I decided to show some of my scribbles/sketches.  They are a nothing.  Not artistic, not inspiration, not anything, but I thought you’d like to see what I will draw on and what’s in my head.

Ok, in this first one, at least the writings are art related:

The next one as you can see has some mathematical formulae on it.  This is Euclid’s Golden Ratio, phi, or the Divine Proportion.  I was reading on the Golden Ratio, the Golden Rectangle, and the Fibonacci Sequence and wanted to understand exactly how they worked.  Mathematicians and artists have been fascinated with these mathematical theorems for thousands of years.  Given my love of maths they amused me for hours.

It is said that Leonardo Da Vinci used the Golden Ratio in the Mona Lisa, and the proportions of Michaelangelo’s David fit the Golden Ratio.  Salvador Dali also used the Golden Ratio in his Sacrament of the Last Supper.

As you can see here, I have further scribblings on the Golden Ratio, and drew the sequence.  I also scribbled my hand in oil pastels.

I started scribbling on this sheet but I was also playing Assassin’s Creed 2 on the Xbox 360, and being the person I am I wanted to collect absolutely everything in the game, so I could 100% it.  What I have scribbled is the treasures, feathers, glyphs, statues collected, and number of viewpoints climbed.

The jotter that these scribbles are taken from is nearly full, and has everthing from colour studies to Gaelic, programming languages like Javascript, HTML and CSS to Contextual Studies, shopping list to memory training notes, Teeline shorthand to Adobe Illustrator.  I scribble pieces of text from the tv to conversations I’m holding on the phone.

This page alone contains stuff relating to my WordPress theme, some web pages that were shown on BBC Click, text relating to my mobile phone plan and some drawing basics.

It’s a pretty varied and random jotter.  As I said, it’s a nothing but it kind of gives you an idea of what my mind is like!

I was looking online a couple of days ago and found that there are life drawing classes in the city every Wednesday evening.  They also hold day-long classes every six weeks on a Sunday.  They just happened to be holding the day-long session today, and luckily for me, they had a few spaces available so I booked myself in.

The session ran for six hours with single pose. It was a fair old challenge for me, since the maximum time I’ve spent on life drawing is two and a half hours. It was a decent enough sized room but the heat was blistering. With the dizziness I’ve been experiencing I wasn’t sure I was going to make it through, but somehow I did.  I did some warm up exercises since I’ve not drawn a live model in months.  They were woeful. I used a graphite stick, then changed to charcoal and chalk.  I’m not a huge fan of drawing with pencil, that’s why I changed to charcoal.  I won’t show my results as they are pretty woeful as I said.

I changed to paint after lunch break since I’m more comfortable with that, but today it wasn’t really my friend.  Obviously, I’m very rusty, and it shows.  I spent hours working on this painting and every time I got to the face it just wasn’t working for me.

I kept scrubbing over it with a fresh layer of paint, and so I couldn’t finish it in the allotted time.  It was very frustrating. I know I’m rusty, so I just have to be patient. I will return to the painting, but I’m not sure where I’m going to go with it.

It was good to get out of the house and back into a classroom environment. I’ve really missed it, and I’ve found it difficult to function artistically outside of it.  Weird, since I found it really difficult to work in a classroom at the start.  Funny how things are.

I intend on making a painting from these but wanted to do a few colour studies first, so these are my first attempts. They’re also my first attempts at Neo-Expressionism. I was a huge fan of Neo-Expressionism long before I even knew what the term meant, or before I knew that what I was looking at was Neo-Expressionist.

Neo-Expressionism uses vivid and banal colour harmonies and is painted in a primitivist style. It portrays raw emotion and tension, and is used to create a sense of disturbance to alienate the viewer in some manner.

I hope I have managed to capture that style here. All I know is that it feels good to create again.

One of the things on my list is doing up the house – long overdue!  I’m moving a heap of stuff out, as I’m a bit of a hoarder, painting, and getting stuck into the garden as well.  I kind of need this at the moment – manual labour soothes the soul – and I’ve got my plan, which I’m determined to stick to!

I’m really sorry, but I haven’t been able to visit anyone’s blogs.  I have a heap to read, and comment on, but I will get to them.

I also have a painting or two that I want to work on.  My dad is a huge fan of tall ships, especially tall ships in battle, so I’m hoping to paint him a seascape. I’d appreciate any help/advice on this, as I’ve never painted the sea.  I have no idea how to go about it.

My father-in-law is also a fan of Dinky vans/trucks and I wanted to paint one for him, whilst my mother-in-law is a massive Jack Vettriano fan, so I’d like to do an homage to him.  I’m not a fan of Vettriano, but being a Scottish artist, he is hugely popular here.

So, yes, there you have it. Those are some of the things on my list, and there’s more, but one thing at a time!

Anyway, I’m trying to get my mojo back as I said.  My problem is that there is so much I want to do, and I don’t know where to start.  I want to do work on my website – CSS, HTML, etc; I want to work on my digital work, i.e. Photoshop, and learn Illustrator; I want to hone my drawing skills; I want to do gardening. I want to scream!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(Don’t you just love this painting? It’s a personal favourite of mine and is exactly how I feel!)

I want to do so much but I’m getting very little done.  I’m doing bits and bobs here and there but don’t feel I’m committing to anything really.  I have no focus.  To top it all off, I’m not sleeping.  I’ve had about 12 hours sleep in one week.

I’ve been an on-off smoker for years, and I started again not too long ago, but I hate it  and this time I was determined to stop and never to start again, so I got a DVD to help me.  I watched the DVD and after watching it, I no longer wanted to smoke.  Brilliant, eh? I’ve not had a cigarette in 3 weeks!

