Pandemic Pondering #158

On By theoldmortuary.designIn London, Serendipity1 Comment

Todays word for the Art Group is Skyscraper. I’m going to be perverse today and talk about the absence of Skyscrapers.

I was 17 when I first became intimately acquainted with St Pauls Cathedral. I calmed my nerves before a career interview at St Bartholomew’s Hospital by wandering the Crypt and Whispering in the eponymous Gallery.

Training in the City with its associated highs and lows gave me ample chance to explore the nooks and crannies of this amazing Cathedral and to develop a humanistic love of the Evensong Service. There is something lovely about doing something that humans have been doing in the same location since 604. Not all history in this area bears repetitions quite so comfortably.

The lack of Skyscrapers around St Pauls is no accident. This is the view from Nunhead Cemetery in South London.

It has a protected view.

You can read more about protected views in this link. https://www.citymetric.com/fabric/protecting-view-how-st-pauls-cathedral-has-been-shaping-rest-london-centuries-2577

This is a painting a little way from St Bartholomew’s Hospital , showing the scale of permitted development closely around St Paul’s. The picture below shows a more distant view from Tate Modern.

Skyscrapers define modern cities but the absence of them near St Paul’s opens up the sky and gives the City a different visual experience.

Pandemic Pondering #157

On By theoldmortuary.designIn SerendipityLeave a comment

#202 a strange number to write in this Pandemic year of 2020, #202 feels strangely unfinished. Just like the year , four and a bit more months to wonder what will happen next in this seminal year.

Yesterday was a bit of a down day @theoldmortuary and then last night was a down night. Different reasons, one more significant than the other.

The down night was caused by not quite parking our camper van horizontally. Which is lucky because today the Art Group Prompt word is Horizontal.

The van was parked with aesthetic and tea drinking in mind but we failed to notice the tiny slope. Both dogs and humans have awoken with hair pulled skyward by our bodies responding to gravity in our sleep as our feet slither slowly off the end of the bed. No photographs are available

I hadn’t expected to have two reasons to ponder ‘Horizontal’ having already been lucky enough to take a photograph that defied me to find a horizontal line when I came to edit it.

Happy Horizontal Sunday.

Pandemic Pondering #156

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Home TownsLeave a comment

The Art Group prompt word is Collage today.

Collage is a popular activity in art classes at all levels. It has never particularly interested me.

I love Palimpsest though, The layering and changing art form so often seen on urban streets.

Palimpsest in its serendipitous form has inspired me to create collage more often and, rather belatedly, I am beginning to enjoy making them just for pleasure, there are many ways to make a collage, some of them without glue.

Mental collage or Palimpsest has started to fascinate me during the pandemic. As our horizons were abruptly limited with lockdown the way I think about certain things has changed. I’ve realised that experiences at home or locally can be as interesting and thought provoking as those moments we rave about when we are away from our domestic location. Extra thinking time and the inability to leave the familiar has made it more interesting.

The month of August and in particular yesterday are two ways I can illustrate this statement.

I’ve always rushed headlong through August in eager anticipation of a holiday or break in September. With no such treat in store, this is the first August I have given due diligence and attention to. Many of my previous thoughts are entirely true , the weather is unreliable, roads and places are too busy, gardens and parks are slightly tired and not as vibrant as earlier in the summer. All true but not as bigger deal as I have previously thought. Adaptation and a little more time makes all these things more interesting this year.

I’ve started forming local holiday type memories and experiences a month earlier than normal simply because I’m paying August more attention.

Holidays @theoldmortuary require

Sunshine

Relaxation

Good Books

Some culture

Swimming

Serendipity

So far August has delivered all of that and more without us leaving a 10 mile radius of our home.

Yesterday was a day of the most tedious shopping; cleaning product stock up time.

Serendipity delivered us a holiday moment on one of our regular dog walks. Mental collage made us notice it, in part I think because the colours reminded us of Greece.

We ordered a fishy tapas at a local restaurant, enjoyed classical music and talked to the owner.

Mental collage around a plate.

If we had been on holiday it would have been a precious nugget of the holiday. What it actually was was a precious nugget of life.

Researchers in the future will look back to this time of Pandemic. There will be many positive findings amongst the sea of bleakness.

Our positive nugget of life happened here.
https://www.thehookandlineplymouth.co.uk/

Pandemic Ponderings #155

On By theoldmortuary.designIn MusicLeave a comment

Lyrics is the word for the Art Group prompt.

I created this image giving an almost identical value to the word and the picture.

Which is the most important?

The words or the music?

So many lyrics so little time was my first thought.

For this reason I sent myself down a rabbit hole , investigating the lyrics of one hit wonders. A genre of popular music that seems to suffer from less interesting lyrics, in my opinion. It was quite the rabbit hole and gave me an exception that proved the, self imagined, rule.

There is a curious transatlantic difference which muddied things a bit.Listed One Hit Wonders in the U.S are often from well established British bands that simply never made a prolonged success of music in the U.S. The lyrics of these One Hit Wonders are of a higher calibre.

The UK list has more solidly poor lyrics. Then a golden nugget of a One Hit Wonder landed at my fingertips.

