Cat life

 Just parking this here. I had it on Facebook but I’m not sure I saved it anywhere else. It happened when E was at my house, drawing. She decided (completely her own idea) to draw my toy cat. She was four at the time. I thought it a very observant study. 

Artistic talent

I spent a happy afternoon recently at The Hepworth, Wakefield with my daughter and two grandgirls. The gallery is very welcoming to children, providing packs of paper and pastel crayons so they can sketch and draw. The girls spent a long time happily ensconced in one of the huge window bays, sketching scenes inspired by the foaming waters of the River Calder below, as it tumbles over a weir. It was a very hot day so eventually we adjourned to the café for drinks and cake. Elodie (11) continued her sketching at the café table, producing this picture of the little flower arrangement on the table. 

I was really impressed at how observant she'd been, capturing not only the graceful arrangement but adding her own touches. The vase was white, not red for a start, but in the picture red tones in with the rusty foliage. There's a confidence, freedom and lyricism to the drawing that I really like. It's taken pride of place on my kitchen noticeboard for now but I wanted to 'immortalise' it here too. 

 

Inspired

I visited an exhibition today in Leeds that contained an exquisite little book called 'A Venetian Brocade' by Helen Douglas, who is a Scottish artist and photographer. The images in her book are collages and layered images of Venice. I was really inspired by them and wondered if I could create something similar related to Saltaire. I took the basic idea (though I could not, of course, not slavishly follow it as I could only guess how she'd created the pictures). Anyway, playing around with some of my recent pictures of Salts Mill and the canal, I have come up with this collage. I do quite like it, though I'm sure with more practice I could improve on it. 

Patterns - and creativity

I seem to be adopting a blue theme in the last few posts. (Cool! 😄)  Here's a collage I made of reflections of Salts Mill in the canal. I'm often drawn to these patterns in the canal and river, which constantly change with the light and the movement of the water. Saltaire is so familiar to me and, even though it's a stunning World Heritage Site, I sometimes get bored by the same old views of the same old places. It's good to challenge myself to make something 'new' of it - and these sorts of patterns and abstracts are as 'original' as you can get, in that each frame cannot be repeated exactly. 

Having said that, I also feel a little frustrated that I get so far and then can't get any further, creatively speaking. This is not displeasing - nice colours and shapes - but I can't help feeling I should be able to make more of it. It's not really very artistic. It reminds me of when I was doing 'O' level Art. I'd drawn some flowers, quite nicely and neatly, and my art teacher took up a brush with red paint and drew a big messy outline around each flower head, with the idea of encouraging me to be freer and looser in my work. It clearly wasn't the right way to go about getting me to relax into it. I was horrified and didn't really see what she was getting at.  Now, I do, of course, but I still can't free my brain of that 'neat' gene. 

OK, pushing myself to riff on the theme now... a paler version:

Pale and layered ( probably like this the best!):

A layered and blended version: 

Change the colours: 

iColorama

I’m a bit of a sucker for photo apps on my iPad, and over the years have experimented with quite a few. Most of them appeal initially for the rapid and interesting effects that can easily be produced, and most of them quickly lose their appeal for the simple reason that they are  - as far as I’m concerned anyway - a bit over the top and ‘fake’. In addition, most photos put through these processes are not admissible in camera club competitions and so have limited value for me. It is more sensible to use normal photo processing software and one’s own photos, including textures and colour layers. Playing with apps can, however, be an absorbing, even soothing, activity and a fun way to fill some spare time, when reading or TV or other leisure activities don’t quite scratch the itch. 

I’m not talking about the very useful processing apps, like Snapseed, which is my (and many other photographers’) choice for mobile editing as it is very good and versatile. No, these are apps like Distressed FX, which offers texture overlays; Waterlogue, which allows you to convert photos into watercolour effects; BeCasso which offers a variety of creative ‘paint’ filters and my current favourite discovery: iColorama, which offers a plethora of styles and effects. I rarely pay a subscription for these apps, just using whatever free content there is. I rarely delve deep into them either, so I suppose I’m not going to produce instant masterpieces without practice. Nevertheless, they can give quite pleasing results, like the sunset fantasy above. (Not that I can remember now how I created that! That’s the downside when I’m ‘just playing’ as I fail to note the various stages of experimentation so that I can never replicate the effect twice!) 

The same app produced the image below, produced ‘in the style of Van Gogh’. Rather fun. 

