Wishing you peace and joy as we celebrate our winter holidays at the time of the turning of the light!
A card for everybody, but especially in gratitude for all the doctors, nurses, social workers,volunteers, dieticians, dentists and all the people who work with such dedication in hospitals and medical offices during this very stressful time
I made The Tangled Garden Series as a reminder of the black and white illustrations in the children’s and botanical books of my childhood, and in some Japanese prints.
Apart from the fact that I love plants and many animals, what especially interests me is their patterns, which are brought out better in black and white, patterns such as the Branching Pattern of leaf veins and branching of tree-branches
These are not straight B/W photos, but were originally coloured ones, which I have worked on “by hand” so to speak, not just using pre-made filters, to produce the effect which I wanted. Time-consuming!
You can see more about this by clicking Art Methods here or in the top heading and scroll down to the robin , near the end.
Mandala of Chaos crossing Order
The “Mandala” of Chaos and Order was made long before we felt the chaotic global effects of whatever caused the Covid 19 pandemic to start.
The apparent wave of “chaos”crossing my symbol for order here (from a clay clock-face which I made in my pottery days) arose out of yet another combination of chance, real liquids and solids and finally, digital art.
The order of the universe itself, plus the order which we believe we see in it, plus chaos, chance, complexity, uncertainty, the interconnection of all things . . what we do with all that : c’est la vie!
Ferns are one of the oldest plants. They first appear in the fossil record about 360 million years ago, but many of our present families and species only appeared about 145 million years ago.
Ferns figure in some folk tales and children’s stories, and are the emblem of New Zealand and probably of many towns.
They are one of my favorite plants. I’m not sure exactly why, apart from the fact it’s interesting to think of how long they have been around and that I tend to like “green” plants more than most garden flowers. Perhaps it’s because they have been part of my life for so long. As a child, I played with friends in an overgrown vacant lot opposite our house, which we called The Jungle. There were lots of huge bracken ferns, now considered a weed, but not to us then. We used to dare each other to swing out on a rope hanging from a tree, over some very prickly bushes, and jump off at the furthest point of the swing to land safely in a mat of bracken, before the rope swung back again! Ferns were also one of my earliest introductions to making art, when my aunts showed me how to make rubbings over fern leaves with my crayons.
This is one version of a picture which I made about an old legend, a few years ago. The later version will follow before long, and perhaps even other versions some day. For this is a story that has many versions and even more interpretations; many meanings for different people, sometimes even more than one meaning for one person! And who can say ? At its simplest, it is a place where you can go to find peace.
This one arose because a friend remarked that, for them, as viewed on a Mac Desktop computer screen, all my pics were “too bright”.
So, since I am a “quiet” person, as is that friend, I think, I decided to make a quiet picture!
Did you know that the apparent colours, brightness, saturation etc, of photos or art or anything viewed on a computer etc, depend in part on the settings in the computer itself, or whatever screen you are viewing it on, as well as on the original input (camera, MP3… whatever). The colours you see may not be what the artist intended!
When I look at the photos on Flickr or other photo sites these days, I find that, for me, a lot of them appear extremely over-saturated, particularly photos of greenery such as grass! Is that a fashion now? Have we lost our taste for subtlety, or are my aging eyes somehow out of touch? Or is it just what I mentioned above, a matter of screens. I don’t know.
Perhaps I do like much of my artwork to be fairly brightly coloured because so much news at the moment is dismal. But it might not be quite as “bright” as it appears on your screen!
In any case, this piece is in grateful recognition of all “quiet” people ! And of all friends. It takes all kinds!
“The Tree” in this series, represents the individual person or our society in general.
It’s the same tree over and over again. All the versions of my Tree as Symbol series have been relevant to the path of my particular journey, but I hope some of them will resonate for you too.
The meaning will be a bit different for everybody. Made long before Covid, war news, etc , it’s truer than ever for me now!
This is an acrylic painting from about 1963, of a snowy winter evening at sunset in a small outport not far from Corner Brook, Newfoundland.
Many decades ago, on the way to somewhere else even further away, I passed through a small town in eastern Europe.
