Hooligans & Riff-Raff

(Take Note: for those of you who have signed up to be notified by email of new postings to this blog, you have been receiving not just a notification, but an actual copy of the new blog posting as the email.  As this does not show the images of the paintings in the best possible light, you should click on the title of the latest blog posting at the top of the post, and not the title of the painting itself; this will open up the actual blog itself, and you may then enjoy the paintings, & the Blog, at their best.)

The Road to Flook Lake

It has come to my attention from a couple of my readers, that the rigmarole one needs go through in order to leave a comment on the Blog, is what probably puts people off doing so.  I thought that might be the case when I began the Blog, but in spite of that, I went ahead with those parameters.  Having looked at a few blogs that I respected, and looking hard at the comments thy attracted, I decided to go this route; some had a few undeserved entries of the kind you might find in the less salubrious chat-room environment, while the comments on others were all germane to the topic at hand, and even where not full in agreement respectfully set forth their points of view, which often led to good discussion between the various commenters.  While my Internet time is limited, I may not have the time to join into such a debate, should one ever arise on my site, a particular thread or discussion might be picked up and addressed in a future Post.  I believe also, that when a commenter has to jump through a few hoops, and whose identity is more or less known, they are less likely to behave as hooligans, and even though I might have editorial powers to extract an offensive comment from the site, as most bloggers have the ability to do, I might not always be in a position to pick them up in a timely manner, because of my limited Internet access; I draw your attention to my recent 6 weeks in the Oregon High Desert Wilds when I was completely off-line … that’s a long time for an inappropriate comment to gestate on one’s unattended site.   It might just well be that all my present readers are hooligans & riff-raff, and thus refraining from jumping through the proverbial hoops to inject pithy comments, but of course I couldn’t possibly entertain such a thought … (hearty laughs all around!).  I will be leaving the present comment parameters in place for the moment, but might revisit them at some point, experimentally. 

At an exhibition not long ago, it was commented on how different my Oil Sketches were from my usual work.  I addressed this in the introduction to this Blog, but I will briefly address this again.  For most of my career my usual work was almost exclusively highly detailed, labor intensive and thus time consuming Watercolour work, with some Pastel and the occasional Oil thrown in.  The Oil Sketches & Studies thus far shown on the Blog are just that … Oil Sketches & Studies, completed in a couple of hours or so, some a little longer, where rapidity of execution to beat the ever changing light, is more important than extreme detail.  Even so, many of them have more detail than much of the Plein Air work seen these in the Art World … ingrained ways of thinking and seeing are not easy to divest, and so I am trying to loosen up even more.  Ultimately, however, when some of these are used to create larger Oil work, I want that work to be somewhere between the looseness of Plein Air and the detail of my more usual Watercolours, and able to go in either direction as the subject o commission might demand.  Meanwhile it’s an interesting and exciting journey.  And speaking of my recent time in the Oregon High Desert, I have finally managed to scan my Oil Sketches & Studies onto my PC, and have begun to correct their colour with Photoshop, and so my next Post will begin to introduce them and relate my Winter High Desert adventures.

Butterfly Wing in the Snow

On the Blue Sky Road

No time to work on more photos ... so until next time ...