Before Christmas things were in a bit of crises with my research. Suddenly I was looking at two years of work unravelling and today Petrology came to the rescue. Strange how things change with just one single word.
I hear the door bell ringing and the panic takes me
One of the most frustrating questions that any artists can here when they have tried to make a likeness of someone is when some one asks “…who is it?…”. I was pondering this question this morning when I was creating this drawing. Just what is a likeness – especially when you are trying to make a likeness of someone you’ve never meet and who works so hard to control their image. On top of this photograph you are using is actually not the standard image that the person has associated with them. I have no idea what the answer is to any of these questions I just like this portrait I made this morning – I guess because it was such a struggle. As for who it is …well Who is it?
I have a confession to make. I love trashy pop music. Music that doesn’t have any deep mean but just is a great tune or harmony or something else that can hook you – that is my sort of music. As I right this I’m listening to Steps – utterly brilliant and utterly trashy nonsense.
Christmas hasn’t turned out the way I had planned just a few days ago. You see I was planning getting up early and drive to the coast for dawn…it would have only taken an hour or so at that time of morning. Yes that was the thing I was going to do. That is until the weather started to close in and the truth started to close in about getting up at 5am on Christmas day. Now I’ve worked on many Christmas days and nights so getting wasn’t a problem then but now well – we didn’t do it. Instead we had a nice walk through an almost deserted in the morning – quite refreshing but not dawn over the sea.
As for the image – this is an experiment I though of doing with a bit of mix media, a drawing and digital image with a bit of work in Photoshop. I think it looks rather 19th century.
Life like a time lived in such a dream…like the birds on winterwood
This is a book end painting. I started to take Digital Painting seriously this time last year and so I though it might be useful to produce something to book end this extraordinary year. I really don’t this is bad start – not sure how many I’ll between now and the end of December.
Waiting for a star to fall. Oh BTW should anyone from Australia or New Zealand read this…Happy Christmas…we’ve got another 6 hours to go. Why in even’s name would some one from Australia read this blog???
Tis the day before Christmas and all is….well bloody frustrating! Whilst other sane people are preparing for their Christmas celebrations this poor sap thought it would be a great idea just to pull in some light archaeological reading. Nothing says Christmas like a discussion of fine sand or granite inclusions in mid to late iron age pottery!
As with most of these documents I have to read them several times to fully understand them – a mixture of dyslexia and not being a trained archaeologist. – By the third run through I discovered that there was a document I should read and it has the potential to blow much of my work out of the water!
A months worth or writing and a couple years of research could go up in smoke – or perhaps it could reinforce everything I had found out. I just don’t know and won’t know until the New year. Oh Hubris…what a wonderful gift for Christmas…ARRGGHH.
Oh the joys of being a drama queen…Merry Christmas everyone. And remember keep away from all those archaeological reports this Christmas!
So now we have to wait until the New Year before any solution is found for the great Rugby melt down. Whilst this is happening the whole of professional rugby in Wales is collapsing before our eyes and there doesn’t seem to be anything anyone is doing about it. We have been through this before in the 1990’s when the Unions tried to keep control of the new professional set up and failed, at least in England and a lesser extent in France.
The view from Ireland is fascinating. The clear villain of the peace is the English and especially the English premiership rugby which are seen as wanting to destroy the status quo and with it much of the rationale for professional rugby in Ireland. There is a kernel of truth in this in the sense that the English clubs want to maximise their earnings, which means destroying the financial structures that under pin professional Irish Rugby.
The view from Wales is totally confusing. If the meeting with the regional supporters is to be believed the Welsh RFU don’t seem to understand that the regions are not going to sign the agreement by the 31st of December to continue to be part of the Pro12 and Heineken Cup. The Union might be right and this is just brinkmanship on the part of the regions but if it is not then professional rugby in Wales will very quickly collapse without the English coming to the rescue. Now there is a very politically charged statement for you but it is the cold hard truth. The English clubs, along with their French counterparts, can afford to sit things out – the Welsh, Irish and Scots can’t.
I guess the outcome of all this is that the Heineken Cup will go ahead next year, without the English, and all the parties who take part will try and pretend that it has been a great sucess. That is until the viewing figures are examined and it will be shown to be a disaster – especially if an Anglo Welsh tournament is arranged to replace the missing European games for the English and Welsh teams, which of course would be sponsored by BT. What a horrible mess that would produce.
