Rudbeckia

My darling wife works hard in the garden and the results of this hard work are wonderful displays of flowers. This year my wife grew some Rudbeckia plants. These plants have been a fantastic display of sunny yellow flowers for what seems to be months.  They look like little suns.  Like the suns that children draw.

Inspired by these plants and finding a canvass in the back of my workroom (calling it a studio seem pretentious). One sunny day a few weeks ago I went into the garden and laid myself flat out in front of one of the Rudbeckia plants with the canvass and a pencil. A few moments later my wife came rushing out asking me if I was ok. She had seen me flat in the garden but did not see the canvass. She thought that I had collapsed.

Armed with a mastic gun I outlined the flowers and produced the following picture. I like the naïve effect that the mastic gun only allows.

Size 16" x 20"

The flowers on the picture are still blooming whilst the plant is now fading.

Why did I think that I could copy nature.

God gave us nature to be inspired by, not to copy it. We mortals are incapable of copying nature and still retaining the impeccable beauty of all things untarnished by man.

I had not done much arty stuff over the summer and I though I would paint a copy of a photograph I had taken earlier in the year. Half way through I realised my mistake (copying nature). I then thought  I would experiment a bit and try to make the foreground flowers more prominent and the background flowers recede. I gave the background a thin wash of white which achieved what I intended. I made the foreground flowers more prominent by outlining them using a mastic gun. I liked the result of this. In the end I have not achieved a picture but I am in the process of trying again using the mastic gun. I live and learn (until I make the same mistake again).



18" x 14"



Roland (as I remember him)

I remember this man from my childhood. He would walk around the town dressed as probably best described as a Dandy, along with a silver tipped walking stick. I remember he once got on a bus that I was on. He stood and talked to the conductor and got off a few stops later without paying. I was possibly nine or ten at the time and I thought that he must be some one special not to have to pay. The thing that I kept in my mind was his red spotted neck scarf. His suit and hat were black making his scarf more prominent.  A while ago I came across a black and white photograph of Roland in book. It did not look right without his red scarf. Hence my ink, pen and red watercolour copy. I know it is not great art to copy something but it is good to keep my draughting skills in tune (weak excuse I know).

Do not try this at home. Some inks when watered down turn to a greeny blue colour. If you must, try Rotring ink. 



4" x 5"



PS sorry about the reflection in the photograph, I did not want to remove him from his frame.

Holes

This piece is inspired by the bark of trees, the textures, the overlapping and the undulations of the bark. The colours are derived from a piece of flint that I have on the windowsill of my work room.  The pieces that I have brought together to form this work, are bits that I have collected, thinking at the time of collection, ‘I think I may be able to use that at some time. Well this sometime has happened.  As with most things I was not so pleased with it when I had first completed it but I have been away in Aberdeen for a week and now my opinion has changed that is why I am now posting it.

Size 8" x 8"

I HAVE DECIDED WHAT TO DO.

Thank you all for your input into my quandary.

ArtPropelled I love your stripes suggestion. But I cannot get the idea of stripy toothpaste put of my head now.

Anna thank you for making me feel not alone in my what would seem to be an illogical attraction to the cone.

Kathryn thank you for’ Give a cone a home’ and other ‘conical’ suggestions.

I have decided keep the cone on the windowsill of my work room along with my collection of interesting stones (do not ask). My cacti have accepted it and it seem to be happy. I am not going to paint it now; I am going for the natural concrete look.

But more importantly you all made me laugh, thank you for that.

Can Someone Tell Me What To Do With This Concrete Cone?

What shall I do with this small concrete cone? (playmobile figure added alongside for scale only)

Let me tell you the story before you tell me what to do with it.

I went to a ruby wedding celebration party at the weekend and had a good old time.  At the party there were about ten tables, each having at least two displays of balloons. Each display consisted of three or four helium filled balloons on long strings tied to some sort of weight. At the end of the party a guest next to me took two of the balloon for her young daughter. I assisted in the untying them from the weight. Normally the weight is a plastic bag filled with water. This weight felt different. We stripped away the decorative paper covering and to my surprise, we found this concrete cone.

Concrete is made using cement and some form of aggregate. Cement is made by grinding limestone and shale and calcifying in a massive rotary kiln. This is then ground in rotary mills to form the dusty cement that arrives in bags to the DIY store. Many moons ago a worked as a design engineer for a cement manufacturer. The efforts and energy to produce cement are enormous. The limestone is quarried; rocks the sizes of a small car are dumped into enormous crushers. The kilns are several hundred feet long. The Cement Works have their own high voltage power supplies.

To me all this makes cement a precious resource to be used wisely. Making balloon weights which will be binned after the party is not wise. I cannot see many people collecting these after the party and taking them to their local recycling centre for crushing and reuse as hard-core.

Now to “what shall I do with it part” of the post. I like the tactile smooth conic shape of the weight and I what to change the destiny of this weight. I am driven to painting it and having it as a decorative object. The problem is that I cannot decide whether to paint it shiny red or matt white.

In the famous words of the Big Brother. ‘You decide’

Intellectual Property Rights of an Image

Following on from my Rusty Bits post http://sparkartsquaresblogspotcom.blogspot.com/2011/06/rusty-bits.html I have now completed my picture. It took me a lot longer than I anticipated. Whilst painting this I was talking to a friend about the process of making the iron that was used to make the ship that inspired my picture. The iron ore would have to be mined and transported. The coal used to fuel the blast furnaces would have to be mined and transported and then converted into coke and probably be transported again. Limestone would also be required to form a flux for the process. This would have to be quarried and transported. All these material would be processed in a blast furnace and an iron billet produced. This billet would the hammered and rolled to form the iron plates. Steam hammers would probably be used. Again coal and a water supply required. The iron plates would need to be shaped, drill and hot riveted to form the ships hull. Just imagine how much of the earth’s resources and human effort was used to make the hull of this ship. It is highly probable that life was last in one of the stages. Most certainly some of the worker would become deaf from the hammering and some miners would have become ill because of the working conditions. My painting is homage to all these workers.

Now where does ‘Intellectual Property Rights of an Image‘ fit with all this.

First who owns the iron of the ship? It seems to me that as it is now rusting and forming iron oxide (which is what is mined in the first place), ‘Mother Earth’ is reclaiming what is hers. Dust to dust.  By this does ‘Mother Earth’ own all rust?

Who owns the image that I produced? Who has the ‘Intellectual Property Rights’ to it?

Consider the passage from ‘The Mirror of Reflection’ by St Francis of Assisi –

“ For in a picture of our Lord and the Blessed Virgin painted on wood, it is the Lord and the Blessed Virgin who receive honour, while the wood and the paint claim nothing for themselves; …..”

Applying this to a secular image, say my ‘The Rusty Bits’ picture, the image, the ‘Intellectual Property Rights‘,  must belongs to the rust its self. And therefore to ‘Mother Earth’

The paper and paint that I used were produced using the earth’s resources and as such must also belong to ‘Mother Earth’.

Thanks to Colin for the informing on the forming of iron.

Thanks to St Francis for his words.