Pencil drawings

After long hesitations, I signed up for a portrait class with Misty. Thas was way back in...January! I decided to be more careful with my money so that I can pay off the mortgage faster and eventually be able to retire and spend more doing things I like. This means that discretionary spendings, such as artsy stuff, were the first casualties. Hmmm ....this plan lasted a whole two weeks!!! In the end I succumbed to the temptation to learn more about face painting. I am not sure why I am so obsessed with portraits but here I am. I've been checking Misty's blog regularly for a while and I like her art. So in the end I figured life is short, nice things are few and far between ...and I signed up.

The first week was about pencil drawing. I did  few sketches on found papers - reclaimed postcard envelopes. It worked well, except the blending is not as smooth as it should be. I did not get a chance to make my own tortillons; blending with tortillon instead of blending stick helps achieve a smooth finish. So I am told. I will try ...one of these days.

First week's production:
This is an older sketch that I reworked, I corrected the nose and the mouth and added more shading.

 

 

 

I used this sketch in week 2 to paint over it with acrylics.

Profiles are definetely the most difficult. I went back and corrected this one, I made the eye a teeny bit bigger and corrected the upper lip under the nose so she does not look so strange anymore. I definetely need to do more profiles. And I used to think that 3/4 faces are difficult ...

In praise of idleness

Do you believe in coincidences? I am not sure what I believe in these days, but at least I notice when something happens three, four times in a row. I keep bumping into this idea o idleness it seems.

Of course, I grew up with the belief that being idle is bad. I had to "do" something all the time, something productive, usefull like homeworks, study, reading. I am not even sure I know how to be idle, assuming that I could find the time for it. It does not mater what I am doing, part of my brain is doing something else. Discussions are going on non stop in my head and no, I do not have ADHD. I simply do not have enough time to deal with everything that needs to be dealt with. I am sure I am not the only dealing with this predicament.

I recently read Jean d'Ormesson's Qu'ai-je dons fait?. In this nostalginc memoir, he also talks about idleness and creativity. Idleness is letting the dust settle, taking time to observe, think, reflect. Masterpieces came to be because their authors took time to be idle. Proust comes to mind, his idleness forced on him by his asthma. He spent years secluded in a cork-lined bedroom, writing A la recherche du temps perdu.  For Thoreau, it was a different kind of idleness, the one made possible by a life in  close communion with nature. Leonardo filled his notebooks with the results of his observations because he took the time to observer. The list could go on. Of course this is not to say that one has to be sick or live a secluded life to be creative. It merely means that the creative act cannot occur when one cannot take time to notice. Nowadays, only the lucky ones seem to have this luxury.

Then, I found this post talking about ... idleness and Bertrand Russell's essay In praise of idleness. And this makes it two.

In an article in Harper's Magazine, the author talked about how America outsourced thinking. How true. Thinking is in short supply these days indeed. No time, we are too busy dancing our fingers on remote controls, ipods, ipads, cellphones, kepboards ...not to mention that nobody tought us how to think. Those who do not think are easier to control because they will think whatever the few want them to think.

And finally the fourth praise of idleness came from another issue of Harper's, from an article about Warren Buffett. The richest man in the world has an office on the 14th floor of a grey building in Omaha where every day he reads reports and thinks. The office is not an example of state-of-the-art-technology, au contraire. But its server the purpose of allowing its owner to do what he does best and that is produce ideas.

How could it be otherwise? How can one think when beig subjected to constant noise, voices, bips, flashes, rings, images, numbers ...The answer is simple: one does not.

I see this chain of events as a concidence; some would argue that it is the Universe trying to tell me something, except that I am not strong in the faith department. And in any case, there is not much I can do about it until I retire or, if I am lucky, until I can leave the rat race behind ...for now, I just notice it. Going back to my long list of non-thought provoking activities.

Flavor of the week

This time around, I baked Vienna Bread with Dutch topping.

The icing is in fact a paste made of rice flour, yeast, a bit of sugar, salt and oil. This bread is supposed to be very good toasted. I tried it fresh from the oven and it was excellent. I am not sure about the toast as I do not have a toaster. I find it amazing that we can come up with so many different using only flour, water and yeast. And a bit of patience, since these breads require long, slow fermentations. I do not mind, all I have to do is put the dough in the fridge overnight and take it out the next morning. Almost always when I make bread, a commercial comes to mind. It is for some kind of frozen bread (frozen bread ... yuccc) and it shows bakers busy in the kitchen making the dough and baking the bread in the wood burning stove. And then a woman comes up in a storm complaining that she cannot spend three hours baking bread because she has yoga and this and that. She looks like she overdosed on caffeine. Of course, the conclusion is "thank goodness for frozen bread". Yeah, sure ....I wish I knew what kind of bread is she making that takes three hours, but that is a whole other story. Me, I am sold. I have my own home bakery now :)

Where did January go ...

... no idea, I am afraid. I only have 2 journal spreads for this month.

When I started this spread, I had something else in mind, but it took me so long to finish that I forgot. On the left page I glued this quote by Oswald Spengler:
 This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us; to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves; to act in such a way that some part of us lives on.
Up until few years back, I was so much into all this purpose gibberish that I ended up investing lots of time and effort in things that turned out to be nuisances at best. Instead, I should have invested my energies to simplify my life and organize my finances so that I can take early retirement. I don't think a day goes by when I do not regret it.

 Here I used all the candy wrappers from the Celebration bottle. It does not even look like a lot of chocolate, does it?After all, I did not even have enough to cover both pages. That is a photo from when I was maybe 3 years old. I was allergic to chocolate and strawberries back then. Maybe this is why I eat so much chocolate now, to make up for those years when I could not?!?!

Now, full speed ahead in February. Only -25 today and a gorgeous, sunny day.

January pages

I remeber when I started messing around with paints how sure I was that I will do something ... every day! Of course I failed with flying colors.These are two of the pages I managed to finish this month - and they don't count as full pages because they were not made from scratch.The backgrounds were done a while back.

 

I shake my head in disbelief again ....

...as I am greeted this morning by a "pleasant" temperature of -29C, winds 35Km/h  and wind gusts 46km/h! Ahhhhhhh. That's almost 40 degrees variation in temperature in one week. Insane .... Gee, I feel relieved that so many people, politicians (including our own Prime Minister) think that climate change is bogus. It is good thing I can "trust" them to take care of everything for me! Funny, wouldn't you say?!

One of the things I hate on days like this is putting gas in the car. It seems that the pump does it on purpose to work slower than in the summer and by the time I am done, the bones in my hands hurt as if somebody cut them to pieces. This is more torture than I am willing to endure for the sake of running, so I will stay put today. If I could skip running errands, it would be lovely. But I cannot. If I could stop working it would be like paradise. That too is impossible of course. So until this will be possible, I have to gather all the courage I have left (that does not amount to much these days) and get going ...I hope the car will start.

Assemblage

This piece lingered on my table for almost the whole last year, until I got tired of it. So tired that I gave myself un ultimatum: finish or garbage. It is finished enough to be hanged on the wall.

This is a piece of countertop from IKEA assorted with screws, discarded metal pieces, rusted wired, a  "mumified" rose bud (rose bud encassed in acrylic medium), dryer sheets, tea leaves, pages from a Bible, a label from "Delirium tremens" beer, a piece of mirror, a transparency, glasses of course, a piece of orage "priority" luggage tag, a piece of circuit board, a toy car...