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!