be?

Thank  you so much for coming to visit me when I was 'off'. I saw the surgeon today. He said I could go back to work in two weeks.

I made this picture and put your name's up in lights as a thank you.
I know chocolates would have been much better, but they are just so, so, so very fattening.

I guess I'll just have to eat them myself....

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 :)

i love my opioids

sorry to be gone again 

s day came and went.

stands for shoulder day. 

now i have so much to say

and only two fingers to say it with.

heh ;0

s also stands for

subscapularis tendon 

ever heard of it?

me neither 

well not till a few weeks ago

when subscap breaks

they can reattach it with screws ?

(s stands for)

thank goodness for surgeons

afterwards they put your arm in a brace so you don't tear the tendon away

again - which would be silly (another 's' word)

so these images were done left handed. 

like the typing.

the monkeys are puzzled for illustration friday.

the next couple are for height .... well at least i think they are 

i'd be lying if i said that i knew what mice had to do with anything, but i just had the urge to entertain the cat... anyway, my brace comes off in six weeks, so if i comment on your blog in a taciturn manner it doesn't mean i didn't want to grargle on like i usually do

i'm using voice control for keyboard shortcuts but un fortunately the dictation software with vista doesn't like my australian accent

but before i go a brief commercial break

i really want to tell you about endone - it's an opioid they give you and it's just unreal,
trouble is,
you need to lie down in bed and put a seatbelt on thats firmly strapped to the matress,

before you 'drop' the tablet and then hold on to the sides of the bed
its like dreaming in blueray with dolby 7.9 surround sound


yaaaaaaaaaaaahhhooooo......

but seriously, thankyou for visiting, i hope you are well

yyyyyyyyyyyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhooooooooooooooooooooo

:)

ps heres a pic of a subscap tear that i didn't make (image from here )

and some great yucky pics here of the biceps tenodesis 

thanks to everyone who wrote and sent good wishes :) much appreciated!

The Master Race

Well, if you've been around blog-land for a while, you might have guessed, from certain slip-ups on my part, that I had blue eyes.

And that of course makes me part of the 'master race'.

You might think it's easy being part of the master race - but in fact it's a lot tougher than you think.

For one thing, if you leave me out in the sun too long, my beautiful pale alabaster-like skin goes an interesting pink colour.

And if you take me out on sunny days you won't see how blue my eyes are - because my face will be screwed up against the glare so much you'll just see slits.

Of course people with blue eyes are higher up on the evolutionary scale than people with brown eyes. 

Everyone knows that. 

Well, everyone who's never had a chance to read a book on iris evolution.

The truth is, us blue eyed people ... well, we're... er....  mutants. 

Plain and simple. 

You see, originally we humans had three layers of pigment on our irises.

The bottom layer was blue, the middle layer some yellowy browny hazel colour, and the top layer a deep velvety chocolate colour.

And somewhere along the way we blue eyed people have lost the outer two layers of pigment.

You can still see it sometimes in a bio-microscope - you'll see little islands of brown sitting up above the sea of blue. (Here's an image from this site to illustrate).

Well, while we are on the subject, did you know I almost went to Vietnam?

If I'd been three years older my number would have come up.

So the chap in the top image is me, born three years earlier, in another country, to people who still had three layers of iris pigment.

He was lucky enough to return home.

Thank you sincerely to everyone who commented on my last post. I've been working my b$#@5om off trying to finish a project before "S" day - which will happen in about two weeks.

I'll be round to visit soon.

And let you know what "S" day is on my next post :)

see you!

Swamp

           TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,

 And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

          And looked down one as far as I could,

    To where it bent in the undergrowth;

"The Road Not Taken" (first stanza): Robert Frost.

Ahh, there's nothing like a good snippet of poetry to add resonance to an image, eh?

Sorry I did not type much today.

I was going to tell you how the "Swamp' was an extended metaphor for life, and that the geese were in fact you and I, and that the creek was the not a creek at all but the River Styx (Charon has nicked under the bridge for a comfort stop and discovered that it is true about trolls) and that I have tried to make it all child friendly by bumping up the saturation...

But I knew you would have already guessed that ;)  

Thanks for looking. Again :) Please feel free to click for big.....

Shades: A Horror Vacui

Have you ever lain on a sandy beach staring up at the beautiful cloudless blue sky, feeling the sun light warm on your face - and thought about what it would be like if suddenly gravity vanished? How the earth's rotation would fling you into the heavens so fast that your eyeballs would sink into the back of your head, and as you sped into the universe your body would be suddenly surrounded by a never ending 'blueness'.