One Hit Wonder on both sides of the Atlantic.

One Hit Wonder for the original writer.

One hit Wonder for the recording artist.

Poetry/Lyric crossover One Hit Wonder.

Surely in a Pandemic what the world needs is a re-release of Desiderata.

Max Ehrman was a lawyer and writer of Poetry. Desiderata was his only well known poem.

Les Crane was a spunky ex Air Force pilot who became a provocative and well respected TV presenter, quite what persuaded him to record a hippy new age recording of Max Ehrmans poem in 1971 is not making itself obvious to me. It’s more spoken word than lyric , but some of the words are sung, making it so much more lyrical.

It made him a One Hit Wonder
https://youtu.be/3bUTcy6w2Rw

Lyrics, just words that take you places.

Pandemic Pondering #154

On By theoldmortuary.designIn SerendipityLeave a comment

Ponderings have very little planning , just musings about things that come up in daily life. August has been slightly different as I am running the Instagram campaign for an Art Group.Every day for a month a prompt word from a list compiled by someone else is given to members. I just upload an image and remind members what the word of the day is. For ease, despite not being the biggest fan of this kind of themed/prompt style of running social media, I decided to use the same word to inspire my bloggings. It has not been as hard as I imagined. Today is day 20 of the prompts for August and Pandemic Pondering #200. The word is ‘throwback’ . Things could not be any worse. If I dislike prompts I dislike the predictable ones even more. For example Monday Motivation, Throwback Thursday, Friday Feeling.It was with horror I realised that a ‘special number’ pondering #200 would be saddled with one of my least favourite prompts.Crazy really as pondering is an almost constant reflecting back.My relationship with prompt words just reflects a bigger antithesis to being controlled while being creative.I adapt recipes.I dance like noone is watching.I used to reassign colours and numbers with paint by numbers sets.The last one is bonkers 😂. How I wish I had kept them. It was an early manifestation of a curious mind not quite happy to conform.This August prompting experience has taught me to just get on with it. Something I’m more than happy to do in real life but resistant to in my creative space.That’s my pre-pondering over, time to get on with throwing back.Serendipity, a key word in pondering throws me back to last Saturday/Sunday when this crazy arrangement happened @theoldmortuary.Three things with identical colours collided on our coffee table.The first and most permanent one is The Vanity of Small Differences by Grayson Perry.Link to Grayson Perry
https://g.co/kgs/cSpNurAn art/sociological essay style picture book for adults. A lovely book to dip into for lots of reasons. His illustrations are completely engaging, our two year old grand daughter also loves it for the funny stories you can make up using his pictures.The second item creating Serendipity was this unexpected free gift from a coffee roasting company, it had arrived with our coffee bean order and was left on the table.Link to Butterworths
https://butterworthandson.co.uk/The third serendipitous item was this lovely bunch of locally grown fresh flowers, that arrived in the hands of some friends who came for supper on Saturday night.This lovely bunch of flowers pulled the whole crazy colour and pattern match together. They were bought from one of the many road side stalls that can be found in the lanes of the Tamar Valley. Historically the Tamar Valley was one of the very important areas for growing fruit and veg because of its rich soil and gentle, warm and wet, climate. The produce was shipped and later carried by train to London for customers from all over the country. These flowers and the produce stalls they come from are all that is left from a growing region that, relatively, grows no more.Link to Tamar Valley AONB
https://www.tamarvalley.org.uk/about/maps/Pandemic Pondering #200 done. Where will we be by #300.

Pandemic Pondering #153

On By theoldmortuary.designIn art, Fitness, SerendipityLeave a comment

Wet on Wet is the Art Group Prompt.That is quite a challenge for a blog.Wet on Wet is a painting technique, where layers of wet paint are applied onto an already wet surface. I am not an expert at this technique. I’ve never used it with oil paints . I do use it with watercolour, but I’m not the best practitioner. It can turn out dreadfully badly, or with practise you can get lucky. Having a good teacher helps immeasurably.

© theoldmortuary
This is an infinity pond at The Scarlet Hotel, Mawganporth, Cornwall. Mr Mackerel posed for this painting, below, before supper.
©theoldmortuary
I’ve also evolved a Wet on Wet technique for acrylic painting. This method is not taught but comes from an inquisitive mind. For this technique, as yet unpatented, I mix acrylic paint with a variety of clear fluids. There has been no teacher for this technique, many muddy mistakes.Water.Saline.Vodka.Rubbing alcohol.Silicone lube.When the different diluents meet on a pre-prepared canvas or board they react to one another quite differently and can give some fascinating effects. Sometimes great and sometimes shockingly bad. With a little practice I have learnt what works well together but I can always be surprised and not always in a good way.These two went well.Dungeness
©theoldmortuary
Dungeness detail.Forder Creek
© theoldmortuary
Forder Creek Detail.And finally and importantly.A Left Hand Cleaving Water
© theoldmortuary
Detail.This last picture is an important link to non arty wet on wet.P.SA pandemic revelation! @theoldmortuary have become hooked on wild water swimming. Not something that you expect to read in an artyfarty blog. But with a prompt like wet on wet, added to us living in Cornwall that particular prompt lends itself to wild swimming too. It can rain a bit in Cornwall. We are fairly enthusiastic swimmers in warmer climates but swimming outside in Britain has been pretty infrequent until this pandemic. Without access to swimming pools since March and with no holidays on the horizon, swimming was off our radar until about 10 days ago. Some friends invited us to go to a beach for an early morning swim and we haven’t stopped going. Wet on wet refers to us not caring about rain , which is very curious. We’ve taken the plunge a few times in the rain without any worries.We’ve even talked about wet suits to prolong our season.Pandemic Pondering- exploring Wet on Wet two ways.

Pandemic Pondering#152

On By theoldmortuary.designIn art, Nature, SerendipityLeave a comment

The Art Group prompt word takes @theoldmortuary to some interesting places. Who doesn’t love a landscape?

My thing for years has been abstract landscapes. For this blog I plunged into my ideas and inspiration file.

I am intrigued and galvanized by nature’s ability to always overwhelm the constructs that man creates or just change the way things look. In doing so there is often unexpected beauty.

The dunes suffocating a beach hut at Wells-next-the-sea, Norfolk.

Here is an urban reclamation. Tarmac in Dulwich Park being broken up by tree roots and covered by autumn leaves and other natural detritus.

@theoldmortuary. The Smith Family Collection.

Nature is not exactly reclaiming this wall, but the Landscape Street Art is so famous as a site for Instagrammers that it is being worn away by sweaty hands and carefully posed leaning. This picture was taken some time after it was painted but before it became insanely popular as an Instagram background.

Alex Croft painted this as a commission for Goods of Desire. Countless Instagram photos feature this slowly fading wall.

©Instagram

Closer to home our century plus garden wall looked like a hedge as ivy took control.

It took quite a bit of effort to bring it back to wall status.

Next up 2 beaches slowly consuming man made structures.

And finally some box fresh images taken on Monday evenings combined swim and dog walk adventure.

A landscape shaped by the sea. Even if you visit this beach every day it will always be different.

Harlyn Bay, Cornwall

Pandemic Pondering #151

On By theoldmortuary.designIn PoetryLeave a comment

Wave is the prompt word of the Art Group. It would be easy living, as I do, close to the sea to share pictures of lapping waves. But today the word Wave gives me a direct link with our other home zone, Lambeth, London.

Not Waving but Drowning is a poem I loved as a teenager. Filed in my mind but not actually reread until today. I find it’s exquisite accuracy even more moving with a perspective altered by many years of adulthood, and the growing understanding of the fragility of young male mental health.

It is the most famous of Stevie Smith’s poems,published in 1957, it addresses death, as much of her work does, without sentiment.

And so on to the Lambeth connection.

Not Waving but Drowning is the second album by Loyle Carner a Lambeth born Hip-Hop artist. I’m not sure I’ve worked out why the album shares its name with Smith’s poem but Loyle is an Ambassador for CALM which is a charity working to support mens mental health. Hip Hop might not be your thing but Carners lyrics are as sharply accurate as Smith’s poetry.
https://www.thecalmzone.net/

Both the poetry of Smith and the lyrics of Loyle Carner use words to create a wave of emotion

I am in awe of their ability. I hope you are inspired to read more Smith and listen to Loyle Carner. Follow this link.
https://g.co/kgs/ZS9raZ

Not Waving, but drowning is the inspiration for this painting #mensmentalhealthawarenes

Not all creative ideas go to plan.

I wanted to push this image into a less figurative work. Unlike poetry or music some things are not great when reproduced. This print only really works if you can see it.

Man overwhelmed @theoldmortuary

Loyle Carner on Table Manners Podcast.
https://castbox.fm/x/x4nU

Pandemic Pondering #150

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Home TownsLeave a comment

View is the prompt word for the Art Group today.

The greyness of today brought the greens in this shot to life. It’s a view we see often and it changes every day. Most days in the last five months Firestone Bay has looked like a Mediterranean Resort. Today the SUP riders and the green of the rocks gives it an Asian feel.

The Greyness of today is a speciality of Plymouth and the surrounding area.

Devils Point, where this picture was taken is a coastal park of great beauty, despite the uniqueness of the location it is rarely busy. The area takes its name from the numerous, possibly 7, tides that converge on this spot making it devilishly difficult to navigate in a boat.

Just a little blog today but four lovely photos from Devils Point this year.

#lovewhereyoulive

Pandemic Pondering #149

On By theoldmortuary.designIn WordsLeave a comment

Change is the prompt word for the Art Group for Saturday.

Is there a word more significant for Pandemic Pondering in a Pandemic. Change is the most unmentioned symptom of this whole Covid-19 period.

Percy the Peacock is the perfect example of the correct way to cope with change.

Most of the time he responds beautifully.

Sometimes he reacts….

Everyone prefers it when Percy responds!!

So being a wise bird, he reverts to responding. It’s better for everyone.

There is so much change for everyone right now, some of it’s pretty unwelcome and reacting is understandable, but it is always possible to upgrade a reaction to a response.

When confronted with change be more Percy!

#bemorepercy