illustration friday -flavour

well a quick sketch for yas


ok so I lied.
obviously.
It's just that, well, I'm all excited by my new H2OILs, (and even more by my new escoda, hand made (in spain) delux pig bristle rounds and flats) but don't have the ball's to crack 'em open and do a flavour.
so I am reverting to a previous drawing, that was a little more than a quick sketch. It's the only time, I promise
(with my fingers crossed behind my back)
got to love illustration friday. I do

holiday- illustration friday

well the ten minute illo is alive and kicking


I am really losing the plot.
I hope things sort themselves out and I can get back to a sort of rythym.
I had it going alright and then along comes work and my reality check.
anyhow, for those wondering about the above drawing and how it fits.
I googled define: holiday (for those who didn't know you can do that, you learn something new every day)
and got

Holiday - Pinhole. Skip. Discontinuity. Void.

Holiday: An uncoated area of a coated surface usually missed unintentionally

Holiday
A missed spot in painting or tarring a roof or foundation, sometimes called a Sunday, it is named because of the idea of a holiday being a gap in work.

Holiday:
Gilding - A gilders term that refers to an area were the leaf did not initially adhere. Holidays are caused by 2 things. First, in the application process, the leaf just did not stick to the 'tacky' surface. Simply apply fresh leaf and rub down. Secondly, when you applied the 'size' in step 4, you missed an area leaving a bald spot, and there is no adhesive for the leaf to stick to. After you have completed leafing the entire surface, including patching in all holidays, re-apply more 'size' to the missing spots with a small artists brush, allow to come to 'tack' as before, then apply leaf to the newly sized area.

Holiday A spot missed while painting a surface.

Holiday: An area where a liquid-applied material is missing.

Holiday: Application defect whereby small areas are left uncoated. Syn: Misses, Skips, Voids, Discontinuities, Vacations.

etc. you get the idea.
the first version was much cleverer, but I am too stressed to pull it off, and today I decided that I would have to do something else.
so
drumroll
duh duh
(it's above)


illustration friday
also I would like to take this opportunity to apologise to all my new illo friday friends whose blogs I have not been visiting and whose comments I have not been making.
I will try and get round you all soon.

OH and I finally filled in part two, just below.
got to try and break that habit

part2 - I got back, sort of

part 2 of my story that is.
I don't have any time already, because I just started work as I mentioned in a previous post, well now I don't get to choose how to spend my time, and worst of all I don't get any free time as I have to study for my job as well.
english grammer sucks big time, but knowing less than my students; sucks more.

well I had left it at that point so I think I better flesh it out a little more.
I will resist talking about how I don't have any time anymore, and get on with trying to explain who I am, or how I came to this point, or, or, .
well I don't really have much of an idea where I was up to.
I'll just go give it a bit of a reread.
well
can't say that I am all that impressed by my start.
I think I need a ghostwriter.
I am convinced that there is plenty of interesting bits in my story so far, but I don't seem to have much of an idea of how to go about talking about them.
I think about some of the things I have done and things I have thought and the way I continue to live now. and I think that if I just come out with that sort of stuff I must come across as an egomaniac, or just a maniac.

I 'spose I don't mind that, but I hope I come across as a lovable maniac, as indeed apparently hitler was. and I paint in watercolours too.

anyway last time I gave the most cursory of overviews to my childhood. I could try to do the same to my teenage years here.
I was saying that I was born in country queensland, and moved oftenn throughout my childhood until spending seven years in buderim.
those high school years spent in a beach paradise are really part of my formation as a person for a variety of reasons and on a variety of levels. not the least of which is that I watched it get destroyed, hell I even participated in it by being there and acting innocent. as we have all been doing over the past 20 years. apparently.
I saw the wide open spaces, (where I ripped around doing environmental damage on my suzuki dr 185) turn in to housing estates called ironically enough, the wide open spaces. or the forest torn down to make way for forestdale, or forestglen, or other such inventive names.
more recently I saw mcdonalds come to coolum beach, after a protracted fight to keep it out. well it was full from the first day, and still is full now. (well right now it's probably closed, being 4:36 am in australia)
we all stood by and watched as we made south east queensland a long strip city, of far strung out malls and continuous housing tracts. the land that used to supply the food that we ate, the bush that used to supply the reason to be there, the dunes that used to separate us from the sea, well the pacific ocean to be precise, (lives up to it's name most all the time, but it seems unwise to count on it.)
all gone
and obviously at least some of us profited by it.
(I even have to include my self here, in a way, as I did allright with the only property I ever purchased and still own part and that's worth more than I paid.)
we all are part of the situation and therefore part of the problem.
I better break for an image here as I am getting all heated up.!!



ooh, I don't know if that helped.

in the same way as I did last time (same link, no need to go there for a third, or is forth, time, but yes you do need to go there now if you haven't yet.) I am giving you an image that is actually part of a larger work. The dollar on the ropes above (scanned from a tiny image on a small part of a thirty-five mm slide) is part of a complex work, that I will endeavor to post more of another time.
and as promised I will now show more of the work that netted me one of my two, lonely prizes. lucky I don't have a trophy cabinet as I would be the laughing stock of all who surveyed it. especially as the prize was a night for two people in the cheapest room at the noosa sheraton resort. and I was even shameless enough to use it. and with my first undying spanish love.
this work was in public space not far from the aforementioned noosa sheraton resort, as part of the seachange sculpture by the sea event that had some incestuous relationship with the 2000 sydney olympics


seems funny that I don't have better fotos, but anyway, one does what one can when one moves to the other side of the world, and forgets to pack in advance.


as you can see the object is an enormous site specific sculpture examining our place in and relationship with the land and the original inhabitants of same.
( or at least I can see it. ) :P


it caught the eye of the curator after being passed over by the official judges, and she gave me her 'curator's prize', earning my eternal gratitude and a good price on a partial purchase of same, years later.
this last object in this post is a not unrelated talisman. a bit too strong for the couple that I made it for who quickly gave it away to another mutual friend.
(I now know another couple who need such a talisman, so might have to try and recreate the magic.)


this photo is from a point that is unfinished but seeing as how the whole work is coloured pencil over acrylic paint, and is very fragile, the pattern dissapearing as fast as you can draw it on, it will forever be unfinished.
anyhow I feel like I still haven't said anything but I have used up my alloted time so I will have to call it part two and come back with more soon
got to love illustration friday. I do.

illo friday's been bumped down one

as I said in the title, I've only just posted my illustration friday link and I just linked to my blog, instead of the permalink, so any hard core illo fridayers who want to go straight to my illo for this week should scroll down immediately.
but if you've got a minute I would like to take the time to tell you about a few things you should read. Well mainly two, I will add them to my links when I have finished here.
one is an article called The Madness of George W Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis, and the other is some of the best blog writing I have read.
go there and read and comment. I don't understand at all why he has no comments.
I came across his blog by followng the link on his sig over at the clusterfuck nation blog, a blog I was completely addicted to, mainly because of the comments by the above mentioned weaseldog and other commentators.
I have mentioned that blog before
and it's sitting over there in my links section.
anyhow the following work that I did a long time ago, in my student days, seems appropriate here



now really, go and read that stuff, start with weaseldogs blog, the other is pretty heavy going, but really well worth it.
I love youse all

oh and I just got one of these accounts too, but I do mean just now so there's only a few photo's there yet. now's your chance to start off in a way that allows to keep up.
serioussix's photos
oops sorry it wouldn't let me stick that here. HTML not acceptable, but it's in the footer of the blog.
cheers

Illustration friday-imagine

since the only thing that would come to my mind was john lennon and yoko ono, I decided to imagine what eni would imagine.
I should point out here that I don't have any problem with john and yoko coming to mind, and I have invited them to stay. They have a busy shedule of coming to mind though so they said that they would see what they could do. maybe someone else will come to mind when they go; kurt cobain perhaps, singing jesus wants me for a sunbeam. or homer simpson doing his version of the joker.
anyhow, here's what I imagine eni would imagine, if he would imagine imagining things



meanwhile I'll put my self to imagining all the people, living life as one,
I might imagine there's no borders, and no religions too,
I might imagine googlegoooogooogogleing the lyrics too,
as otherwise, I might ima-agine wrong

illustration friday

Imagine

Imagine there's no heaven,
It's easy if you try,
No hell below us,
Above us only sky,
Imagine all the people
living for today...

