Friday, April 16, 2010

Been Busy! - J'ai été très occupé

This acrylic panel took much longer than usual because it presented several problems - how to show a mass of trees receding into the distance without making the greens too boring.  In fact, my ususal technique of short brush-strokes, merging colours where necessary, turned out to be the best way here. It took a long time because there was so much of it.
The perspective and impression of distance problem solved itself because the subject of a river flowing towards the viewer meant that I didn't have to convey very much aerial perspective.

J'avait passé beaucoup plus temps que d'habitude parce qu'il présentait plusieurs problèmes - comment afficher une masse d'arbres fuyant à la distance sans les verts trop ennuyeux. En outre, il n'etait pas necessaire de lutter avec "aerial perspective." parce que le sujet a resolu ce probleme soi même, mais il y avait un tas des arbres!...

Detail..

Detail...

Detail

 

Mike

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Sunday, April 11, 2010

The first April panel is finished. This a typical bucolic subject, beloved of the resaurants we are supplying.

The panel is MDF as usual and around 1.6 metres wide.
It took just over 10 hours to do, although it has yet to be varnished.

It was entirely executed with the studio door wide open this time, spring is really giving me a push now and this morning I've already started the next panel.
We've started our musical endeavours again - just three of us. We've clubbed together and bought some PA kit so we can make a reasonable amount of noise if anyone asks us to play for them (Amplifier/mixer, speaker, microphones) - all we need now is some practic! We're down to 2 guitars, the occasional keyboard use and a singer but i'm attempting to make some 'backing tracks (via 'Garageband on the Apple Mac) to give us a bit more 'body'. Tomorrow evening I'll be attending a meeting to help organise a music festival in June at a nearby village so we may have a gig....
We'll see.
Busy, busy............

Mike

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Thursday, April 1, 2010

Another UK trip(up). The politics of despair and the despair of politics.

Just got back from a week in the Old Country. Frankly, very depressing. Used Flybe (Limoges - Southampton) for a change as we thought it would be a bit cheaper overall but the whole thing was a trial (security, extra baggage payments, inconvenience of not being able to carry extra stuff), so won't fly again in a hurry. Car much more convenient and doesn't cost much more overall.
Weather was awful and politics worse. The anodyne "debate" between the three putative Chancellors-to-be was pretty pathetic. I found myself aligned with Simon Jenkins - have a look at this:

And then there was the nonsense in the UK media over the possibility of a 'huing parliament'. The Guardian tried to sum this up:

What a farce! What a muddle. Look at this quote:

"The head of the civil service, Sir Gus O'Donnell, updated a manual today which sets out how the key players are expected to act if no party can instantly form a government.

In one of a number of precautionary steps, it has been agreed that parliament should not meet to decide if a government can be formed for as long as 18 days after polling day.

The extension to the period is to give the political parties extra leeway to create a government commanding the support of the Commons.

After the 18 days the Tories could then table an immediate motion of no confidence.

The manual is designed to protect the Queen from being asked prematurely to invite someone to form a government, or to prevent a constitutional impasse causing a panic in the financial markets at a time when the UK's triple-A credit rating is under threat .

O'Donnell is due to meet with other senior civil servants in New Zealand shortly to discuss how they have handled hung parliaments."

Is this the way to run a country?
"..it makes yer want ter eat yer young..." (Someone said this, I think)


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Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Blog Standard

Ironically, the reason I haven't blogged in "The Xaintrie Blog" since January is because I've gone Facebook, Twitter then 'Posterous' new blog (for our Art group here) since then. It's time I consolidated all this verbal thrashing about...
Facebook I dislike - messy interface, only good for checking up on activities of other family members and friends who use it but I don't join in very often.
I'm a fan of Twitter though. I like its simplicity and the fact that one can find a group of tweeters who have similar interests to your own, then 'follow' them. More often than not, they will start to follow you and as long as you don't let the list become too long (I follow around 35 artists - nearly all of them follow me) then you can keep up with their tweets. Web links can be inserted in the short texts (tweets are only 140 characters long) and a twin site called 'Twitpic' can allow you to publish a picture. No more complexity necessary. I have added one or two others to follow out of curiosity, and mostly 'unfollowed' them pretty quickly therafter as there is a lot rubbish out there. One enduring outsider for me however is Stephen Fry - always entertaining and full of fascinating outside web-references.
Posterous is now my favourite for actually creating the blogs, simply because all you have to do is write an email. As soon as you send it to them via your Posterous postbox, they manage the whole thing and it appears as a blog within minutes. I'm doing this right now, writing this email which will be published immediately I finish - to the Xaintrie Blog and to "Michaels Posterous" (http://mapmaker.posterous.com/). I've set it to automatically write a Twitter entry also.  I write separate emails to our artgroup blog which is called 'The CA3 Newsblog' (http://ca3.posterous.com/). 

Xaintrie news: Winter seems to have ended at last. I'm no longer lighting the fire after breakfast - last year this event took place a couple of weeks earlier. This year the cold was not too intense but lasted much longer than previous years. No rain to speak of though.
The fishing season started last week but I've resisted a cold wade into our lovely Maronne thus far. The fishing experts tell us the trout are still dozing on the river bed as the water is still too cold. I dipped a thermometer into it last week and registered 6 degrees C. Since then the weather has become very warm and spring is twittering everywhere (pun might have been intended - not sure).
We've decided to grow some veg this year so I've cut a chink out of the lawn (only around 4 square metres at the moment) which will become a raised 'potager'. A friend nearby says he has a pile of good soil we can have so that's the next task.
Sun is shining, temperature's rising. I'm off - outside to get some...

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