As Canute discovered all those years ago you can’t fight the primeval forces of life (a bit of a mixed metaphor I know). Once BT saw rugby as their way of attacking Sky Sport’s cosy hegemony of the pay sports market then this mess was bound to happen. The respective Unions always try and protect the status quo without any real power to do so, as I guess will be shortly proven to be the case when the Welsh regions sue the Welsh RFU for restriction of trade. The problem with this is that one union, the English, is richer than the others put together and have embraced life without too much control over their professional clubs. When this happens it doesn’t take long before the whole thing collapses. It would have been nice if the home unions had woken up to this fact and not tried pretend it wasn’t happening. Unfortunately they didn’t and so we have this sorry mess.
Simon Marchini
http://www.simonmarchini.co.uk
It has been a while since I ventured into the murky world of professional Rugby Union in Europe. My main beef in the past has been how the Murdoch controlled media, in my case The Times, has represented the conflict to their own advantage ie SKY Sports, a Murdoch controlled if not owned TV Company, have the right to European Rugby and BT Sports, a new kid on the block but with a BIG company backing them, have the rights to the English Premiership Rugby Union – so current European Rugby set up Good – proposed English European set up BAD.
The dispute has been about two things control and money, which in truth is all about money, and is the logical outcome of the professionalisation of Rugby Union in the 1990’s. There are many faults on both sides but it is clear that money will win the day in the end over tradition as the clubs pay the players wages rather than the National Unions.
The one final element in this sorry story is that there are only two countries who can fully support a professional Rugby Union structure, France and especially England. The other countries are trying to, by many slights of hand, support professional Rugby but when you see the value of the TV rights in countries other than England and France it soon becomes clear that there really is no monetary value in the professional set up beyond some form of tie up with the England and France. The proposed European set up next year shows just how worthless any product is without England for one very delicate reason – Scotland, Ireland and Wales are in the same market as England – they are not in the same market as France – much as they might wish to think they are. Hence any marketing strategy that doesn’t include the English is going to be significantly less valuable.
Which brings us to this article and how Wales is caught up in the middle of this monumental struggle. Professional Rugby does have value in Wales but the way things are going it would seem that value is stagnating. To make matters worse South Wales has started to establish itself in the English Premier League which means Rugby has to compete against the most successful International sporting organisation in the world – which game would the punter like to see Swansea v Manchester United or Ospreys v Leinster? In truth, I suspect, the only thing that would get real interest is if Ospreys play the Leicester Tigers or Bath or Gloucester. In short, Welsh professional rugby only has a future playing in an Anglo Welsh set up because, well not to a too finer point on it, that is where the money is. Hence the dilemma.
This whole sorry story will only have one winner – Money and those who have the money – England and France will eventually set the terms on which the other professional Rugby set ups are run and controlled and it doesn’t matter how many meetings between national Rugby Unions take place to try and pretend this isn’t the case. One final thought which I think underlines my point. The last World Cup was held in New Zealand, the world power house of Rugby Union, not because it would be a good idea but because it would have been the last time New Zealand could afford to host the tournament. You see there are only 4 million souls in New Zealand, which is small beer and the commercial opportunities aren’t there to support the Rugby World Cup. That is very very sad but the way of the world which, after all, ‘…money makes the world go round, the world go round…’
http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2013/dec/19/rugby-union-wales-deadline-heineken-cup
Simon Marchini
http://www.simonmarchini.co.uk
Over the past week or so I’ve been working hard…something I’ve not done in a very long time! By hard I mean the kind of work I used to do all the time but it is like everything if you don’t use it then you loose it. So I’m just a bit knackered just now – hopefully the hard work will be over with by Christmas and I can go back to my more leisurely pace of life.
In the meantime I just been working on this painting to relax. She is coming along just fine.
Simon Marchini
http://www.simonmarchini.co.uk
Sitting at the breakfast table this morning I was mindlessly looking at the knots in the pine table and suddenly saw the nostrils of a face. I had to work out what the rest of the face might look like so I sketched the nostrils out and left the rest to my imagination.
Simon Marchini
http://www.simonmarchini.co.uk
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