Imagine there's no countries,
It isnt hard to do,
Nothing to kill or die for,
No religion too,
Imagine all the people
living life in peace...

Imagine no possesions,
I wonder if you can,
No need for greed or hunger,
A brotherhood of man,
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

You may say Im a dreamer,
but Im not the only one,
I hope some day you'll join us,
And the world will live as one.

Writen by: John Lennon
© Bag productions inc.

I imagine that john lennon might have imagined a world without copyright too, but I might be wro-o-o-ong. I got these from the number one rank on googling lyrics imagine lennon

illofri- I can't do any more

the expression on the top eni, makes me feel queasy.
well sick to the stomach to tell the truth.


guilty conscience, or simply guilt complex.
I don't know who is more spoiled, eni or I.
it's the unfortunate second possible meaning to the title of this blog
personally for me, if I forget about how guilty I feel about eni's new lifestyle, I am quite enjoying it.
eni has also decided it was time to do an illustration friday as well, and he has let it all hang out
listen, I got to rush, sorry to the bloggers whose comments I haven't done yet.
maybe tomorrow I can find some time
I love youse all

well the whole plan's come unstuck!!

I've gone and got a job!
one of my english speaking aquaintances gave me the number and name of her boss the other week, and although I rang straight away, last week was the sort of week, with two public holidays, that the spanish on mass seem to just take the whole week off.
they call it haciendo puente, making a bridge.
then they take the puente areo the air-bridge (literally) and go for a vacation. well that's not strictly true, of course as the air-bridge is more a week day thing. a bit like the early morning and evening services between Sydney and Brisbane, only in this case between Madrid and Barcelona. (Sydney and Brisbane are both a little to far away to hacer puente, of any sort.

so where the hell was I.
I'm in great danger of getting side tracked rather badly, as usual.
ah my job. back to me. that's better
anyway
having been told that the boss lady, would be back on the monday, I rang on the monday morn, when I came in from my dog walk.
I didn't actually speak to her, but instead to a nice scottish boy, (maybe he was irish or even welsh, I didn't take a lot of notice, and I'm not very good with that sort of thing), who asked if I could come in an hour to have an interview with the director. well we negotiated a time a little more than two hours away and I was away.
Bad luck painting!.
because that's what I was doing at the time.
trying to pull off what I said the other day
as you can see I have included above the painting in it's current state so that I can be believed when I say that I am trying to pull off another work like last weeks, even though it seems quite obvious that I am failing to do so. It's not that it couldn't work, just that it isn't working, related phenomena, but not the same.
:)
so to get back to the employment strand. The interview seemed to go alright, well, quite well really. The director turned out to be a lovely british lady, the whole thing seemed fairly laid back, although she was obviously dealing with quite a few things at once. ( I find out later that the are nearly 60 teachers so it's a bit of a big operation.) and anyway she seemed to indicate that I looked pretty good for a january start. and, she did give me fair warning that one of her teachers was looking at a job offer in america, and she wasn't sure if they might need an emergency replacement. I of course indicated that I was flexible and adaptable, and whatever happened she could count on me. etc.
so this morning (that's the next day)when I got back from my dog walk I find my slippers in the middle of the lounge room (as if there was any other room) floor, with a great big note taped to them, saying I had two classes to do at 2 pm in Atocha, and could I please come past the school as well.
Ironic about the note, as Lourdes hadn't left to go to class yet, so was dressing in the lounge room (as if there was any other room) and could of told me in person, and of course did.
(well that was an unamusing aside)
anyhoo, so I'm an The English Centre english teacher now.
so that's going to have an impact on my blogging and cycling and painting careers.
although I am easing in to it, with only four hours a week this week and next week, and then two weeks holiday.
but in january they will be trying to give me fifteen hours a week. well, they will be paying me for fifteen hours a week, so I assume they will try pretty hard to give me that many.
So I will see how I go. because there is the studying solar energy strand of my life as well, which is already being sorely neglected.
and I don't want to give up blogging and doing illustration friday, nor cycling, nor, obviously, painting, so I will have to be more organised and try to get it all done. wish I hadn't spoiled my dog so much. he's so used to his 4-6 hours of walks every day, so I just realised that his expression in the entry below, (or here, if you are on the permalink page) and this one, that of surprise, is his face when he hears that I have a job, and will have to go out even more times without him.
poor little fellow.
he's depressed right now.
and it's only my first day.

