More to the point

is that it is not "white English people" the Labour Party, and the left in general, discriminate against, it is white men. If you're a woman, you can claim yourself to be part of a persecuted officially recognised Victim Group, no matter what colour you are.

It was revealed last year that Avon and Somerset Constab-ulary rejected 186 applications from white men on the grounds that they were already “over-represented” in the force. In the same way, London Mayor Ken Livingstone last month refused to endorse a series of nominations for the London Fire Authority because they were dominated by whites.

And whole towns are beginning to suffer state disapproval. Eighty administrative jobs in the Prison Service have recently been transferred from Corby in Northamptonshire to Leicester because, as the Home Office admitted, Corby’s population is predominantly “white British”, a terrible sin in our multicultural society.

It is a bitter irony that the Labour Government, which works itself into such a synthetic rage over racial prejudice, should practise overt discrimination on an epic scale. The remorseless focus on supporting minorities has led to a perverted ideology of anti-white racism. 

Identity politics, another name for a shakedown. I remember another version of it. They used to call it "consciousness raising," but another word for it is "grievance-mongering." My mother became addicted to it, so I saw it up close and ugly in all its whining, snivelling, morally infantilising glory.



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Ten thousand? Really?

I know that some people have disputed the 10,000 hour idea. Some guy has determined that you can get to a professional level of expertise in artistic skill, either music or painting or whatever, by spending 10,000 hours practising. This works out to about 6.8 years of practising 4 hours a day.

I am a little skeptical of this theory myself, but there is probably at least some truth to it. I think there is a lot more than just sitting down at a piano and practising for ten thousand hours that created an artist like a Rubenstein or Lang Lang. I know that Yoyo Ma had all manner of other things in place that allowed him to get to where he is in his skill. The right parents, the right time and place. And yes, probably an elevated "natural talent," if we mean by that an aptitude supported by love.

I know from experience that sometimes one simply gets "bitten" by something. When I was a teenager, I was briefly in the army cadets in the NWT. I loved it. I couldn't get enough of the outdoors stuff we did, running about with maps and compasses, building fires of damp wood and making traps out of a sapling and a shoelace. Hiking and camping and swimming and target shooting. I didn't care one way or another about the military aspect of it, though I enjoyed the disciplined and organised approach to learning things it taught me, (not that I ever applied it to much).

I got bitten by it, the outdoor bug, very hard, and for years after, even long after I moved back down south to live in BC again, I would annually be seized by the need to be outdoors for days at a time, and would pack my stuff and just walk all over the islands. Living in Cheshire, I couldn't resist the countryside and would spend hours stomping all over the footpaths, always reluctant to go home. England was so tame; I missed the great, vast emptiness of BC.

When I went to university in Nova Scotia, in the theatre department of Dalhousie, I was hoping I would get "bitten" by the theatre bug, since it seemed like it would be such a natural fit, but it never happened. In the end I was so depressed and alienated from what I was doing I couldn't wait to get away and never wanted to go anywhere near a theatre again. It goes to show that there is such a thing, at least, as aptitude.

I suppose it could be said that I was "bitten" by writing, but it happened so long ago, and has become so much a part of my daily existence, that it is like saying I was bitten by breathing.

The more I draw, the more I want to, which is a sign at least of bittenness. Obviously love is needed, and I think it is a stronger thing than "talent". Nothing I've ever done has ever so calmed my mind and quieted the arch-chatterer that lives in my skull. And it happens every time I start; time seems to stand still, even as the waves keep crashing and the birds keep flying and the sun keeps moving towards the West. maybe it's not time standing still, but me.

I remember reading an essay by Stephen King about writing. He said that everyone has an obsession. And the lucky few are those who can make their obsession their work. Other people do a job in order to support their obsession, which their families politely call a "hobby". The English are famous for this kind of thing, all those men going out to work in the shed or at the allotment, after they get home from their jobs. What else could possibly account for the Industrial Revolution? How do we think the Cotton Ginny was invented?

If talent is real at all, I think it is just another name for love. Without that love, or obsession, it would simply be impossible to practice anything for 10,000 hours. No one would ever do it, even with the most terrifying Tiger-mother standing over him.

I've found there's a strange push-pull that happens with drawing, though, in your brain. On the one hand we get obsessed with it, with perfecting this or that technique. Once the pencil is in the hand it is close to impossible to stop. A lot of times, I've found myself standing with an aching back and cold feet at the easel and six or seven hours have passed, it is dark outside and I'm hungry and all I had intended to do was just fix this one little thing here... At other times, I can go for weeks without touching a pencil, with the feeling of hopelessness growing on me, my Evil Brain whispering coldly, "there's no point in trying, you're never going to get there..."

