Simon's Blog

Feeling your age

Posted on May 26, 2015 by Guthlac

One of the things that no one really tells you about aging is that you have to endure the slow destruction of your body in front of your eyes. Of course many people resort to plastic surgery to try and arrest this never ending battle with gravity but in truth they rarely succeed. In the end we all age, some better than others, but it happens and suddenly we look into the mirror and there is this strange older face looking back. Where the hell did he come from? Of course we all know the answer and we also know the ultimate answer to this problem which is also looking back at us in the mirror but we don’t really want to dwell on that either.

Posted in Art | Tagged Aging, man, plastic surgery, Soft Pastels | Leave a comment

Language

Posted on May 25, 2015 by Guthlac

I was listening to a fascinating talk on TED the other day about the development of language and how it became a defining feature of being human. With language you are able to explain things in an abstract form as well as passing one lessons from the past. The speaker then went onto explain that language was, like everything about us, a genetic mistake when DNA was coding itself. Apparently DNA makes such mistakes every billion or so replications. Most of the time these replication errors don’t cause any noticeable changes but sometimes they have profound effects on the next generation. Such an effect was the ability of talk.

Of course the ability to form coherent sounds really is the easy part – the ability to understand what they mean is the other half of the equation. Just prove this think of anytime you might have heard someone talking in a language you might not understand and how that makes communication so much more difficult. So perhaps there were two genetic errors that came along and helped to start the development of the brain at the same time as language. This in turn means that somewhere back in the past there was individual who had the language error transmitted to them during conception and that one person must have been the mother or father of us all. I am sure that this is a too simplistic understanding of the situation but in just under 150,000 years we have gone from not being able to talk to Buzzfeed …some progress?

So what has this to do with the drawings? Nothing but as I have stated before it is my blog so I’ll fill it with as many strange juxtapositions as I like.

Posted in Art | Tagged Buzzfeed, development of language, DNA, ink drawing, ink sketch, Language, portrait, sketch, TED | Leave a comment

Blue…Needles Guns and…

Posted on May 24, 2015 by Guthlac

I’m going through a blue period at the moment…the interesting thing about these images that I made another drawing which was trying to be too formal and it didn’t work. These two were drawn freehand and where much more successful…maybe there is a moral there?

Posted in Art | Tagged Blue, blue period, ink drawing, ink sketch, Mother and Child, The Joker, woman | Leave a comment

LIfe and death

Posted on May 21, 2015 by Guthlac

At the moment we have several known bird’s nests within in the garden at the moment and it a wonder of nature to watch the scramble for life of these creatures. However, with this gift comes heartache as we find from time to time the bodies of small birds, usually chicks or fledglings, around the garden. Of course it is very easy to get all teary about such things but this would be wrong response. Instead it should be accepted as just another part of the life cycle of the small birds who as a means to compensate for this have several large broods each summer.

I was contemplating these and many other things this afternoon as I sat in the sunlight this afternoon making this drawing. As I did this the small birds flittered around trying to feed their ever hungry offspring. Is there a moral? No but then again I don’t think that there should be.

Posted in Art | Tagged Birds, Chicks, drawing, Female Nude, Fledgling, Nests, nude, Soft Pastels | 2 Comments

Freehand

Posted on May 20, 2015 by Guthlac

One of the real joys I find from creating art (what an awful phrase that is!) is just sitting down and drawing freehand. In the past I used to got really hung up with trying to make an accurate copy of whatever I was drawing, now I’m not that bothered as the process is what I really enjoy. Strangely the less I cared about the resemblance to what I am drawing the more interesting and accurate the drawings have become – well sort of.

BTW these drawings were all made yesterday afternoon – if that makes a difference which I’m not sure it does.

Posted in Art | Tagged drawing, ink drawing, nude, Nude Woman, woman | Leave a comment

Scallywag and the gothic novel

Posted on May 19, 2015 by Guthlac

Creative journeys are strange things. They have huge twists and turns that aren’t planned, well that is how it seems to me but it may be that I am doing things all wrong. So yesterday I was feeling quite pleased with myself as I seem to have discovered an approach to making paintings that suits me and everything was wonderful in the garden.

Then this morning I found myself clearing out a load of images from my iPhone because it was running out of space. Amongst the image I discovered one that ignited another fire in my brain – for some reason I thought ‘Blasted Heath’. Now I am sure that there have never been any witches active at Calke Abbey the image did have that feel. Perhaps it is where Heathcliff might have married Catherine? I think I am letting this whole thing get away from me.

Anyway, strange bedfellows make for an interesting couple.

Posted in Art, Photography | Tagged Calke Abbey, Heathcliff, iphone, Oil Pastels, photography, Shakespeare, Wuthering Heights | Leave a comment

The Yin and Yang of Labour Politics

Posted on May 18, 2015 by Guthlac

Two weeks after the most devastating defeat for the Labour party in living memory we have entered a time when all concerned will be eating their babies, by which I mean they are trying to elect a new leader. Straight after the defeat it was the turn of the Blairites to get their knives out. This weekend its the turn of the, well I’m not sure what epithet to give them – maybe Unite – to get their retaliation in. It is so very depressing and so very predictable. When will any of these people learn that it wasn’t because they weren’t too right wing, centrist or left wing that they lost. It was because no one really believed that they could form a government and that even less people thought that Ed Miliband was a suitable candidate to be prime minister.

None of this will matter over the next few months. Instead what will matter will be purity of thought around subjects that I suspect an awful lot of Labour members don’t really care about. At the same time they will be reinforcing the notion being put about by the Tories that Labour is untrustworthy, which I suspect is the kettle calling the pot black but it is Labour’s own fault.

The one ray of hope is that they have been here before. In 1992 they suffered a defeat, perhaps nothing of the magnitude of 2015 but a shattering one nonetheless, yet by 1997 they had been elected with a huge majority after the Tories had pulled themselves apart over Europe, does that sound familiar? Of course the Labour party had elected a leader who proved on three separate occasions he knew how to win an election. However, Tony Blair seems to be such a dirty word amongst the Labour party that they really deserve everything they are about to get.