illustation friday surprise

hi everybody,
I am getting a bit paranoid that I may never finish the painting that I am doing for this weeks illustration friday, and seeing how there were well over five hundred entries last week, the last time I looked, I thought I might just post the sketch that came together straight away, and will probably capture the feeling I was hoping for better than the finished work.


if the painting comes together I will be sure to post it. or I should say, when the painting is finished I will post it.
the other reason that I was feeling presure to get my post done is that I wanted to announce that I was starting a tag, that I will tag two people with. Then those two will tag two and so on. so I thought I would start with two of my first blogging aquaintances, one being teri c and valgalart
the task for the tag, is to post the work, represented in one or more photos, that took the most time to complete, and to talk a little about the process and the result. a little like what I posted recently, jpg or gif although as you can see, I wasn't specifically doing what I have asked them to do.

oh and in case anyone is wondering, the following button is not a paid ad, I'm doing it for you, anyone who hasn't discovered the benefits of tabbed browsing is really missing out



(although I have some trouble with it at times though, I must admit. keep internet explorer round for those times)

I love youse all

part one of my story

one the illustration friday contributers sent me an email to thank me for some little thing and she added the question;

> Okay, I am being more nosy now. What is your
> profession? You are such a
> marvelous artist, and have so many good artistic
> suggestions, I keep
> wondering if that's what they pay you to do.

I have answered her in an email but I thought that I really should do a few posts to
explain where I come from, and why I do what I do. as much to try and explain it to me as to anybody who stumbles across this. (and to have a chance to put this wonderful praise up infront of you all)

I am a professional artist and have been for years. I have never earned a profit and in fact have always run at a huge loss, even if I don't count my time. (full timer)
so it's not all it's cracked up to be.
I have my ups and downs but I always have to have a full time job on top in order to survive.
well these last two years I have not had to, as I worked hard for a time in australia, forwent a lot of the ordinary things that people take for granted, both during and since and I have been living on that money ever since. It's almost gone now though and I am trying to think what is my next plan, because I have never felt so far from cracking the big time in my whole life.
so unfortunately the only person that pays me to do it is me, and I pay lousy.
:)
but to go back to the beginning a little.
I will have to look for some images to scan and flesh it out with a few words.


my sister and I before the biggest social event of the year, the fancy dress ball. Blackwater cerca 1976 (the link is to a google map, well worth a look. zoom out to get the true idea.)

I was born in the outback.
well in a town in the the outback.
Mt. Isa, according to wikipedia, and I quote (from the queensland link) "The largest city by area in the world, Mount Isa, is located in Queensland. The city area is in excess of 40,000 km²"
google map of mt Isa (same advice about zooming out)

I don't remember a thing and until a few years ago had never seen mt isa with self concious eyes as the family moved when I was all of two years old.
we moved every two years or so during my whole life, well two years or a few more.
the longest we ever spent in one place was in buderim also in queensland where my dad put his foot down and refused to move the family while I was in high school, feeling that it had sent my sister off the rails, moving during her high school years. so there we stayed until I had finished. completely ruined his career as buderim was one of the plushest offices in the state and there was a lot of resentment.