Anyway, I've decided to start tracking my practice hours and see how much per week I can do. And maybe try to apply some of the disciplined approach I learned from the Canadian military.

And at the next long weekend, I'm going to go to Florence again. The last time, I had no confidence about drawing from life and the statues intimidated me. We'll see if things have improved.



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Another one

Weird but interesting.

Dead Birds.



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Put 'em up!

I LOVE this!!!

From the ex-pat-without-a-name.

AWEsome!



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Three blogs

Another Anglo living abroad because the Home Country has become just too damn frightening and insane. I hear you, brother.

And a fascinating blog that examines modern realist paintings and illustration according to the classical rules of composition. Very interesting page on the Golden Section/Golden Ratio. Everything is Math.

Drawing OWU is for students of drawing at Ohio Wesleyan University. Check out the galleries there if you want to see how far it's possible to go with drawing as an art form of its own. Some of it boggles the mind.

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Also, once again, researchers find out that modern people just aren't constituted for marriage. Modern, Newfangled people just don't know how to order their lives. Thanks, Hippies, for doing such a good job of destroying any last shreds of hope that we can put back together the civilisation you've destroyed.

"The more a man does in the home, the higher the divorce rate," Thomas Hansen, co-author of the study entitled "Equality in the Home", told AFP.

Researchers found no, or very little, cause-and-effect. Rather, they saw in the correlation a sign of "modern" attitudes.

"Modern couples are just that, both in the way they divide up the chores and in their perception of marriage" as being less sacred, Hansen said, stressing it was all about values.

"In these modern couples, women also have a high level of education and a well-paid job, which makes them less dependent on their spouse financially. They can manage much easier if they divorce," he said.

I'm pretty sure if I were married, I would never allow my husband to touch anything at home. No way he'll do it right. Whenever I've had roommates, I don't want to let them do the housework, or if they do, I usually sneak around after, to do it again properly.



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Drawing from photos

I've noticed something interesting, and I thought I would run it past the Picnickers who are into photography. I've found that there is a distinct difference in appearance, in "tone," between the drawings I've made from photos of ordinary people, and great master painters, and the ones made from photos from modern magazines.

In learning to draw formally in a studio, a great deal of time is spent copying "from the flats," as it is called by instructors. That is, from 2D depictions of objects, usually casts of famous Classical and Renaissance statues.

Outside the studio, I have amassed a collection of art books with good black and white and colour photographs of those statues, both by the Ancients and the great Italian masters. Drawing practice from these is a great pleasure and always presents some new thing to learn and perfect. Somewhat less frequently, I also use photographic reproductions of master paintings, and making "master copies" is a big part of classical instruction.

In drawing the figure, I'm currently doing a little practice project in my book recommended by one of the online drawing people. Drawing 100 noses, 100 eyes (or pairs of eyes), 100 hands, 100 legs etc. The idea is to become so familiar with the structure of these that they become almost automatic, so when drawing from a live model I can cut down on the time it takes to produce a likeness. It's quite fun actually, and I might put a few up and make a contest out of it: "Name that nose".

I've always known that a lot of drawing practice involves copying from flats. Everyone used to start off with the Bargues, a set of lithographs, and so we still do. And I am given to understand that in some places (that should know better) all the drawing instruction that is offered is the kind that involves taking a page out of a magazine, drawing a grid on it and copying from the grid. But this latter always seems to produce a much inferior quality of work.

As well, for some years I thought a convenient way to learn figure drawing, at least to learn the basic human proportions, would be to practice using photos from fashion magazines. They may not help you produce great art, but at least you could become adept at rendering the human form, correct proportions, etc. But now, having tried it a few times, I find that there is something about most fashion photography that produces a strange quality to the drawings. I suppose it is true that you could use fashion photos effectively, if you had no other source (living on, say, Mars) and wanted to learn to render the figure. But they have such an air of unreality about them that the drawings have an oddly unnatural feel. I don't know how to describe it better than that.

What I was wondering about, and would like to hear from our photography readers, is what about that kind of photography produces this strangely flattened effect.



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Hey! someone stole my wishlist!!

I've found another artist I long to be when I grow up.

Sarah Simblet. She teaches drawing at Oxford's Ruskin school and has produced several books for artists, including the Sketch Book book, Botany for Artists and an anatomy book. The last one I'm not too sure about, since it seems to be one of those anatomy books that is very heavy on the photos. I prefer drawings.

But the botany book looks very exciting. Not so much a book on botanical illustration but an actual study of plants with her drawings, which are beautiful.

But to my great annoyance, it seems as if Amazon and Blogger are no longer on speaking terms. I had a Wishlist posted to the sidebar, and have been very grateful to have received several books from generous and helpful readers from it. But I had a note last night from a friend in England asking where it went. I didn't notice, but it seems as if Blogger just took it off. V. annnoying! I tried to put it back up, but the thingy says there isn't one. Grrr...

