In The Cloud of Witnesses

Kenaniah, felt tipped and ball point pens, watercolour wash.

This is one of those ones that I like and I don't like at the same time. The main problem being the figures which I did much too quick like and tried to knock back with blue washes, which makes the piece in general look much too sombre. While meant to be singing they look too sad and pained. Damn it would look good if it weren't for that. I knew I shouldn't have done that part while tired at work.

Of course once more I played the partial iconoclast that I am by using the tetragrammaton. This time I tried to tie it into the bizarro notes above, all of which I am reasonably pleased with.
I always thought of this one as Petra's song until Sacred Trust came along. So now there's two of them I guess. Or something. Ha.

The Twelve Shifts of Christmas

On the first shift of Christmas, a resident gave to me
a diaper full of pee

On the second shift of Christmas, a resident gave to me
emesis x2
and a diaper full of pee

On the third shift of Christmas, a resident gave to me
three spit wads
emesis x2
and a diaper full of pee

On the fourth shift of Christmas, a resident gave to me
four escape attempts
three spit wads
emesis x2
and a diaper full of pee

On the fifth shift of Christmas, my boss gave to me
FIVE MORE SHIFTS

four escape attempts
three spit wads
emesis x2
and a diaper full of pee

On the sixth shift of Christmas, a resident gave to me
six yelling fits

FIVE MORE SHIFTS

four escape attempts
three spit wads
emesis x2
and a diaper full of pee

On the seventh shift of Christmas, a resident gave to me
Seven pounds of poo
six yelling fits

FIVE MORE SHIFTS

four escape attempts
three spit wads
emesis x2
and a diaper full of pee

On the eighth shift of Christmas, a resident gave to me
....

Okay by this time I'm not sure I'm going to be coherent or alive, so as Bob and Doug said, Welcome to shift twelve.


When I told Phil I was working twelve shifts the first thing he said was "hey the twelve shifts of Christmas." and he totally gave me the best line (five). Ha.

No Other Name

What's In A Name, lettered in india ink with various pens

Really what else was I going to do for this one? I did get to try out the expensive drawing board I bought a while back which I had been unable to really test run until now since grandma was driving me too crazy to want to. It's wonderful BTW and much better than the North American ones I've seen, good working angles.
The few b nib (oval) lettering styles really evidence how infrequently I use the b nib, and the second go around spaced the words a little differently than the practice one (from which I liked the layout better). Letter spacing also got rather wonky at times-more on this one than the practice one in fact-still the right justification while not great is also not hideously bad. Really there isn't much opaque white on this piece, so I consider that pretty decent.

Peekturs

Richard and Avery came down this weekend and Richard treated us to a fresh application of his own special brand of annoyingness-mostly by taking many terrible pictures this time around.

This is the picture Richard took of me (I am standing at the bathroom sink) while I was trying to tell him how to work the camera.


He thinks terrible pictures of me are somehow funny.

I retaliate with this.
Okay terrible pictures can be funny. If they aren't of me. Don't you love the horns his toque made in his hair? Right at this point we were discussing how cool it would be to play the labour day classic as nonchalantly as possible and then make a round about Taylor Field (yes TAYLOR FIELD) with the cup.

Since we're posting terrible pictures of everyone, here is one of marvin k haggler (aka mumbley peg/hieme h manush/mothra) and my hand. This picture made Richard and I both laugh.

Mama hates it and when auntie linder tells her I posted it she'll probably give me a beating. I know she can still do it because about five minutes after this I said to her "see if you can catch me Mama!" and jumped on her-and she did manage to do it so even though she's getting all super old and true seniorhood looms imminently, she can still carry my weight-which means she can still whip me around. Having said that I probably weigh below max lifting weight for labour standards.

And Grandma and Avery.


Well at least it's a good picture of Grandma anyway. I think Avery is trying to be a raptor or something. I got partially cut out of the picture.

Avery squealing as I did the old "don't smile-tissues" routine. I had to leave the red-eye in there.

This kid does not know how to take teasing-I blame only child syndrome. He gets very angry so that we laugh and do it even more, just like we used to do to Liz-the best cure for only child syndrome is the tissues routine. He was so mad. Bwahahahahaha perfect.

Me laughing while we teased Avery.
I wanted to post this one simply because mama's camera flash does not make my hair look orange. I am trying to get her to trade cameras with me now based on that fact alone.

Richard sitting in dad's chair looking like dad. When I told him that he said "hey better that than the milkman."

Here I Am

Take Me In, felt-tipped marker and watercolour wash.