The girl with the orange pencil

I spotted this painting some while ago in a gallery in the Piece Hall in Halifax. It's called 'The Orange Pencil' and was designed by Young and Battaglia, based on a 16th century portrait of an unknown woman by Agnolo Bronzino. It amuses me no end... Something to do with the juxtaposition of the elegant lady and her 'well, I'm me and I don't care' attitude really speaks to me. I took a photo with my phone and had it printed out and it is pinned on the noticeboard in my kitchen. My youngest granddaughter saw it and decided to recreate it. She didn't have too much difficulty, whereas I find it really tricky to hold a pencil right there. Believe me, I've tried! 😉

 

Cloud Inversion

I'm thrilled to have this hanging on the wall in my kitchen-diner. It's a hand-finished, limited edition print: 'Cloud Inversion', by the Hebden Bridge-based artist, Kate Lycett. I've admired her work for a long time, and have enjoyed seeing her finding her style over the years and creating work with an increasingly sure touch. She originally trained as a textile designer and you can still see that influence in her work, with soft inks and gouache overlaid by characteristic embellishments and the use of gold thread and gold leaf. You can just about see from my photo how the patches of gold leaf catch the light so that the print shimmers and changes as you move around it. I absolutely love it! I never thought I'd be lucky enough to own one of her larger prints, though I have cards and a beautiful book already. This was a gift for my 70th birthday - print edition 70/150. I am delighted with it.  

On the back it has this note from the artist:

That makes the scene even more special as this place is just across the valley from where my daughter lives. 

Not grumpy!

Just parking this here for memory's sake. I had my granddaughters for the day. They've just returned from holiday and have another couple of weeks before school restarts. We had a lovely day. We called into a huge, local garden centre that, as well as all the plants and garden stuff, has tropical fish, a few guinea pigs, two enormous tortoises and a parrot called Elvis. It also has an arcade of old penny slot machines, so we had a fun time in there. Back at mine, they drew, made bead bracelets and we went to the local playground (they call it the play park) for them to run off some steam. 

My older granddaughter is almost 11 and suddenly rather 'tween', apparently as perplexed herself, as her parents, are by sudden mood swings and outbursts of frustration. (Trying to put on lace-up shoes was a real trigger point!) Up to now, she and her sister (nearly 8) have been pretty much in step but I can see that is changing. They do still play together well but also need times apart and have times of friction. What still suits the younger one is suddenly of no interest to the older one. I can see we're all in for some fun and games! 

That said, they are both very loving and E (the older one) drew me this picture with a lovely message. She'd be surprised by how often my own grumpy cloud is in evidence... but I'm glad she doesn't see it. 

Heavenly host

I popped into Sandsend's little Victorian church, St Mary's, whilst I was on holiday. It had all these paper angels flying around the nave - rather pretty. It also had a yoga class going on and I think the instructor thought I was taking a photo of all the ladies lying on their mats! I didn't hang around!

I do find I love depictions of angels, in graveyards and in paintings: all those cute, chubby little cherubim, especially that wonderful pair in Raphael's 'Sistine Madonna' painting.  There are angels mentioned many times in the Bible, and some people believe they are here on earth as well as in heaven. I tend to think our angels don't have wings...  It is, however, somehow comforting to me to think that we may each have a guardian angel. There have been times in my life when I felt maybe there was an angel nearby watching out for me. When my daughter first left home for university, one of the ways I coped was to pray and believe that there would be an angel watching over her. I still remember the tingle I felt when I went to visit her and looked out of the window of her room. Although it was a fairly modern accommodation block, it was adjacent to a much older building with fancy carved stonework - and yes, there was a stone angel there, looking over and into her room. 

"For it is written: 'He will command his angels concerning you to guard you carefully.'" Luke 4:10

'See, I am sending an angel ahead of you to guard you along the way and to bring you to the place I have prepared.' Exodus 23:20

"And suddenly there appeared with the angel a great multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying:: 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom His favour rests!'" Luke 2:13

Pastels

I really should find time to make more creative, non-representational images. I do quite enjoy myself when I let go and just let myself play. It's hard to judge whether the results are worthwhile, but these days it seems the only way you can be truly original (by which I mean show something different and innovative) as a photographer is to make composite or artistic images, one way or another. Most good landscape scenes have been Instagrammed to death. Sport, nature, portraits and street are kind of niche genres that I'm not too fond of shooting, and many of their subjects are seen over and over again, somewhat predictably. 'Birds on sticks', jet skis, racing motorbikes and so on...  

