Anniversary #38

OK, OK, OK, I know I have gotten a bit lost in the labyrinths of my own mind for a while but, like a dead budgie, I always turn up sometime at the bottom of my cage.

What I have to gab about is my 38th Wedding Anniversary (a surprise even to myself that I could even remember the number!), but what a day it was. Read on:

Meditation at the Glasgow Buddhist Centre (Metta to you all) with long conversation with my friends on how it is possible to express emotion in paint (Buddha alone knows), followed by lunch at my very favourite Italian Ristorante (Topolino's) my absolutely favourite restaurant in Glasgow (it's impossible to eat anywhere else without making unfavouable comparisons), and the reasons will become clear even if the link doesn't. We (my darling wife and I) have been having lunch there for two years now every Thursday immediately after the going to the Buddhist Centre and have never yet had a poor meal. Quite the contrary, it is incomparable - and we have great patter with Ricardo (il cameriere extrordanaire [a bit o' French there just to show how cosmopolitan I can be] who is mad keen, not only with our mutual reverence for the Glasgow Rangers, but also his deep and passionate love for Andy Murray, our rising star (No3) in the tennis world (Ricky has the 't' shirt and the shoes (how sad is he?) but also, presently helping with the service, a lovely cameriere lass called Diane (love the hairstyle D!).
Many, many, thanks to Ricardo for waving the cost of the lunch on our anniversary day.
But the day didn't end there, Oh no:

Two hours at the Glasgow School of Art Degree Show (crap Fine Art [NONE of them can paint as far as I'm concerned!], but beautiful Silversmithing and Textile Design, as usual, as well as what they now call "Visual Communication" (Graphic Art to oldies like me).

But, La Piece de la Resistance:

I managed to get two tickets for a concert (for FREE [no cheapskate me - just canny])at the Glasgow City Halls to hear the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra who play a mixed bag of fantastic music starting with the most sublime excerpt from Mendelssohn's Hebridean Suite, "Fingal's Cave" (I have to admit I felt very emotional with the opening bars but instead of wallowing in it I observe the effect for my Grande Projet); then Hydyn's Trumpet Concerto; and pieces from Handel's "Water Music"; including the "Bouree" (which we play in Mandolin Class), finishing with the "Overture: Beatrice and Benedict" by Berlioz; and, finally, "The Young Persons Guide to the Orchestra" by Benjamin Britten (they put that one in especially for me :o)

And just to finish off the evening...a bit of Jazz. Right next door to the City Halls was a small cafe-bar with a live jazz band - the Michael Deans Quintet - with a friend from the Buddhist Center, John-Paul, playing fantastic bass guitar.
I didn't make any sketches from the SSO concert (miles too far away) but I did get some sketches in the more intimate atmosphere of the cafe:



Michael Deans playing Saxaphone.


The Drummer.


John-Paul on Bass.


Trumpet 1.


Trumpet 2.

Hope you also enjoyed the show :o)

WARNING!

If you get any Emails telling you that ham and chopped pork has been infected with Swine Flu don't open them...it's just Spam!

A Scottish Garden in May

In response to Vivien's Blog I am posting up some of the multitude of flowers presently astonishing me in my very own garden. Not many words (you'll be glad to know) but if only Blogger could offer an olfactory dimension to it's blogsite then you would half-ways understand why I get so exercised by this show of munificence:


"Centaurea montana", Feathery petals of the most delicious cornflower blue.

"Clematis Montana" covering the fence at my front door greeting me with it's abundance every morning with more buds than you can shake stick at giving promise of more abundance for weeks to come.

"Prunus laurocerausus", Laurel: Dark and quiet but reeking of early summer while I drink my Bordillino and dream of Lake Garda.

"Rhododendron Evelyn", Named after a close family friend of great intellect and deep compassion.

"Scilla", or Bluebell to you and me. Prolific and my absolutely favourite colour of blue, after cornflower, ultramarine, cobalt and cerulean, and, of course Sky blue, whenever we get the chance!

Such a Lovely Lass!

I drew this a couple of months ago while we were travelling on a train down to the coast and she was all wrapped up against the cold, which now seems a million miles away, and another country:

Pencil on paper, 2xA6.
The days fly by so quickly and now we are approaching what we laughingly call 'summer', and I still think I'm a young thing, but know I am not.
I've spent the last half-hour watching a big grey cat in our garden that I call 'Smokey-the-Bandit' because he used to come and eat some of the food I left out for Leo! Until I know better, I call him "he", but he won't come anywhere near me (much to Jacqui's relief), but I would love to make contact with him.
And now I am eating the first rhubarb crumble of the season, with ice-cream.
Such a good day, and my football team, Rangers, also won their league game against Hibernian.
I am happy , and everything is right with the world (even though I know it is not).