I like this one. I maintained from the start that it would depict a coal in a golden tong, but the deco/cubist look evolved in my mind over sketches until it became this in the last rendering. I was altering the design to the end. I am annoyed that my favorite grey brush marker has dried out, so I had to go with the next lightest for the lines in the background, and I don't like that grey as much.
I did the final rendering at work, because the full moon is past and the psych patients behaved themselves!

AHH

..hhhh!
WE WON!!!

Bleed Green Baby

Boo YA

DEATH TO WINNIPEG!!!

I still hate Kent Austin, just so you know. But perhaps he will prove himself useful once again. He does seem a little less arrogant these days.
Now back to the regular schedule...

KILL THE BLUE BASTARDS!

95 Theses and Beer on the Wall

Happy 490th Reformation day peeps!!

And without further ado, my attire for the day, the Calvin hat.


This is the only picture without the book (my copy of the institutes vol 1), and unfortunately, just about the only one where I am not pissing myself laughing. I was trying to look austere and Calvin-like which did not work and only served to make us laugh harder. I should post the "thinking about Pelagius" picture, that one is fricking hilarious.

And yeah I am working today and that is a uniform.

20/20 Vision

God Fixation; ink and crowquill pen

I'm not crazy about the last one, and especially the way it looks in the scan. I posted it mostly because of it's relation to the Athanasius piece. Anyway I want to bump it, so here is this one.

This is all ink, done with a crowquill (the lettering is done with a c4 and c5). The scan makes it look black and blue, but it is in fact brown and blue. This (along with Stand) was the second idea utilizing the shield of the trinity. I decided to put it in latin for some reason. I dunno, that "deus" in the middle of that dilated pupil just looks cool. And I wanted it to be at least a little less man-centred than the actual song is.

You Are the Holy One

Hallowed Be Thy Name, machine embroidered with metallic threads on silk noil and dupioni.

This has not translated in the scan well at all. I am still debating how I feel about the actual piece, particularly since it was a test piece for Athanasius. I know he has been languishing in his desert exile for almost a year; hanging out with Antony, writing subversive letters and whatnot. As history bore out, those complete losers Eusebius and Constantius couldn't keep him down and he is gearing for a triumphal return. There will probably be some rioting in the near future.

Anyway I am not so proficient with my machine work these days (especially since I am still getting used to teh noo machine), so it's a good thing I tried this out. The metallics of course don't show up the way they should. The gold is the only one you can really see in the scan, however in the actual piece I am thinking it is too distracting. I think I need to keep playing with thread colours. I like the copper and I think I am going to go tonal and eliminate the gold. We'll see.

This is the first CIP piece I've done since we ripped up the back room-yes I am still working on it! I'm still not finished the art room-I have to make the curtains and set up the paper hangers yet. There were other minor things I was intending on, but I am getting tired of it and I think that once those two things are done then so is the room.

My hands smell like oil paint from the paintstiks....since you all think I stink anyway, it doesn't matter.

You Have NO Idea

Many of us in the field watched this program with interest;

marketplace

It's certainly true that long term facilities become "dumping grounds" and by no means provide care only for the frail elderly. The thing is, long term beds are cheap and psych beds very expensive and at a premium-many psych centers have been closed and are no longer options.

I take exception to the assertion that this behavior is accepted by staff-there is only so much staff CAN do. The model of care is anarchistic and over and OVER we hear that these people have the right to integrate. It's like everything, we hear that segregation of problem people is unfair to them, just as it is on the other end in schools-and everyone else has to lump it.

I am reminded however that at the same time people are horrified by segufixes.

Ach with the baby boomers and their absolute demand for personal autonomy aging, expect things to get shittier.

Petra is the BGM of the Rest of My Life Too

For my auntie; this is the way one of my mail art friends folded the zine she created, which I find easier to demonstrate than explain. I thought it was ingenious. The most work would be in setting up the original to be copied.

To A Friend

By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.

I think more than anything, you exuded this love. You were one of the most joyful, open and loving people I think I've ever met. I wish I could have known you longer, that I could trade places with you. I am lazy and selfish and I know the world would miss me less than it will you. Such irony that those who are so full of life should lose it, while those of us who waste it are left to continue floating along. The world is still unjust still fallen.

I remind myself that our enemy has been and is being defeated-yet he still manages to get his swipes in. Such an ugly, even if temporary, separation.

I have to say I'll never be able to forget the "man under the bridge" story. If we see each other in the new earth perhaps I will say "but can you describe his face?" hee.

Now would be the time

To speak up and make whatever requests you may have of me. You know, art, hits, whatever. I only have a year of wasted youth left and I am sure that at the end of it I will dissolve into a gurgling puddle of goo.

