Around 90 years ago, my grandfather would travel to pre-war Germany "doing business" and on one of his trips he brought back a bear. A very fine bear that as a rather small child I used to admire immensely. As is the way of these things, it eventually came to live with me [...]
Just playing around on a dull day, but it was fun ... though certainly not great art. Yesterday, NY Eve, was thickly fogged all day long as the abnormally warm weather lifted water vapour form the snow which hung around in the absence of wind. Fog is interesting and I spent a bit [...]
Introducing Favourite Artists I have read that the basic arts of drawing are no longer much taught in a number of art schools and in the ones that do still offer the subject, it is just one option amongst many. A shame - a great shame if this really is the case. I [...]
Nine years ago we were birding and botanising in Austria and the Czech Republic with a pause for history and culture in Prague. I was especially struck by the interplay of light on the stone columns in this medieval cathedral.
We have a much loved etching by the English artist Graham Clarke hanging in our dining room ... admire it every day. This is another of his works that pretty well sums up life for us these days - apart from the thatched roof. No complaints.
I wonder if I might solicit your comments please on some pairs of photographs ... well, actually on the software that edited them. This week, after a sadly lengthy wait while the slow boat arrived from China, I finally took delivery of a spiffy new computer (Apple MacBook with the new super-powerful M1 chip [...]
Pictures From a Different Age For reasons I won't bore you with I have been evaluating a couple of software packages for "digitally developing" RAW format photos from my cameras. One of the test pictures I have been working with was taken in May of this year in England when, with friends, we [...]
Cartooning ... Seeking some illustrations for a project elsewhere I started sketching on my iPad using the Procreate app ... I tested some of these on Facebook and enough people were complementary that I thought this might amuse the followers of the journal on a hot, too hot, Sunday afternoon. It was fun [...]
Nest-hole Renovations In the front garden there is a large, old and rather magnificent paper birch tree. In fact so magnificent it was a reason we chose to buy this house 20 years ago. The tree has three trunks, one of which has shown signs of rot for a while now and the top [...]
The sun shone today and we decided to have a cultural day downtown and visit the Montreal Musée des Beaux Arts (https://www.mbam.qc.ca/en/)to see the wonderful exhibition currently showing there under the title of "Marvels and Mirages of Orientalism: From Spain to Morocco, Benjamin-Constant in His Time" ... and well worth the effort it was too. Click here [...]