Tag: sketching

#205 theoldmortuary ponders

On By theoldmortuary.designIn art1 Comment

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they hug.

For the next couple of months hugging is the loose starting point for my quick sketches. I don’t really know where the sketches will lead.

Hugging dropped out of favour during the pandemic and is only now rising, Phoenix like, from the still glowing embers of the new endemic era.

Have our hugging habits changed significantly. Will some people slink back away from the sensation of physical touch and isolate themselves forever from the causal embrace?

Others who have previously had a hidden,but effective, force field resisting hugs may decide that now is time to embrace their fellow humans in a way they never did.

I have always been a keen observer and practitioner of the hug. Watching it slowly return into the normal hurly burly of life is a rare opportunity to watch a human interaction re-establish itself.

Sketching and pondering hugs is proving to be an interesting project even if I have no idea where it is going.

The new etiquette of the social hug. It’s a jungle out there.

Pandemic Pondering #15

On By theoldmortuary.designIn Pandemic ponderingsLeave a comment

Pondering the poor Pangolin.Being a small bookworm took me to some interesting books and introduced me to unusual creatures The Pangolin was a creature I felt an affinity with whenever one appeared in the books I was reading. At other times I sought them out in Zoos and wildlife parks, thrilled by their ability to lick up ants. Their tongue is longer than their whole body and is kept in a pouch by one hip. That’s like a superpower. Pangolins might have remained in a quiet recess in my brain had the current Pandemic not put them very squarely in the frame through no fault of their own. Their scales are prized in Chinese medicine and their flesh is prized as a delicacy, increasingly they are farmed and this unregulated trade puts them in unnatural close proximity to Bats believed to be the original species host of Coronovirus.
Katherine Rundell has written this uncomfortable account of Pangolin reality.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n04/katherine-rundell/consider-the-pangolin
The awkward path of Coronovirus from Bat to Human via the Pangolin in wet Markets in China will be the stuff of much research in the future.
For today I just wanted to sketch my childhood friend, the Pangolin.

As luck would have it, I had a curious wedding garment that I photographed in Greece in my image file . It was just what I needed to give this little chap some bling.