Since my laziness is well documented get your applications in now. No guarantee I'll actually do it of course, but if you wait you won't get the warm feeling that comes with wondering what the hell I am doing instead of the art/hit/etc.


BAH.

I Has Noo Toi!

Now I don't really need a new sewing machine but I am a brand loyal sort of person so every time I go to the quilt store I always look at Janomes (and as a brand-loyal person, I have always wondered if the e is silent or not. I usually say it, but the lady at the store did not and that just opens that right up again). Anyway the mechanical version of the QC is on promotion in all Janome dealerships, which makes me wonder if they are phasing it out-I am wary of computerized models in a completely luddite sort of way, and the thought made me kind of want to buy one while they are still around.
So they were basically throwing in the table for the price of the machine (the tables are usually extra and they make you pay lots of money. Everyone is taking lessons from Apple on How to Charge Extra for Everything and Still Have Idiots Buy Your Stuff these days)...Mama made me buy it. No really I was buying other stuff and she said "oh and she'll take the machine too". Mama likes making executive decisions like that. Then she said later "I guess I could have bought it for you for your birthday or at least gone halfs." Yeah that probably would have been nice.
Oh well. I got a table-and quickly disabused mama of the idea that I was getting rid of the old machine. HA!

Now I just have two of them.

Well at Least I can do Something

I confess I am becoming frustrated. I have been without an artroom for two months (and with grandma there was all but without it for the two months previous-though at least I still had access to art supplies) and it begins to wear on me. I haven't been making so much art for the last long while, but I guess it was enough that the absence of all my favorite tools is making me cranky.

As is normal during the summer, I have been working quite frequently during those two months, and have not had the time to get into the city to buy stuff, shelves foremost. This reminds me of why I hate Broadview. Anyone else can just go to the lumber yard or what have you and get what they need. I have to drive an hour and a half-even more irritating since I can't frickin drive. Anyway, with nowhere to put art stuff, there's no opportunity to get it out and work on something. The room is half full of things I have rescued from mom's good idea of putting them all outside (granted in her defense, it's Saskatchewan. Our rainy season is usually like May. This year it was a lot longer, and hot).

Poor Art Schtuff. You were great and I'll miss you.

Anyway, since I can't do any of my conventional art, I made the executive decision to decorate the walls of the art room with flourishes. I had actually painted the walls two different shades of green, which is not immediately apparent, so when I did the flourishes I reversed them. I am still undecided if I am going to bring my two neutrals in or not. Just depends on how far along I get before I get the materials I need to finish the room.

Here is the corner between the two doorways; the original doorway was finished with no door.


As you can see.

These two pictures were pieced in photoshop, so they look a little odd. This is the south wall, with flourishes emanating from the outlet. This is the wall I am a little disappointed with. I think there is tweakage to do here.


Another pieced one, this is the east wall (trim for the window is another thing I have to buy)with flourishes starting at the corner of the window. The pictures unfortunately didn't actually overlap. I think this wall be my faevrit!



Since the room is so small and half full of the crap that I salvaged from the great outdoors, it's pretty difficult to take pictures of and get a feel for what I was doing. So here is the basic layout from the Book of Plans. The initial version of my flourish lemur is there too (you can see a bit of the better version of him on the page behind). I am not yet sure where he will go, though I am thinking on the wall by the dresser (which is why it has a little less ornamentation).



I never did take a picture of the other side of the west wall though.

Anyway, we have enough paint that I could always paint over it if I decide I hate it. We'll see.

The Reason the Internet Exists

For wasting time on really cool stuff, obviously. I am putting flourishes in the art room and found these ones. One word for all those words-AWESOME. The calligraphic forms of arabic have always made me want to learn it.
I had forgotten what a great site bibliodyssey is for the sheer amount of hours you can spend browsing on it. Only the best sites can do that...

Green Room Serenade

I am finally toward the end of completing grandma's room. If I hadn't been working, then waiting over a week for the trim to be delivered I might have gotten it done sooner. I am a terrible procrastinator though and we are still having no end of problems with the closet...So probably not.

I am also wasting time writing lists and making diagrams and other ideas for how I am going to fit everything I don't cull in to the other side. I have a book dedicated to this, about which Mama said "Oh no you are making PLANS." I don't know what her problem is. Several pages of to-scale diagrams are not obsessive, they are signs of organization or something like that.

Speaking of diagrams I've also become enamored of the idea of buying a new drawing board, but all the nice desktop ones come from the UK and cost like 90 pounds. I decided against a desk as all the split top ones cost lots of money and discriminate against me by having the flat part on the right side only.

Anyway, I have everything painted and most of the trim up, so we can move the furniture back in. As for the paint; my mom and grandma have one notion of colour and I another. Theirs being pale and wan versions of white and mine being, well colour:



I have wanted to paint that back room green for quite awhile, and now that it is two rooms I said I didn't care what was done with my side as long as it was green (which was a lie as the Book of Plans attests, but that was the paramount part of the plan even when I thought I was going to be able to have the whole room-as the Book of Plans also attests). Grandma who is not here at the moment will hate it but that's just too frickin bad.

Mom suggested what else but pale pale green. I countered with whining. What's the point of picking a colour if all I have to choose from are variations of white non-colours? We had the same argument when my own bedroom was built years ago. I had wanted blue and to my mother that meant bluish white. To me it meant blue. People would look and say 'hey your room is blue" blue. Granted both of these rooms are now impossibly small (8 ft and 5 ft) and if I'm being honest, the colours, even though they are not overly dark, do tend to overwhelm. Still I like to see real colours and that is what I have gotten. Now the whole house is shades of white with the exception of the rooms that I have involved myself in...
Dad always said that too many colours got you a Ukrainian house. Well they did give us perogies after all how bad could a Ukrainian house be?

Here you can have a look into the off-whiteness of Grandma's room, which should make us both happy.

The WORST

My brother finally managed to get down here and work on the back room (now rooms). Though he did the bulk of the work, he had to go back home before the mudding of the drywall was done. So I get to finish sanding.

This is how I feel about sanding drywall:

He was trying to say that mudding beads is messiest. WTF-does this look neat and clean to you? No I'm not a professional, but I've helped put up the drywall in almost every room of this house and I know for a fact the sanding is the WORST part. Bar none.
This was at about two in the morning (as I did the sanding after working an evening) and it was still about 30 degrees in there. It REALLY sucks when you are sweating so much that the drywall dust is turning back into mud as it hits your body.
And of course there was dust everywhere. Look at the drywall dust behind me! I had it in my hair, on my eyelashes and up my nose for heaven's sake.

And now I get to do it all over again. Bah.

Mine!

In his lecture on the background of the British drawing collection owned by the National Gallery, the curator who originally put this exhibit together reminded the audience that all of the drawings belonged to the people of Canada. So I already own a CRM-I just have to share it with 30 million other people. I don't know why they wouldn't let me get my time's worth out of it at by keeping it at my house for awhile.

Okay I didn't steal it, but I did buy the retrospective book that went with the exhibit, and by posting this picture from that am likely violating copyright so I'm still breakin the laaaawww.

At the time this was painted, the Mackintoshes careers were in the tank. While architectural and other design were abandoned, Charles focused on serene landscapes and continued doing his beautiful, painstakingly detailed flower paintings. I was reminded of the famous quote from a lecture he gave:

Art is the Flower...Life is the Green Leaf.
Let every artist strive to make his flower a beautiful living thing, something that will convince the world that there may be, there are, things more precious, more beautiful-more lasting than life itself.

I was so drawn to the cartouche, which he inscribed with his own and Margaret's initials in pencil.

The Salon itself was interesting. They had organized lectures, a piano performance (Mama and I only recognizing the most common of the four pieces he did-Clair de Lune-since we are part of the unwashed masses), a rather amusing tableau in which the performers re-created one of the paintings, and a poetry reading. All of these were interspersed with periods for conversational circles relating to various subjects. The major complaint I had was that the conversational circles were almost impossible to join in because we couldn't hear a thing. I tried very hard to hear the fellow who was involved in the work with the synchrotron, but to no avail.

At least we got booze and food-totally the redeeming part for mama. :-P She said it was just like all the functions she used to go to with dad; she had no idea what the hell they were on about half the time.


Here is what 100 of my dollars looks like. Why do art books always have to be so expensive? I think someone is trying to keep them from we unwashed masses or some such thing. Okay and they have lots of pictures-and colour ones at that.
I had to go back the next day and buy the book as the gift shop was closed during the Salon, then went back a third time and bought the Lanigan collection book. Since admission is by donation, I visited my favorite pictures-and especially the CRM-every time. :)
I didn't buy them at once was because I didn't think I could really afford both until mama the buying enabler got involved and told me to go back for the one on the left. Though both exhibits were beautiful, some of my favorites were from the Lanigan collection (he is reported to own the most impressive personal collection of PRB and related works in the country).


This one does however partially belong to me:

This is a detail of a large and meticulous pen sketch by David Wilkie chronicling a visit to Scotland of George IV. I just love this guy, he's all "who gives a rip about that fatarsed German king? Don't these people know if it's not Scottish it's crrap?!"