The sea was dead calm today.
A rather unsettling effect making the whole scene from the balcony look rather like a colour drained painting. A single pedestrian walking along the unfinished promenade looked out of place, rather like one of those cut out animated figures that Terry Gilliam in Monty Python made come to life as they passed over some sort of static background.
The sand has also changed tone, though trying to tie down a precise designation, let alone stating the refinement of a shade is beyond me, I take refuge in Robert Graves’ poem ‘Welsh Incident’ where they were described as ‘mostly nameless colours’ but ‘colours you would like to see.’ I don’t know how Ceri does it – this matching of colours.
My attempts are spectacular failures, probably because I mix colours like a demented cook forever adding herbs and spices on the basis of a single taste. I start off trying to get a particular shade of green. Green I can do: blue and yellow. It is not the right green so I add more blue. That doesn’t work so I add a bit of black. This is a disaster so I add more yellow. Then a tiny squeeze of white. I now have a vast quantity of paint mixed, but not the right colour. I make the disastrous decision that the green I want has a little bit of brown in it. So I add red. I add too much. The colour is no longer green. So I add a soupcon of blue and yellow to bring it back to life. But the proportions are wrong so I add green from a tube of green and . . . you see where this is leading. Eventually my paint is transformed into that muddy sludge that plasticine becomes when you mix all the separate colours of the stuff together.
I have just checked up on the spelling of plasticine and found a little video on how to make your own! This is at http://www.metacafe.com/watch/802582/home_plasticine/ it looks simple and good fun. Perhaps I could make enough plasticine (Word keeps underlining this spelling but it is the correct one) and construct a three dimensional version of the view of Sitges that I have bound myself to paint. It could hardly be more difficult.
A rather unsettling effect making the whole scene from the balcony look rather like a colour drained painting. A single pedestrian walking along the unfinished promenade looked out of place, rather like one of those cut out animated figures that Terry Gilliam in Monty Python made come to life as they passed over some sort of static background.
The sand has also changed tone, though trying to tie down a precise designation, let alone stating the refinement of a shade is beyond me, I take refuge in Robert Graves’ poem ‘Welsh Incident’ where they were described as ‘mostly nameless colours’ but ‘colours you would like to see.’ I don’t know how Ceri does it – this matching of colours.
My attempts are spectacular failures, probably because I mix colours like a demented cook forever adding herbs and spices on the basis of a single taste. I start off trying to get a particular shade of green. Green I can do: blue and yellow. It is not the right green so I add more blue. That doesn’t work so I add a bit of black. This is a disaster so I add more yellow. Then a tiny squeeze of white. I now have a vast quantity of paint mixed, but not the right colour. I make the disastrous decision that the green I want has a little bit of brown in it. So I add red. I add too much. The colour is no longer green. So I add a soupcon of blue and yellow to bring it back to life. But the proportions are wrong so I add green from a tube of green and . . . you see where this is leading. Eventually my paint is transformed into that muddy sludge that plasticine becomes when you mix all the separate colours of the stuff together.
I have just checked up on the spelling of plasticine and found a little video on how to make your own! This is at http://www.metacafe.com/watch/802582/home_plasticine/ it looks simple and good fun. Perhaps I could make enough plasticine (Word keeps underlining this spelling but it is the correct one) and construct a three dimensional version of the view of Sitges that I have bound myself to paint. It could hardly be more difficult.
I have decided that Ceri obviously manages to produce his tempera paintings by witchcraft – it is the only logical explanation. And he adds another level of difficulty by painting in tempera which means that he makes his own colours by using pure pigment and then adding egg to them. The egg is absolutely essential, but I reckon that it is some sort of small domestic sacrifice to placate the gods of the muddy colour to which all paint mixing tends and which allows Ceri to produce the glowing and accurate colours which he uses and defy the gods which then take out all their frustrations on my desperate attempts to be artistic!
Today I added a sort of wash of light purple for a distant headland in my painting. It didn’t come out like that when I added it to the canvas but, thank god with acrylic you can always paint over. There are more layers of paint on some parts of my barely started canvas than there are in a Nigerian pyramid selling scam.
My head however is bloody but unbowed and you can get paint out from underneath the fingernails with a plastic collar stiffener which suddenly turned up on the floor of the kitchen looking like a very, very small flat white vacuum flask or tiny name spikes for miniscule plants. One would be forgiven for asking why a plastic collar stiffener needs a simile when it is what it is. But how many people these days have ever seen one of these things?
Today I added a sort of wash of light purple for a distant headland in my painting. It didn’t come out like that when I added it to the canvas but, thank god with acrylic you can always paint over. There are more layers of paint on some parts of my barely started canvas than there are in a Nigerian pyramid selling scam.
My head however is bloody but unbowed and you can get paint out from underneath the fingernails with a plastic collar stiffener which suddenly turned up on the floor of the kitchen looking like a very, very small flat white vacuum flask or tiny name spikes for miniscule plants. One would be forgiven for asking why a plastic collar stiffener needs a simile when it is what it is. But how many people these days have ever seen one of these things?
I can remember that I used to have them in all my school shirts and it was yet another chore remembering to take the things out before they were washed because the heat of the wash did terrible things to them if they were left in. I am not 100% sure where this thing came from and it is a little unsettling. It is as if a portal in the space/time continuum has opened and popped one of those things in front of me as a little recherche du temps perdu!
I shall however continue with the painting. It is an essential part of the general level of excitement in my life that I can sit here and speculate about what small space of the canvas will be covered with the next inappropriate colour tomorrow. Other people have jobs.
Which is where the New Year comes in. In a couple of weeks time I will be off to Barcelona again to have a ‘chat’ with a school to see if I might ‘do’ for any future job that might come up.
One of the chores that I will have to complete before I go is to dig out a copy of my CV the style and literary imagination of which makes Lord of the Rings read like an episode of The Archers. It is therefore pretty important that I refresh my memory of precisely what I dredged up from the vaults of my past to entice unsuspecting managers to aspire to have my lofty accomplishments illuminate their place of learning.
My CV is rather like Oscar’s description of a diary in The Importance of Being Earnest, ‘One should always have something sensational to read on the train!’ My having read it should preclude the start of surprise on hearing some well crafted extract from that document read by a stranger!
Short fiction at its best!
I shall however continue with the painting. It is an essential part of the general level of excitement in my life that I can sit here and speculate about what small space of the canvas will be covered with the next inappropriate colour tomorrow. Other people have jobs.
Which is where the New Year comes in. In a couple of weeks time I will be off to Barcelona again to have a ‘chat’ with a school to see if I might ‘do’ for any future job that might come up.
One of the chores that I will have to complete before I go is to dig out a copy of my CV the style and literary imagination of which makes Lord of the Rings read like an episode of The Archers. It is therefore pretty important that I refresh my memory of precisely what I dredged up from the vaults of my past to entice unsuspecting managers to aspire to have my lofty accomplishments illuminate their place of learning.
My CV is rather like Oscar’s description of a diary in The Importance of Being Earnest, ‘One should always have something sensational to read on the train!’ My having read it should preclude the start of surprise on hearing some well crafted extract from that document read by a stranger!
Short fiction at its best!
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