However, now I’m not sleeping, and I’m having panic attacks.  My thoughts have also become really negative.  I feel like almost everything is pointless and futile. I’m questioning and worrying about everything I’m doing.  I can deal with the negative thoughts, but it’s the panic attacks and sleeplessness that’s bothering me most. I know that the negative thoughts are the cause of the panic attacks and sleeplessness, and I’m trying to do everything to avoid them.  I’m using relaxation techniques, natural remedies, and even tried alcohol to get me to sleep!  Nothing is working.  My GP wants to see me as he thinks my symptoms are stress-related.  Well, duh?  I’m always stressed.  I have a lot going on in my personal life, ensuring that I’m always stressed.  I think that stopping smoking may just have exacerbated it.

The thing is, I don’t want a cigarette. I haven’t had any cravings.  I haven’t used any substitutes. I’m not eating more; not chewing gum or trying to find uses for my hands to take my mind off smoking.  However, I do think that when I’m stressed the normal thing for me to do is have a cigarette.  Now I don’t have that.  Perhaps that’s what’s causing my problems.

Oh yes, and then there’s the added stress of the World Cup. Don’t even get me started on that.  Let’s just say the noise has been a real turn off.  For those in the know, the dreaded vuvuzela has completely ruined the competition.  I think so anyway, and so do many others.  I  was looking forward to relaxing for the next few weeks and now that’s not on the cards.  The game has been ruined.

So, now you know why I’ve had no creative spark at all.  Too many fingers in too many pies, and not getting my desired relaxation, but at least I’ve vented a little here. Anyway, I hope to be back soon!

It talks to artists who studied at Glasgow School of Art, and their memories of first seeing the painting in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum and what it meant to them.  It’s a pretty similar experience to my own. What you find is people hypnotised by this piece of art, regardless of whether they liked Dali or not.  For most of them, like myself, it was their first experience of  art.

What is hilarious is the bit where they talk to this guy who petitioned against the painting in the 1950s because of the cost. He refers to the painting as junk! Haha! I understand he feels the need to defend his original stance, but really he doesn’t have to.  He could have just admitted that he got it wrong in the first place.  It just makes him seem really petty and reeks of sour grapes. You may not like a painting, but you can’t refer to it as junk, unless it is actually junk. Dali worked on this painting for months and he put his heart and soul into, and you do any artist a great disservice by triviliasing it down to a single disparaging word.

This video is quite a few years old so bits of it are out of date, but it’s a really great documentary. I thinked I’ve expounded enough about this painting, but I hope you’ll enjoy it!

I have lots of gorgeous pictures from home and I will be adding them tomorrow hopefully.  I managed to get to Kelvingrove Art Gallery, where the Glasgow Boys exhibit is being held.  I only saw some of the exhibition because we’d been up since the crack of dawn and were on our way back to Aberdeen (a 4-hour journey), so our time was limited.  I tried to go the day before when I had lots of time, but it was a bank holiday and the museum staff around the country were on strike, so it was a no go for us.  The Glasgow Boys exhibit is running until September and we intend going back home in a few weeks so there’s plenty of time to see it.

There was so much to see, and of course, I just had to take hubby upstairs to see Salvador Dali’s Christ of St John of the Cross.  This is one of the most famous images of Christ ever painted, and the most reproduced.  I have often regaled my hubby with the tale of when I first saw this painting – when I was a teenager – hanging upstairs in the gallery, high up on the wall way above me, and no matter how high up the painting was it always appeared as if you were looking down on it.  Strangely enough, it is this view of Christ being looked down upon that caused the painting to be attacked.  Presumably it was deemed that no-one should look down on Christ, but rather all eyes should be raised upwards.  However, what is not said here is that this is God’s view of his son on the cross. Christ is the connection between God and earth.

The painting has two perspectives here: the image of Christ is taken from above (a heavenly perspective) and the landscape is at the viewer’s eye-level, signifying that we are mere mortals, anchored to the earth -  the fishing boats further confirming our earthly status.   God looks down on all of us, and Christ is the inbetweener, the bridge; he is at the heart of everything.

Dali wrote about this piece: “In the first place, in 1950, I had a ‘cosmic dream’ in which I saw this image in color and which in my dream represented the ‘nucleus of the atom’. This nucleus later took on a metaphysical sense; I considered it ‘the very unity of the universe’, the Christ ! In the second place, when thanks to the instructions of Father Bruno, a Carmelite, I saw the Christ drawn by Saint John of the Cross, I worked out geometrically a triangle and a circle, which ‘aesthetically’ summarized all my previous experiments, and I inscribed my Christ in this triangle.”

What I truly love about the story of this painting is that it was on sale in 1951 (just after the piece had been painted) for a price of £12,000, and the city council managed to get it for the measly sum of £8,200 – a lot of money then but a pittance compared to its worth today.  The council also, very astutely, managed to secure the copyright for the image from Dali himself – notoriously difficult to gain from any artist past and present. There was an uproar in Glasgow from the local people, the art establishment and the art students who all thought the money (the only money left in the kitty) was completely wasted and could have been better spent.  How wrong they were!

The public flocked to see the painting from far and wide, and they have never stopped coming.  It has paid for itself many times over, and indeed the Spanish government offered Glasgow £80 million for it.  It was refused.  The painting goes on loan to Atlanta for 5 months in August.  I for one am against this.  To quote Julian Spalding, the former director of Glasgow galleries and museums, “The Louvre lent to Atlanta, but they lent stuff that was basically from their stores. They didn’t lend the Mona Lisa.” I understand the reason for sending it abroad, but I think it cheapens the artwork.  You don’t go to your local gallery to see the Mona Lisa, you go to Paris. However, I would urge anyone who may get the chance, to go see and it.  It’s a stunning painting, and it is the one piece that developed my love of art, and my love of Dali.  Seeing it on a computer does it no justice at all, and really should be seen in person.