Scott Hollingsworth, Our Ordinary Queenslander, or she has a hot arse

so what ever else he did, or didn't, do for me he gave up his hopes to make it further by doing that.
I have probably never told him to his face that I appreciate that he did that for me.
I'll have to try and get round to it.
the funny thing is that I would have coped just fine I reckon as none of our moves ever traumatised me, I liked it. chance to shed old friends and make a new set.
but in the end you never really make any permanent friends.
I don't have any friends that I have had since childhood, and those few that I do have are from my art school years, which I started when I already had a good twenty six-seven years or so under the bridge, or one from when I did my badly thought out stint in med school from 8 years earlier.

I told teri that I would include some works done with the sewing machine, so here's
one called, "of the difference between criminals and outlaws"


and


this is part of a much larger work, that I will post some picture of in another post, as it was a work that earned me one of my only two prizes.
I had some help getting this work together from my long time partner and collaborator at the time. I won't mention her by name in case I upset her, but a great artist and a fine human being.

and I might post this entry and call it part one, finishing up with a photo from a performance art piece, called "on the wings of an angel, or at least chatting to one" in memory of my favourite preachers daughter.



for anyone who has too much time on their hands and wants more google map experiences
my house in madrid, as seen in a previous post

a selection of other previous homes

where I lived in Gladstone from 1972 - 75,

coolangatta house, right behind the police station

coles creek road

well for some reason these maps are all much more zoomed out than when I linked to them, so sorry 'bout that.
you'll have to zoom them in or just ignore them all together.
but they are fun
until next time

jpg or gif

well what a strange thing
doesn't seem to matter, once you upload it to blogger servers it's a jpg, even if it was a gif on your computer.

I was asked by a lovely illustration friday artist lady if I could help another member with a blogging question.
I said I would be happy to give it a try, and found that he (the member with the problem wanted to know how to put his own banner image on his blog.
well having studied HTML for five minutes with on-line resources like webmonkey and echoecho I felt I could give it a pretty good shot.
so I wrote this guy a long email explaining what he would have to do, and anyway, to cut a long story short, I thought that maybe I would like to give it a go myself.
so having found my banner image in my template, which is the not at all unlovely
following gif from the original tic-tac template that I am using


I set about making a replacement from one of my favourite themes, little ball paintings. (also seen in a previous post)
the following is the same image that I used for the invitation to my last exhibition, now one year ago in madrid.


so I uploaded the gif that I made in fotoshop and got a jpg bit of html, so thinking I must of uploaded the wrong one I went about it again and got the same thing.
so I have to use a jpg when I change my banner image.
oh well, I hope it works alright. You will probably know by now, having opened this page you will have seen the balls or the cool blogger header.
balls mean, I rock, cool header means my coding skills are of the level that I fear.
isn't blogging grand.
(if you haven't worked it out by now I still haven't tried to change the banner. I will do it after I post this)
anyhow I have decided that you lucky devils don't even have to click on that link, if you don't especially want to as I am going to get a bit more milage from the images that I uploaded then by using them again here.
this is the painting that I have done that took the most time.


three months, it took. with time off for good behavior.
or really with a couple of weeks where I had to work on other things because it was getting a form of carpal tunnel syndrome.
that's three months where I was working 10 to 12 hours a day.
there is ten thousand eight hundred and twenty blue balls there.


each has seven steps to complete it and the background is painted between the balls, as one of the last steps.
well before the shadows anyway.


the whole thing is watercolour on gesso, and as you can see there is a lot of cracking and crazing, a thing which I think adds to it's charm.


