Give-Away Again

He lost an ear during the firing and you first saw him back in April. I just wasn't ready to give up on him but now he's somebody's Rescue Dude. He stayed in place for a week before disappearing.

In Austin we have Ghost Bikes as memorials. I put a Sweater Child here over a year ago. It's still at the bike.  Sometimes miracles happen.

 

 

And another Give-Away at Jennifer's wall. If you want to see what the whole area looks like, pull up Google Earth and put "1101 W 31st St, Austin, TX" in the search box, then drag the little Google man over to get the street view. Their image is better than my pictures.

Netflix report: The Wolf of Wall Street was stupid. I can't believe Martin Scorsese did it. A huge self-indulgent, self-absorbed swamp of the F-word. It made Susan mad for 2 days. Finished reading The Boys in the Boat - 5 stars for that great book.

Pods Again

These are similar to others I've done but this time I'll try to get the glazing right so we don't have to touch it up with acrylic paint. Although I do like the effect the gold paint can provide.

Latest Netflix: The Artist gets 5 stars. We put off watching it because, honestly, who wants to watch a silent movie? It turned out to be a great movie with a clever twist and thoroughly held our attention. Before that one we watched Paul - a totally stupid, cute, funny movie (4 stars) that made us laugh out loud at the scene of an alien mooning people. We ran that back 3 times and laughed every time.  Loved the references to old alien movies, which I'm sure anyone under 40 would not get unless they watched oldies.

Latest book finished: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. It won a Pulitzer prize and definitely deserved it.  I'm dyslexic so I listen to books on Audible.com and wasn't sure about this one because it seemed so long (over 33 hours) and I only listen an hour or two at night.  It was so good that after finishing listening to it I took Susan's hardback copy (she hasn't read it yet) and carefully read the last chapter just to savor it all over again. 

Trivia: We were lucky enough to see the goldfinch painting by Fabritius at the Frick when we were in New York City.  Let me rephrase that: Susan remembers seeing it and pointing it out to me. I don't remember it.  OK, OK, there were a lot of paintings in that place!

New York City in January

This is the cover of my sketchbook I use when we travel. It's the 4x6" size and Susan helped me cut up one of my old art papers to make the cover. 

And why, you ask, have I waited so long to post the rest of the  information and pictures from my January trip to New York City? I have an excuse and it's a very good one.  Susan is my Blog Wrangler and it's HER fault. She has been doing things like wrangling with the new (now 6 months old) computer and has now figured out that for every snag the old one had, the new one has a different snag, just a bad. It took just about 2 weeks to get rid of the crummy security program that came preinstalled so she could use her familiar one. She has no idea why she can't play Yahoo games anymore. She has no idea why Yahoo Mail randomly ignores paragraph spacing. She is beginning to hate Yahoo.

This week she hates Picasa Web where she normally puts pictures so that this Blog can get at them. For no reason it keeps telling her "Upload failed: Server rejected". But if she keeps trying a LOT of times it will finally take them, one at a time, very slowly.

Anyway....

Now you know what we do with our days. This is how we travel through the city:

I finished reading Dog Stars by Peter Heller. Wow! Martha tells it better than I can. I'm now starting Before I Go To Sleep by S. J. Watson and the first chapter has already hooked me in.  Susan is reading Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking and gave me the Introvert Test in the book:  Scoring 19 out of 20 makes me a gold-plated Introvert. She thinks the book is great reading if you are, as she is, a "pseudo-extrovert". 

Looking back on the notes above I see that we watched the movie Hanna. A fascinating creepy movie, 5 Stars.  Last night we tried to watch Cosmopolis. I don't care what the reviewers said about how great it was, we stopped it after the scene with the doctor in the taxi. Dumb. No Stars.

Ludvig and Mapping

Ludvig is at the gallery.  I tried a different clay for the heads this time but managed to keep them from blowing up in the kiln.  It still isn't the exact mix I want but I'm working on it.  He's holding a little shell in his hand.