I did this one a while ago and just came across it again. It often helps to review these kinds of images some time later. If I still like them after a passage of time, that is good. I can't even recall when or where I took the base images but I was playing with water and reflections and then adding coloured texture layers. (As far as I'm concerned, my creative images are so 'original' that I couldn't reproduce one of them a second time myself, even if I wanted to. I don't keep note of the steps in their creation.) This one would probably look good printed on some matte, textured art paper. Printing is another thing I should perhaps do more of, though then you have to find space to store the prints, always a problem. 

Retreating

This painting, a watercolour called 'Medieval hall' by Rachel Wood, was hanging above the desk in my room at the retreat house where I stayed in Sleights. (The copyright will be hers, not mine, and I hope there is no objection to me sharing it.) The more I looked at it, the more I appreciated it - the soft, loose strokes and gentle neutral tones appealed to me very much. It's the kind of scene I'd photograph if I came across it. Furthermore the empty, cell-like space increasingly spoke to me. 

The week I was away coincided with a heatwave, not the record temperatures we had a few weeks ago but still too hot for me to feel comfortable by the afternoon. (I don't know how I do it... That's the third holiday I've had in succession that coincided with a heatwave - 2019, 2021 and now 2022! Different weeks too.) Some people would love the sunshine but I like to explore and walk on my holidays and it was too hot to do that.  So the week, for me, turned into a bit of a challenge to my boredom thresholds. The wi-fi at the retreat house is, sadly or perhaps deliberately, abysmal, only properly available in one room  and even then so slow as to be fairly impossible to use successfully. So, perhaps fortuitously, my 'go-to' time-waster wasn't readily available! That still left books to read and I finished one and started another, and managed to restore to some extent my powers of concentration, generally rather badly eroded by too much reliance on tech/computer/iPad. 

The week also provided, for me, a way back into a regular rhythm of shared prayer and worship, since guests are invited to join the community in their chapel for short services of morning and evening prayer. Since Covid came along and we all had to lock-down, my regular church going has broken down. I did try a couple of services once things were going back to normal (or as normal as they are now) but I found problems with hearing properly and difficult issues with wearing a mask and specs at the same time, and things went on too long for comfort and then I was pinged by the NHS app for 'being in close contact with someone who later tested positive for Covid' - and it turned out I'd been surrounded by about-to-be-ill people! Though I didn't myself succumb (as far as I know!) that was pretty off-putting. So I haven't so far been back. I suppose I should make the effort again but it hasn't really felt as though it has impacted my faith or my personal rhythm of quiet prayer time. I was having issues before with all sorts of aspects of 'church', which are not resolved...

Anyway, the gentle, quiet discipline of short times of shared worship proved comforting. The Community use several parts of the Northumbria Community's Celtic devotions and, having used those myself (and indeed spent time with the Northumbria Community in the past) it was familiar, like rediscovering a favourite and comfortable garment. I have resolved to go back to using those verses again at home. When the worship sticks to a liturgy that is incredibly helpful to me (being deaf), though I can never hear people's offered prayers, which feels both slightly annoying and slightly disenfranchising, since I dare not pray aloud myself in case I'm just repeating or cutting across someone else. Never mind, I just pray my own prayers in those bits.

On the Thursday evening before I left on Friday, there was a simple, shared Communion, the first I have taken since before lockdown. So that felt warming and nourishing, soul food. 

Retreating... re-treating... perhaps moving forwards rather than backwards? 

'Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his love endures forever.'  Psalm 118. 

Thoughts...

This print by Jack Vettriano was hanging in the bedroom of the accommodation that I stayed in for a recent family wedding celebration in Berkshire. Although the wedding itself was delightful, the print was really the best bit about the accommodation! It was all a bit eccentric... cobwebs seemed to be used almost as a design feature. I'm not a huge fan of Jack Vettriano but I do like this picture. Entitled 'In thoughts of you', it is enough of an enigma to suggest a story to your own liking. I asked M (7) what she thought of it. She has been something of an art expert from an early age. She was spotted - aged about two - reading 'Art and Sexual Politics' (albeit upside down) and, even before she could talk, she communicated in sign language to tell us that she thought a modern art painting of random coloured splodges and spots was 'stars'. Her thoughts on this one were that 'the lady has just moved in to a new house. She is having a cup of tea and wondering what to do next'. Anyone who moves house wearing killer heels like those probably has staff to do the 'what next' stuff but, nevertheless, I though it a charming interpretation of the picture.