Anyway...

I am leaning more and more towards botanical and nature illustration. I know that the world needs more classical realist art, and that the Church is in desperate need of a revival of sacred art. But I can't help it, I just like bugs and flowers.

I did one of the geckoes last night in my leather book, and he turned out beautifully.



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September fauna

September is a good time of year for spotting geckoes.

(Though I took this pic in May, 2009)

One of the fun and easy Amateur Naturalist things you can do after dark in Italy is look for geckoes. They hunt mostly at night and are able to run around at astonishing speeds up walls and even upside down! They like to hunt insects and love to roost quietly, waiting for their prey to come along, just hanging on a wall. They are also attracted to bright light, so are among the easiest of the wildlife in Italy to spot. You can often see them on the ceiling of the walkway outside the bar at the train station, running around with that odd, twisty and very comical gait.

But the other night when I was coming home late from Rome, I kept an eye open and saw several of them between the station and home, some tiny, no longer than my little finger and others larger, about the length of my hand.


Though you can see why they're sometimes hard to spot if they're sitting still.

They come in colours ranging from light greenish grey to dark brown, and sometimes are mottled for camouflage. They live in the little cracks and crevices of walls, so you can see them come out in the evenings if you are patient. Though you do mostly see them at night, I think the big ones don't mind coming out to bask in the sun.

I've wanted to draw them since I came here and saw one up close the first time, but they are really very shy and incredibly fast, so I really have very little hope of ever catching one. One of them came into my first flat one evening while I was sitting very quietly reading. I wonder if it is possible to attract them somehow.


I just find them irresistibly cute, with the little rounded pads on the ends of their toes and their funny run.

In a few months they will have all gone to sleep for the winter. It's always the best sign of spring when you start hearing the geckoes shuffling around in the leaves when the weather starts warming up.



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Perception

I don't know if I've ever mentioned this, but when I was about 12, I was diagnosed with epilepsy. Not the falling-down-and-frothing kind, but a rather less well-known kind that is more difficult to pin down. Temporal Lobe epilepsy seizures produce some profoundly weird experiences, with a lot of hallucinations, and can leave a person, especially a young person, with some rather strange perspectives on reality. For me, reality was never so hard and fast as it seems to be for some other people, a difference I didn't even know was there until I was much older. I had been having the seizures for as long as I remembered, and, despite a prodigious skill at describing things, they remain extremely elusive.

Words are a medium meant to abstract reality, to create symbols that point to something real. But if your perception of reality periodically gets radically altered, if you regularly wake up in the middle of the night and can't tell the difference any more between here and there, the distance between here-ness and there-ness is either non-existent or infinite; if you can't tell the difference between an inch and a thousand miles, between a thing and not-a-thing, between a space and the object that defines the space, words meant to describe the ordinary waking world, will tend to fail. I can say that on occasion, I've been able to see sounds.

I was told when I was diagnosed that it would go away and the seizures would stop when I reached puberty, and it was true that I now rarely have the strange experience of falling backwards into another world that presages them. Now that I know what is happening, they aren't so frightening. I have also learned to make them stop when they are inconvenient by playing music, making noise or by physically grasping objects, all methods of trying to make perception and the external world match up. I remember once I was even able to just let it all happen and ignore it and carry on reading my book while reality hissed and bent snakily away from me.

Now, in my stolid middle age, they come so rarely that I can often forget about it entirely. Only when I am really sick with flu and a high fever, or experiencing extreme emotional stress (something that has happened a lot in the last few years) do I ever get a glimmer of the Other World. And oddly, though it was a bit of a problem when I was a kid, I sort of miss it. The only thing left that makes me remember it is knowing that I can't take modern anti-depressants. Apparently the serotonin re-uptake inhibitors that are all the rage with the more reductionist variety of head shrinkers "lower the threshold" for seizures and create a kind of constant state of seizureness that more or less is functionally the equivalent of going insane.

(I found this out the hard way several years ago when I went to the doctor complaining of being down after losing a job. The drugs he gave me, as a matter of routine, and which successive doctors added to, made me so ill that I was told on one occasion that I was probably going to die. I didn't know what was going on until a specialist (that I had to nearly threaten a lawsuit to get referred to) told me, rather alarmed, that it was no bloody wonder I was so badly off. While muttering something about the damned arrogance and incompetence of the psychiatric profession, he prescribed a mild anti-epileptic drug and a lot of water and rest and two months later I was back in the boring old Real World full time. But it was an interesting experience, and some day I'll write it into something.)

