Wednesday is the New Saturday
So, my work schedule is slightly amended: I don’t go in at all on Wednesdays. This means sleeping late and (I’ve decided) painting. You know, like art.
I am determined to get some work in at least one show this year.
That shouldn’t be too tough, considering I’ve just joined an amateur art society with a requirement to show two pieces in their annual. That is, the judging shouldn’t be tough. I still have to paint some shit.
When I first moved here, surrounded as I am by sheep, I thought they’d be a natural. Turns out, they’re really fun to draw and harder’n hell to paint.
It’s the fleece. Use cool colors (blues) and they look dead, use warm colors (browns) and they look dirty.
So, chickens it is!
I don’t suppose I can make a whole career out of chicken painting. I’m discovering they only have one facial expression — pent-up rage. Seriously, chickens have the most awful ‘resting bitch faces.’ It’s the downturned beak. And the glarey eyes.
Chicken painter. Sixteen-year-old me would be so humiliated.
March 1, 2017 — 10:01 pm
Comments: 16
No, not this one
I think this would be a difficult piece of furniture to live with. “Twin moons stare down one-eyed space aliens fresh off the mothership, 1769” we’ll call it. It’s got a certain…mmm…I dunno.
For our anniversary this year, Uncle B bought a beautiful 17th C coffer to replace the Ikea entertainment center eyesore in the living room. It arrived today, and it’s spectacular. It’s the first thing you see when you walk in and it’s perfect (and, yes, it has the set-top box on it, but somehow it still manages to look dignified).
We’ve been meaning to buy one for that spot, like, forever. When this house was built (sometime between 1500 and 1610), oak coffers like this would have been the one for sure piece of furniture they would have had; probably a number of them. The chair was a newfangled contraption (at least in terms of furnishing a humble household), so these things would have served as storage, seating, working surfaces. We had no lack of ones to choose from — Britain is lousy with them, still.
Anyway, I found our friends the moon-aliens while looking for a picture of a coffer similar to ours to show you, on account of I’m too lazy to try and get the difficult shot of ours in situ. Mostly, though, I wanted to tease you guys with the sort of antiques easily available here. Tease, tease.
Oh, and thanks to Brexit jitters, the pound is nearing parity with the dollar. You can buy a whole English £ for $1.20 today.
February 22, 2017 — 10:10 pm
Comments: 8
Here, let me waste your afternoon for you
The Sea Monk (Umi Bozu) is a sea monster with a smooth round head, like the shaven head of a Buddhist monk. This woodblock print illustrates the story of the sailor Kawanaya Tokuzo, who decides to go to sea on the last day of the year, which other sailors consider unlucky. A violent storm breaks out, and the Umi Bozu appears. In a ghastly voice the apparition demands, “Name the most horrible thing you know!” Tokuzo yells back, “My profession is the most horrible thing I know!” The monster is apparently satisfied with this answer and disappears along with the storm.
Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797–1861) did woodcuts for popular consumption. They were like 19th C Japanese monster action comix. There’s a nice selection of his pictures here.
He was a contemporary of Hokusai, the Great Wave guy and they both belonged to a school of painting called Ukiyo-e. The word ukiyo means “floating world” and describes the lifestyle rather than the subject matter.
Edo (now Tokyo) saw a boom in the 17th C and suddenly merchants who had been at the bottom of the heap could afford to go to the theater and hang out with the professional ladies. And go watch the fat guys rassle in their underpants. And buy art for the walls. This stuff caters to that taste.
If you go to the Wikipedia article (previous link), look at the pictures in the sidebar (you’ll surely recognize some of them), take a name to ukiyo-e org, you can spend happy hours paddling around the art.
I think Kuniyoshi is my favorite, though. Lots of soldiers and monsters and ghosts.
February 21, 2017 — 8:35 pm
Comments: 6
Art geekery
When I was a teenager, I was the spergiest art geek EVER. Art lends itself to geekery. It has so many moving parts.
One of the coolest is pigments and colors. All that ancient boogidy-boogidy alchemy survived as (among other things) paint chemistry – some of the experiments they did on the way to the philosopher’s stone resulted in paints and dyes that we still use.
In art terms, at least, a paint is made up of little particles of colored pigment, often mineral, that don’t dissolve in the medium. A dye is made of a colored stuff, often vegetable, that does dissolve in its medium. So, proper oil paints are a paint but most ink is dye. Dye is inherently fugitive (but often gorgeously colorful).
Between the two are the lake pigments, which are organic dyes that are stained onto an inert material making them kinda sorta pigments, more stable than most dyes. The best are just acceptable to use in an artist’s palette. My favorite color, Alizarin crimson, is a lake; it was the very first natural pigment (madder) to be synthesized in a lab in the 19th C. It’s usually regarded as the least permanent of the acceptably permanent pigments.
Folks, I could burble like this for hours.
Anyway, I made my own oil paints for a few years. They refer to this as “grinding” paint, but it’s a misnomer — you don’t grind the pigment particles into smaller pigment particles, you spread them out as thinly as possible to make sure each little particle is surrounded by oil. To do this, you use a sheet of glass and the thing in the picture, a muller (that’s a purty one, available here). A little pigment, a drop of oil, and you go round and round and round and round. It was the shitty job given to the newest apprentice in the studio.