I just hope that it doesn't mean that at some point the paint will just fall off.
I hope it is in some museum by then.
(which contradicts what I think will happen, but we can all dream ¿no?
I should point out that the whole painting is 27 X 22 cms or 11 X 9 inches so it's fairly concentrated painters energy there.
I did fear that I wouldn't finish it a few times.
(right near the start too, when I realised that I should have left the space, that represents the reflected highlight of each ball. I had to draw the paint back off the surface of the gesso with the tip of a paintbrush putting the tiniest little drops of water on each one and then drawing that water and paint up with the brush and then cleaning the brush on kitchen paper and with water and then repeat. etc. ad infinitum)


anyhow an experience it was.
got me a mention in the review of a competition exhibition in an arts newspaper here in madrid (el punto de las artes) where the reviewer, who remained nameless, even after I rang to ask who it was, lumped it in with a couple of other works in the 'also worth a mention' part of the review.
after getting my name badly wrong, as did the organisers in the catalog and on the wall tags, he said that my work represented a new and interesting discourse.
so I was pretty pleased with that,(one has to take what one can get, otherwise known as beggers can't be choosers) and of course I think it does.anyhow I should really be doing other things, but I have recently discovered that there is a large art materials store not far at all from here so I think I am going to go take a look and take my little doggy mate for a walk at the same time
kill two birds with one stone as it were

I'm having some second thoughts too
I am thinking that even if I succeed in putting my new banner up I might end up going back to the other if it looks better.
I didn't think much before making this one and I think I could have made a better job.
I'll see how I go, see how it looks.
thanks go out to anyone who is visiting, rest assured I will return the favour
isn't blogging grand

love from me

illustration friday blue dog

Well, that took a while
what a drama real life can be
anyhow here's my final blue illo.




and what an unusual thing for me as well, but I have loved it, well, you know what I mean. This illustration friday thing is really good for me. and it keeps me off the streets.
I was really stumped for a while by the theme blue, but then I started thinking of true blue, and blue dogs of aussie land and then after I had started painting this blue dog, lourdes said that the only image that had occured to her was ojos de perro azul (eyes of the blue dog), a story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, so a bit of synchronicity there.
A little while ago, well not that long, back when the theme was free, so two weeks, I think, alina posted a picture with her kit.
I thought I would return the favor.
here's my table this morning.



note the dead cactus. :|
There are plenty of live cactus, doing very well indeed, just off to the right of this space, you'll just have to take my word for it.

so that is my entire work, study and painting space.
That table top.
(which in itself is about one twenty-eth of the space of the whole house)
note the depth of the layers, although it's a bit hard to see.

well I better post this and take my non-blue dog down to the street until he turns blue, from the cold, and then take him to bed and he can warm up under the doona where he sleeps, and I can get some sleep as well

illustration friday- blue stopgap

kind of a stopgap, I'm trying to come up with something



sorry,
but it is blue

illustration friday

pine needles needling me

while looking through some of the blogs of this weeks illustration fiday I came across a really cute birdy and pine needles drawing, that so reminded me of me, although it's a long time since I have made any serious attempt to represent one of our fine feathered friends.
I haven't however, ever gotten completely over my lifelong desire (well thats some sort of tautism) to become a bird painter, and most of what I do when I draw (when I do draw) could be described as studies of objects to go in bird paintings.
I did the following drawing last year, as one of the build-up to longer works.
what a shame I got side tracked.
goddamn technology, (as I am sure she will)
this is a detail first, which on my screen looks like it has come out about life size, ie. the size of the original drawing, which, incidentely, or not, is the size of the original object, or, life size
:)



and this is the whole drawing, which is a non Asomething size, 30 X 42 cms, or for those of the american persuasion, . . hang on!. .. well rethinking that one, that is an Asomething size, being A3, so just ignore that. for the americans that's 12 X 16 and a bit, nearly 17 inches, unless I am sadly mistaken, and the drawing was done from a 'fresh' specimen that I broke of a tree in the park.
sorry tree
I had it set up, spiked on a needle tool, so that it was hanging over my desk, at the angle you see here.
took about ten days and had to finish when I accidently tapped it with my pencil, and all the needles fell off!
the nick of time



You can see why the drawing by ellen made me think of me, and made me want to post this.
also, sounds a bit silly but don't be afraid to post comments to my blog, and say whatever you want. I don't encourage only superpositive comments, although if that's all you can come up with...
love youse all