Since diagnosis I've read, though, that what they thought about my kind of epilepsy in 1979 is no longer regarded as complete. When they told me that it would "probably go away" they didn't know what a strange and complicated place the brain was. Epilepsy doesn't ever go away, but it can certainly change. I don't get the huge and terrifying, all-encompassing hallucinatory seizures that frightened me so much as a child. But apparently, the type of epilepsy I have can alter perceptions in hidden and interesting ways.

Of course, it is close to impossible to tell if I am perceiving reality differently from the way everyone else does, but it seems that temporal lobe epileptics have certain personality traits in common, which I suppose makes sense. And a lot of them have to do with communication and perception, which tends to make us arty.

The world looks unique to each person who observes it, neurological disorders notwithstanding. I think of learning to draw as taming those bendy and malleable perceptions. Having not had much parental guidance, I've been making up my life as I've gone along, Indiana Jones style, through my whole adult life. It would be interesting to work out if that includes a perceptual method that differs from other peoples.



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Flipped my book today

I've been writing and drawing in my leather book since I bought it on November 11, 2011. 11/11/11. Today I reached a milestone and flipped my book.

I bought it in a little stationers' behind the Pantheon that specialises in leather bound books and hand made leather bags and satchels. You can buy really beautifully bound sketchbooks, diaries, blank books of all sorts, as well as printed stationary and all sorts of fanciful toy-stationary like letter seals and pewter framed magnifying lenses and dip pens. Girls, especially imaginative Goth girls, love this stuff, and I couldn't resist the siren call of the place. I bought my leather book last November just before they told us I would have to go forward and have the big surgery. I determined right away that I would use it to write down my explorations in art and perception, a project meant to distract from cancer fears and lift myself out of depression. It has worked, to a degree.

The book that comes in the leather cover can be replaced, so I thought I would keep going buying replacements as I fill up the books. I can foresee a line of these on the bookshelf, dated by hand. The stationer's has been in operation since 1910, so it seems likely that I'll be able to keep getting the refills indefinitely. Looking in it today, one can see as I've gone along that my courage has grown for drawing.

Of course, most of my life I've been comfortable with using words; my mother started teaching me to write, on an ancient manual typewriter, when I was six or seven. But I realised a few years ago after starting to take drawing lessons that I've overdeveloped my verbal skills and neglected my visual vocabulary. When I was a child I loved art, and knew quite a lot about the Italians and the Victorians as painters. I remember being tremendously excited at being taken to see an exhibition of drawings and sketches by Turner and Constable that came to the Victoria Art Gallery. I can still close my eyes and see the pieces, which were surprisingly small. One, a beautiful Turner watercolour of a fish, is especially lodged in the grey matter.

But, though I don't know why, I never took to drawing as a skill, even though Grandma tried many times to teach me. I guess words were just so much easier as a method of expression that drawing always seemed like too much trouble. As a result, I feel as if I'm mentally muscle-bound in one area and nearly atrophied in another.

During cancer, I found an odd thing happening with writing. I started to get sick of words and felt they were inadequate to describe what my brain was doing. I wanted to understand the world in a different way, a way that I had previously skipped over or considered too hard for me. I reasoned that there had to have been a time in my life when writing was difficult, when it was an effort to put words together to express ideas and that it had only got easier after doing it a lot for a long time, like any other skill. It's just that it was so long ago and so early in my life that I don't now remember it being difficult. This had to mean that if I only persevered I could in theory become as proficient with drawing as I had become with words after a lifetime of writing.

I'm still deeply frustrated with my inability to use drawing to describe my thoughts, but I have recently found it becoming ever so slightly easier, like feeling the first movement when you're trying to push a car out of the mud.

Anyway, I thought the process would be very long and would be interesting enough as an experience to write about and I didn't want to have the whole thing left to this ephemeral electronic medium. I wanted something solid and permanent. The leather books are ideal for this purpose.

I write and draw habitually only on the right side of the book, which seems a waste to me, so my friend Vicky suggested that when I got to the end of the book, I should just pull the insert out, turn it over and start again on the pages that had been on the left side for the first half of the book. Today I reached the end of the right side pages turned the book over, and it feels like I have accomplished something. I think flipping the book is going to be a sort of marker, a place to pause and look back at what and how I've been doing.

At some point, the idea is to go through the whole thing and put together a book worth publishing about what it is like to live in Italy studying art. But not only about that in an autobiographical way. I hope it will be about the process of learning, developing perceptual skills. And I want to examine what I've learned about how seeing is not the same thing as perceiving, but putting the two together and drawing the result creates a unique way of bringing information from out of yourself into the outside world and the life of others.

Everyone who comes here seems to write an Italian Book at some point, so this is the one I'm planning.



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