I'm still doing maps.  What size is this? What color of ink do you use? Why is the paper rippled? How do you get that shape? Inquiring minds want to know and I will tell all, as promised.

The size is 6x8 inches, the paper is from a Strathmore Drawing paper tablet. When Susan puts the pictures on the computer she usually does a rough crop to eliminate the edges of my sloppy photo so the actual image you see might not show that proportion exactly.

We set the tablet open on the kitchen counter with a piece of aluminum foil under it and a piece of foil under the top clean page.  When we have finished drinking coffee for the day I take out the wet coffee-loaded filter and put it down on the page. Randomly, just where it wants to go.  During the rest of the day we sometimes push down on it. Sometimes the grounds spill out.  Sometimes we splash a little coffee back on it.  Look at the map above and you'll see a vague filter shape starting at the bottom left.

The next morning the filter is taken off, foil put down on the other side of the tablet and the damp page flipped over and a fresh page is ready for its filter.  At the end of a couple of days some of the pages will be totally dry so their foil can be taken out but the stack will still be several days worth high.  The pages are very rippled because they dried with a wet blob on them.

Susan tried ironing them.  Nope, didn't work.  She tried ironing them with a damp paper on them.  Smelled just like fresh coffee but totally diluted the color.  We've been given ideas about how watercolor artists "stretch" wet paper but haven't bothered to buy expensive paper. Yet.

The ink? Just fine point Sharpies and (preferably) Pigma Micron pens or Faber-Castell Pitt pens.  Once every page in the tablet has some stain marks on it and the whole table is dry I can start marking on them.  This series of maps needed a unifying element so I started by making dotted lines through every page first.  No thinking allowed!

Susan has told me to read the book The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet and the map illustrations look really cool but I just haven't gotten around to reading it yet.

However, I have taken time to watch the movie The Grey with Liam Neesom.  It's the movie about guys trapped in the wilderness as they are stalked by wolves.  I learned a valuable lesson watching that movie:  Never take a leak in the woods at night.

Books - REAL Books

We are Book people. Above is what we gave each other for Christmas. Books. What else do you need?



This video is terrific! I reduced the size so you can see it here in the blog but if you go directly to YouTube and search for "Joy of Books" you'll be able to view it larger.

As for the Kindle or Nook... is that something you want to take in the bathroom with you?

Winter's Bone and The Hunger Games

We are reading The Hunger Games trilogy (now into the third book). In this case it is actually Listening, not reading, because they are from Audible.  A book that is read to you gives you an entirely different connection to the story and a good reader will help you stretch your imagination as you visualize the characters and the scene.  These books are considered "Young Adult" but it confuses me as to why they aren't considered Adult books. Yes, the main character is a teenage girl but so what? The theme of the books is heavy-duty morality, the future, death, violence, manipulation, deceit and so on. The movie (of course) is being shot now and Jennifer Lawrence is the main character, Katniss.

So how does this tie in with the movie Winter's Bone? Jennifer Lawrence (shown above) was the lead actor in this movie and her performance was achingly, hauntingly perfect. A good movie is one that has you thinking about it the next day, mulling over the scenes and wondering about the characters. In this movie it was very interesting to realize at the end that the strongest characters, in terms of how they faced life and dealt with hardship, were the women, not the men. Recently we watched The King's Speech and gave that a five-star rating. Winter's Bone gets six stars.

How does that all tie in with the picture of the antler pieces at the top? They came from Kervin, my barber. He hunts a lot and does a lot of gardening, too.  In The Hunger Games they hunt game for food, in Winter's Bone they hunt game for food.  You may think hunting animals is a bad thing but consider the fact that in Austin our local Caritas organization accepts venison donations from hunters and uses it to provide food to families in need.

The antler pieces are in the process of being worked into some ceramic sculptures - or at least that's the plan.