Over and over again, you’ll read that modern paints are far better than this. That machine methods ‘grind’ paint better than any snot-nosed apprentice ever could. That the old masters would die for the kind of paint we have now.
I read it for years before it dawned on me what they were clearly, obviously, blatantly saying — modern paint is TOTALLY DIFFERENT from the stuff the masters used.
Okay, maybe that doesn’t sound like an all-caps moment to you, but I assure you it was one of the stonking thinks of my lifetime. I felt like flinging off my clothes and running down the road yelling “URETHRA!”
And it’s true: you have a better chance of reproducing some of the masters’ techniques with paint that is slightly less well ground. In fact, some of that beautiful, globby lace that Rembrandt painted wasn’t even ground at all, it was just pigment lightly folded with a drop of oil. Turns out, though, that it only really matters in the bright opaque colors, particularly white.
I’m not going anywhere with this. I’m just happy to be playing with my paint box again.
Good weekend, all!
February 17, 2017 — 9:07 pm
Comments: 21
I joined a thing!
I joined a local art society. Been meaning to do it since I moved here. I was going to describe it as prestigious, but it isn’t that at all. It’s…venerable. It’s an amateur society set up fifty years ago to complement the local professional society.
You don’t apply to join the professional society. If they want you, they’ll let you know.
In addition to monthly lectures of various kinds, the real appeal is the annual show. And the appeal of the annual show is to kick me in the ass and make me paint some shit.
Behold, my ancient pile of watercolor tubes! (Here it is in color, because honestly that looks pretty cool).
Now I just have to paint something.
February 16, 2017 — 10:42 pm
Comments: 29
Adorable cartoon weasel
Okay, maybe not so adorable. This is a 3D model I made ages ago, when I first got started with Blender. I posted about it at the time. I guess. I hadn’t remembered.
Until somebody wrote and asked if he could have it for something. Of course he could.
And. Oh. My. God. IT’S SO FUZZY!
February 8, 2017 — 9:14 pm
Comments: 15
I wish I’d thought of this…
New Jersey graphic artist Michal Krauthamer ‘shops The Donald’s face onto various Queens of England. It works shockingly well. (I found them in this Anorak article, which includes my favorite examples).
It helps the joke that they’re good clean Photoshops, but then I would say that.
I once did a comic P’shop of Her Maj. Once. A commenter I’d never seen before (or since) turned up and posted with menace “Do not. Photoshop. The Queen.”
I’ll be honest, fam, I was skeert.
January 31, 2017 — 7:40 pm
Comments: 16
Come in, Lord Satan. Have a seat.
One of our oldest local inns is closed this week for general renovation. I got a chance to walk around and take pictures today. Hoo boy, was there some beautiful furniture! Not original, except for some spectacular wall carving, but they’ve bought antiques appropriate for the period.
Hard to photograph dark brown furniture, alas. I hate using flash, but there was no other way to get sharp images.
This guy lives in an inglenook AND SOME DAY HE MUST BE MINE. I don’t know anything about him except he’s real, probably 16th or 17th C, and they call him the Unlucky Chair.
There was an article in the Mail today about how Ikea is killing the antiques trade. Probably Mail hyperbole, but it is true that so-called ‘brown furniture’ is at a very low ebb at the moment. We must start haunting the auction sites — O, how I love me some brown furniture.
But they’re talking about the 19th C stuff. Beauties like Goat Chair don’t go cheap.
January 18, 2017 — 10:20 pm
Comments: 7
This guy.
Cartoonist I just discovered. Actually, I liked this panel best. It’s arty. Doesn’t work well small and in black and white, though.
I don’t know much about this guy. He’s British, probably. He’s a libertarian, I think. He got into a Twitter duel with @notch (the guy who sold Minecraft to Microsoft for $1B) and briefly drove him off the internet.
You know, I was going to post a disclaimer about how I didn’t agree with him on everything. Then I realized it was a pure conditioned response because some of his comics are about race. I wouldn’t feel moved to disavow him if we disagreed about economics or feminism or history. Just race. And that made me angry, so I didn’t.
Happy MLK Day!
January 16, 2017 — 6:57 pm
Comments: 10
Nice hat.
An altar covering in a little parish church in Herefordshire may originally have been a dress worn by Elizabeth I. This is important because no other dress of hers exists.
Or, it probably does, but one hasn’t turned up yet. Clothes (particularly fancy ones) were so expensive in Tudor times that they were frequently re-purposed. And Cromwell sold off all the royal togs in the early 17th C, so before that date we’ve got this one dress (maybe) and Henry VIII’s hat.
Someone researching something totally else ran across the thing and realized it was made of cloth of silver. In Tudor times, only the monarch and immediate fambly could wear cloth of silver. Other stuff was embroidered on it afterwards (one embroidered bear exactly matches one that appeared in a picture book in 1594).
My tame historians are very excited about this.
The best article I found was this one in the Telegraph, but their articles sometimes get stuck behind the paywall. If that happens, here it is in the Mail (the article is old; I think this has drifted to the top of the news because the dress is about to go on display at Hampton Court after extensive refurb).
January 9, 2017 — 9:23 pm
Comments: 12