OCA Exhibition at Ocean Terminal

Taking a moment's breather from the confusion of abstracted thoughts so I'm doing a bit of tidying round and catching up.

Time flies when you are enjoying yourself, as they say, and I've been having lots of fun recently but it appears that five weeks have passed since I put my three paintings into this exhibition, organised by the Open College of the Arts (OCA), and a whole month since I went back for a visit to see how it all looked.

I thought you might like to see what the exhibition looked like in-situ:


This is one of the better areas (above), albeit a corridor, but don't let that lady with the serious look on her face kid you - I know for a fact she is skint and has no intention of buying!

Looking down the length of the mall. My paintings are somewhere along there on the third floor's thirty-fourth column:




The exhibition is made up of both present and past students, and this past student's work (below) is also by my present Tutor, Jane Mitchell:



Ah, here's what I'm looking for:

Goldenbury Hill in all it's glory, but what's this...nobody looking at it? Hey everybody, up here --->>>>>!


Apparently six paintings were sold, but I don't need to tell you that none of them were mine. If any of them had then you wouldn't have needed the internet to hear about it!!!

OCA Changeing Lives Exhibition

Yesterday I drove through from the Wild West (of Scotland) to the Erudite East to submit three paintings into an Open College of the Arts (OCA) exhibition at Ocean Terminal, Leith Docks, Edinburgh.
I could have submitted three more recent paintings but I didn't really have anything else created under the auspices of the OCA. These three were done circa 2005 when I last painted anything for the "Painting 2: Finding Your Way" Course, or as I like to term it: "Painting 2: Losing Your Way". I lost all confidence in my painting at that time, although when I look back I now feel perhaps I shouldn't have.
Ce'st la vie, can't re-live time, I can only move forward from here. And these are what I chose to put into this exhibition:



All three are painted in acrylics on paper, and framed in natural wood.

The exhibition space is not ideal, being 3 or 4 stories up on a kind of top-level open gallery of a shopping mall with the paintings displayed high on widely spaced columns. I'll go back there again next week and take some photo's to show you what I mean. Still, I understand it is almost impossible to get affordable gallery space anywhere in our nation's capital city, or anywhere for that matter.
So, I shouldn't complain - I am just happy to have three paintings hanging anywhere in public at the moment without me nailed up there beside them :o{

First Album

I must be off my head - this has taken me just about all day to assemble but I'm sure you'll a' think it's worth it and be clamouring for copies!

And it is Melanie at My Croft that's all to blame. You see I was checking to see if she was back blogging again and sure enough there she was, the wee lamb, blethering away about this fabby new Blogger-Land game she herself was caught up in and I thought it was brilliant too!

The game is to follow a set of instructions and randomly come up with the name of your band, the title of your first album, and the cover artwork. This is doing the rounds so I'll give a mention to those from whence it apparently has come:
66squarefeet
Secretnotebookswildpages , and
moreidlethoughts


And here are the instructions:
To create your own band name and album cover, follow these easy instructions from m. heart:
1. Click wikipedia. The first random article you get is the name of your band.

2. Click quotations. The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3. Click flicker. Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4. Use Photoshop (or similar) to put it all together.

Anyway, here's my take on it:

"Emotions are Violent" by Danskammer.



Danskammer Point Light is, of course, a lighthouse sitting out on some exposed coastal headland near New York (I'm sure you know it well Melanie?), and the quote comes from W.Somerset Maugham - "When you're eighteen your emotions are violent but they're not durable".

And the excellent photo of a lovely lassie is by Stink Poop on Flickr.

I thought the three parts came together rather well with the Scandanavian name, the coldly lit girl, and the raw emotional tag.

Anyway if all of that hasn't made you weep yet, then this will: My first track on the album will be "La Campursita" by Gerardo Matos Rodriguez, played deftly on an A+ Moon mandolin by that Plucky Plectrum all the way from East Kilbride -
yours truly, "Wee Davey Twangathon" :




[standing ovation and thunderous applause]

Thank you, thank you, thank you, don't throw flowers, just throw money!