You know, the wonderful thing is, that if you   lay there on the beach and let the blueness of the sky surround you (like standing in front of a Field Painting) and concentrate hard enough it really does happen. And when it really does happen you don't exactly achieve nirvana. In fact all you get is a horrible spinning inertia driven queasiness as the sandy beach spins around you like a .... like a revolving sandy beach.

I guess, in a way, it's the epiphany of what it would be like to not have gravity.

You remember epiphanies? When a sudden realisation of a particular truth comes whistling out of the air and whacks you in the back of the  skull like a pea  sized comet? And afterwards you are left with a zinging clear brained  head and a realization that the universe is not quite the same as it was two seconds ago. 

To be honest, as I've grown older I don't have ephiphanies any more - I have, what I call, gradiphanies. 

Gradiphanies are kind of like slothful epiphanies that sneak up when you least expect it - like when you are flossing your grandmother's dentures, or measuring the length of your big toes to make sure they are the same size on either foot (they aren't). Or just hanging out outside the lolly shop waiting to be arrested.

Quite often these gradiphanies are epiphanies that you have had before - and have forgotten.

I have a particular one quite regularly - and I had it while I was jogging on the beach yesterday. (see pic at end of post).

Yesterday, as I came closer to the northern headland and it filled my vision, I had the particular peculiar feeling that, despite the sound of the waves and the feel of the wet wind on my shoulders that everything surrounding me wasn't quite real.

Well, to be perfectly specific, that it was myself who wasn't quite real. And that if I wasn't there, then it would make no difference to anything at all. I know it's cliched, that's it's a kind  of tree-falling-in-the-forest-not-making-a-noise moment, but in fifty years time the rocks and the cliffs and the dunes and the ocean would still be there - but it was myself who would be gone. Really truly gone.

But that wasn't yesterday's gradiphany. Yesterday's gradiphany was that, in truth, that it was my presence that made the landscape real, that, in fact, when I was no longer there, when I was no longer observing it, all the light falling from the sky would vanish, the sounds of the breaking waves and the rustling sand dune vegetation would stop, and, finally, the wind would drop away to leave an awful and still one dimensional horror vacui.

Strange isn't it?

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be a huge piece of rock lying at the base of one of those cliffs, watching  each generation of beach goers growing old and feeble and becoming nothing but dust.

Still, it's better to have lived and died, than never have lived at all.

At least I think it is.

And to be perfectly honest, we don't get a choice really, do we?

Oh, this is the beach I jog at. :)

And if I can blame someone for this post I would like to blame my outrageously talented (both writer and visual artist) friend Linda Hensley who recently was kind enough to give enough to give me the Genuine Blogger Award for modesty, intelligence, good looks, charm and all round good old fashioned 'niceness' - not to mention brilliance and a penchant for telling lies about myself.

But seriously, thank you Linda :) 

You can find Linda's blog exceptionale here. If you haven't seen her work or read her words then, when you pop in for a visit, you are in for a stupendous treat.

Yield

Hay! Thanks so much for all your kind welcoming comments on my last post. :) They made me feel all warm and fuzzy (could be hot flushes actually  - apparently you start to get them at about the age of 41, especially if you eat a lot of chicken)

Recently I have been reading the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and it's an interesting book because, (spoiler alert) the girl with Dragon Tattoo (Lisbeth Salander) is a wild kind of Goth, who in the course of the first two books , beats up a bunch of Hells Angels Bikies, tortures a sexual molestor by tying him to the bed and tattooing his crimes on his tummy, jumps in and out of bed with whoever she wants, all the while escaping a nationwide 'man' hunt, simultaneously tapping into the computers of the famous and infamous alike, transferring millions of Kronor into her own offshore accounts, and living the high life of your average Asperger's Syndrome person, while surviving a hurricane and having breast implants, and, at the same time, high-society-chameleon-like, being able to charm the suit and tie off any man (note: must be father like figure) she comes into contact with..

After a while you kind of start to like her. If you are un homme d'un certain age (and not a Hell's Angel Bikie) you think "gee, why aren't there more girls' like this in my neighbourhood?'.

And if you are a woman I think you are supposed to think: "Yeah, go GIRL!" Power to the Sisterhood!"

But I'm not really sure if that's what women think. After all, the book is written by a male (sadly deceased) who seems to have cast his alter ego as the main male character (totally irresistible to women etc) and let his own corporal fantasies build the framework for the novels.

Mind you the books went viral last year and became the world's second best sellers. So, dead or not, he must be doing something right.

So the 'nice parts' of The Girl with Dragon Tattoo (and there are some wholesome parts on page 37 right down the bottom in the second last paragraph) are the genesis of this image. 

Even Lisbeth Salandar was a child once.

thank you, once again, for looking :) please feel free to click for big - I won't be offended in the  least.