Personality: Bedrock or (magnetized) Gravel?

King Lear

Wordsworth speaks about "The fountain light of all our days", Yeats of "The foul rag and bone shop of the heart". The stuff that forms us - what we hold on to - is it loss or freedom to let it go? If the weather is too hot where you are, I understand completely if you don't want to ponder this.

Things are actually better with the king in question for now. But in the lil world o art here, I may be working it out for awhile.

(sea)worthy

Favorite sea chanteys, anyone?

For comics fans, Malachi Ward is offering his services at bargain rates for the next couple of weeks- think of the possibilities, you could be your own superhero!

Meet the Paisleys

Oh - It appears the Illustration Friday theme is Paisley this week.

Spring Fever

Who here has it?

Exuberance

As some of you know, I am fond of efflorescence. This doesn't look like it took almost four hours, does it? I started with a drawing of a man with flowering sideburns, then I altered a photo of a man and wife...now that I have made this into a t-shirt working digitally, I can paint on it for real.

For those of you who enjoy altering art, Steve Loya has a new blog up, a sort of monster laboratory. Check out A Splotch Monster a Day.

For my London readers, Jenny Woolf is giving a talk on The Mystery of Lewis Carroll this Friday at the Art Workers Guild, sounds like a wonderful venue.

Kublai's plans

A visionary leader, Kublai reformed the taxation system, renovated and extended the grand canal, and promoted the study of astronomy, mathematics and medicine.

Jamesian

This reminded me of Wings of the Dove when I put the raw sea-colored fabric edge in.

Subterranean Roots

I have been rereading Graham Greene's Under the Garden and noticing its parallels to Wonderland - the protagonist falls though a hole in the ground and discovers strange characters beneath the surface. What I had not noticed previously is the resemblance of the ruler of the underground kingdom to Humpty Dumpty, in his enthroned eminence, in his air of infallibility, and in the apparent deliriousness of his pronouncements which yet seem to have something hidden underneath. The rereading is prior to sending two copies of this little Penguin reissue off to foreign parts, the idea is to have a sort of virtual book club when the copies are received, I will post one illustration to commence the reading period and then another a couple of weeks later and if others want to participate, we can have a discussion in the comments section. It's available on Amazon, and first appeared in the story collection A Sense of Reality.

A plan has emerged regarding these altered photos, more on that later. The illlustration friday prompt is subterranean.

Popinjay and other birds

There are some lovely little owls on yarn soup

Guerrilla Art in San Francisco's Mission District on The Holy Enchilada

Extraordinary paper sculpture on anna-wili highfield

For the moms and dads, nest building on ecokids crafts

A proud son shows off his Mom's creations on Dudecraft

Parenthood

On this will hurt me, extraordinary photos by a father of his two young sons.

On flickr, Laura Ferrara's lovely narrative of letting go.

For myself, "restoring" old photos is an ideal activity when visiting my father while we watch some old film without too many ellipses or actors with similar hair colors - no, it's not because he's old, he's one of those people who doesn't register faces. We need to put "You Kill Me"on the Netflix list because there's no way he can confuse Ben Kingsley with Tea Leoni. Also I'd watch it just to see that sideways head nod Ben Kingsley does in an early scene with Luke Wilson.

The Beginning

This is how it looks now...for a clue as to where I'm planning to take it, see SpiritCloth. We're going on a little family outing for a couple of days, I'm hoping to work on this and have it finished for my sister to take back to England...

Farewell, photo version

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

– T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding