This is what may be called a “weblog” or “blog” of sorts, but I have been doing it before that word was around. The old logs are filed away. My other pages have very strictly defined purposes, such as the promotion of my paintings, or the propagation of sound philosophy, all related to my livelihood and avocations. Here I write my left-over thoughts. I absolutely do not invite comments or e-mail about these random writings, because this is simply an exercise in expressive self-indulgence. But, out of respect for the reader, I usually do not comment on things in the news. There is enough commentary out there, and you can get it elsewhere. Anyways I have friends in the real world, I listen to the tales of their battles, sympathize, hope well for them. But to make friends over the Internet? Why not make friends by calling wrong numbers instead?
APRIL 10th, 2007.
Tomorrow will be three weeks since the dog died. Without the dog I am bored. I am too bored to eat when I feel hungry. A theologian once answered a little girl’s question: “If your dog is necessary for your happiness, then yes, your dog will be with you in heaven”. I visited A. D. M. and borrowed a book, a collection of three stories by Evelyn Waugh. The book was stamped as discarded from ***** Library. Usually I do not read books for entertainment. This is because I do several hours of reading a day as work, because my eye-sight becomes weaker, and because usually reading is boring. But I read this book until I finished—“The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold and other stories”—and the other stories are “Mr. Loveday’s Little Outing” (which I have not yet read, but skipped by accident), “Scott-King’s Modern Europe”, “Love Among the Ruins”, and “The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold”. “Love Among the Runs” begins with this dystopian sentence: “Despite their promises at the last Election, the politicians had not yet changed the climate …”. With that, I read forward avidly. […a couple hours later&hellip] Well, hunger overcame boredom, and I ate something. Now to paint.
I have been working with temperone (rye flour, honey, venetian turpentine or larch sap, linseed oil) and egg-tempera. I did a drawing on canvas paper in India Ink, then rubbed oil on it, then painted on it the next day with Egg-tempera. The results are as I hoped: the oil sticks to the paper, and the egg-tempera sticks to the oil, which is still solidifying. Otherwise, egg-tempera is reluctant to stick to canvas paper. The same will certainly apply to temperone, and it will adhere better to an oily substrate.
I came across several new words in Waugh’s book. Here is one: charabanc—it is a bus, a char (French for cart) with bancs (French for benches).
April 13, 2007
Today I gave the dog-cart to the ***** Humane Society. For lame dogs, I recommend http://www.handicappedpets.com/Articles/bergins/. Rich Bergins is a mechanical engineer specializing in devices for the handicapped, and makes carts for dogs with weak legs. He is very helpful in making necessary adjustments.
I have been doing abstract paintings that are divided into 72 sections, which is the sum of the following. 1 + 1 + 3 + 2 + (5 x (1 + 10 +2). The astute reader will guess what these numbers are used to count.
Last night I did a painting as follows. I mixed cheap hardware store double-boiled linseed oil with chalk (calcium carbonate, precipitated chalk) and painted this onto a canvas board (the type with primed canvas stretched on top of padboard paper). After painting this stuff on, I rubbed it with a rag (then disposed of the rag in a can with water, which is important to prevent spontaneous combustion). Then I used oil paint from the tube to paint my picture (with 72 sections) on to the wet surface. The chalk-oil preparation served several purposes. First, it helped to even out the surface, so the hills and valleys of the canvas would become even. Second, the oil, with the rubbing, completely penetrated the surface, because authorwise, the acrylic priming on canvas boards sometimes rejects oil, which sits in bubbles, and so I prepared the surface for further oil painting. The chalk with the oil made a thick mixture that held brush strokes very well, and at the same time allowed me to do very smooth blending. My intention it to paint on top of this when it dries, and the chalk in the mixture will help this, because it will provide an absorbent ground that will accept oil, egg-tempera, or temperone.
When I was doing the painting, when I was not thinking about the numbers and their signification (which the astute reader will understand), I was thinking about an artist called Tamara de Lempicka. Lempicka is an artist who does very stylistic human figures, and places that do oil-paintings on order will often do replicas of Lempicka. Just now I looked her up and found http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamara_de_Lempicka. I was thinking about her because my underpainting (with the chalk etc), although abstract, had the look of her brush work. But also, she died in 1980, so how can workshops brazenly make copies of her works. Unless she stated this expressly, her works would not be public domain. I do not know how this works. Certainly a general style is not copyrighted, because one artist builds on another, but they actually do duplicates of her painting.
This afternoon I did some quick portraits of people, using some scratchboard. They are posted in the portraits section of my website, along with some portraits in my sketchbook.
April 16, 2007—I posted some completed oil paintings (or that I decided today that they were complete) on page 3 of my gallery, and also one new portrait. And in the evening, I have added 2 more portraits. Earlier today, I did more work on six or seven old oil paintings. Mostly, I put on a glove and rubbed in a layer of cobalt violet so it was thin, even, and transparent, then took rags and removed paint where I wanted highlights. The effect is what is called sfumato. The more times I do this to a painting, the more dreamlike it looks. Of course, the sfumato layers are in different colors. I did a tessellation painting in full color in oils.
April 17, 2007—This morning I did a tessellated painting. I prepared a very thick oil paint with lots of chalk, enabling me to draw in the paint. This afternoon, I did a portrait, which has been added to the portraits page.
April 18, 2007—I did a portrait of Jackie and John, now added to the portraits page. April 19, prepared some canvas boards for painting with chalk mixed with linseed oil. April 20, 2007—added another portrait. April 23, started 2 paintings today, the first was a scene, and I painted it on a canvas that had been prepared with oil, chalk, and pigment, and which had dried. I used my temperone mixture, and mixed my paints with chalk to thicken them. This worked well, except that some parts of the canvas possibly had two much oil, too little chalk, and the paint tended to bead up. I added more linseed oil to the temperone medium. I expect that today those areas which beaded up will be more receptive to the paint. I also started an egg-tempera painting of an old car on a canvas board that had been primed with rabbit-skin glue and pigment. I mixed my egg-tempera with chalk to give it body (the first time I tried this). Now, the rabbit skin glue was still water-soluble, which meant that if I worked the paint too much it would dissolve or detach. Also, with the addition of the chalk, sometimes the paint would crack as it dried. That does not matter, because another layer of paint fills the cracks, and my intention was only to make a solid underpainting. However, there is a lesson to be learned. Rabbit-skin glue alone is not good for priming canvas boards. There must be some oil in the gesso, because when the oil has dried (after about a week) the gesso will not be moved. And if the oil is not excessive, the gesso will be receptive to anything I paint on it. Also, I suspect that I should lightly sand a canvas board or canvas before applying a traditional gesso.
April 24, I am adding an old painting to the gallery, “Music at Dusk”. I think I started on it around 2002 and kept returning to it. Today I was adding details to oil paintings, and I added Canadian Balsam and Linseed Oil to egg. It adheres very well, and it sets up solidly very quickly. Last week I put a photograph of some chipped paint on a lamp-post on my frontpage (photographs and sketches from my daily sketchbooks). Last night I put a photograph of the aftermath of an ice storm. The latter photograph I adjusted a little to bring out details that were hiding in the dark. I admire the photograph work done with the HDR technique (High Dynamic Range) shown at www.stuckincustoms.com.
Some new paintings, oil and whatnot. If I have not mentioned, ordinary paper coated with rabbitskin glue (you can add pigment and chalk) is excellent for oil painting. Oil does not seep through the glue, and it does not disturb the glue. May 3, added a new photo to the front-page, a cement figure in an antique-store window.
June 9, 2007. The main thing this month is this. I used Alkyd (oil-based) primer to coat canvas-paper (which is acrylic primed). I added some chalk to the primer to make it more absorbent. It has worked excellently for egg-tempera and temperone. The paint sticks to this surface. The paint sinks in nicely. And the paper does not warp. Other things. I have added some portraits to the site. I have started going out every day to paint or draw some local scenery. These will be posted on the website at some point. The thing is, when the weather is nice, I do not really like to be stuck in front of the computer more than necessary.
August 27, 2007. Now something for the patient readers, because I have not been posting anything. I have some new reading material posted at the following: hyoobear.blogspot.com
November 15, 2007. Now something else for patient readers, duly noted on the front page: radio3.cbc.ca/bands/dos-caballeros, which is music and other sounds by my brother and Michael McGraw, and myself. I have recently been perusing a long neglected box of books given to me by Melanie who inherited them from her mother. As a result, in recent days I have read Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake. It is a story in verse of the adventures of a King of Scotland who went about his realm in disguise and met a fair maid. Sir Walter Scott and others have supplied all sorts of notes and quotes to accompany the main text, and as a result I found all sorts of things about Scotland, the music, the folklore, the geography, and so forth. I learned about a music form called a pibroch, and other forms, and then searched and found some pibrochs, which I am learning. Then I read, from among my father’s books, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, which contains some of the stories of King Arthur and the round table. I was led by providence to this book. Mother quoted the line “More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of”, and I searched for it, and the Internet told me it was Tennyson, and then that same day, I picked up a small book that had lain on a basement shelf for years, and indeed was somewhat damp and moldy, and lo, it was Tennyson, and I did read that book, and I did rejoice. Among the books of Melanie’s mother’s box, there was Habitant Poems by William Henry Drummond. Mostly he imitates the French Canadian dialect, that is, the way they speak English. It reminds one a bit of the way Stephen Foster imitated the dialect of the blacks in his songs, but I think that Drummond did a better job, because he lived among the habitants as a neighbor. And now I am starting on another book in the pile of books, called Lalla Rookh by Thomas Moore. From the introduction, I discover that by his own admission he was highly regarded, because the publisher gave him 3,000 guineas for the book (in 1816) without even seeing a single verse. I also discovered how such books were used. The book was translated into other languages, including Persian and German. It is a book of verse, and a story concerning the Orient, and the Emperor of Russia read it with others. She apparently “played” the part of the princess, someone else another part, etc. So, books such as that were read aloud by groups of people. It sounds more active a sort of entertainment that television or recorded music. Thomas Moore was an Irish poet and songwriter (1778–1852), and his songs are still sung, such as The Minstrel Boy.
November 24. I finished reading Lalla Rookh, 200 pages of a story in verse. Interesting enough, I found the song “Bendemeer’s Stream” there. It was written by Thomas Moore, who was one of the greatest song-writers of the 19th century. I always thought it was about a place in Ireland or England, but no, it is about a place in Persia. Right now, I am reading “The Golden Legend” by Longfellow. This poem probably contains the answer to the riddle posed by the line “the leading actor hurried by in the costume of a monk”. And I read a short book that was on the shelves here called “The Sanctuaries of Tabgha”, about some things excavated near Capharnaum, possibly near the site of the Sermon on the Mount.
I posted some new pictures today, two pictures illustrating (or “illuminating”) the song “All Along the Watchtower”. Right now it is past midnight, and now Sunday (25th) and I can hear the racoons outside. They were in the attic, and I convinced them to leave and prepared a comfortable place for them outside.
I understand now how Rembrandt got his paint to be so thick and solid. Researchers were baffled, because analysis showed that he simplied used linseed oil like everyone else. Well, my basement studio is very cold now, a few degrees above freezing, and oil paint is very thick under such circumstance. It is like painting with plaster. And I think I read an anecdote about Rembrandt’s cold studio, though memory does play tricks on one.
Work. Today I am translating in the letter “F”, and am in the middle of an article about Philo of Alexandria (“Filon z Aleksandrii” in Polish, if you were wondering). I read some of his works while searching for some specific terms. I learned this from Philo. It was the custom among the Jews of his time to give shelter to any animal that sought it, no matter how small. I wonder, is it still? Related to this is something I read in a National Geographic of 1967 about the Pathan tribesmen of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Incidentally, they claim to be descended from the biblical tribe of Benjamin, and conserve many biblical customs. If a wild boar pursued by hunters takes refuge on their property, they give him all the protection they give to any guest, and guests among them are sacred.
The 28th. Painting. This summer I prepared some canvas paper, to see if I could paint on it with egg tempera. I made very chalky paint or gesso. Some of it was water-based with rabbit skin with linseed oil added in. This is because rabbit skin glue by itself remains water soluble, and it does not adhere to canvas paper because the paper is already coated with a semi-glossy acrylic. The last couple of days, in the time I set aside for painting, I tried it out. The painting medium I used was egg-tempera (egg-yolk) with linseed oil and Canadian balsam thinned with turpentine. I practised copying some Japanese “manga” art. It works like a charm. The paint sinks immediately into the chalky surface and binds with it. The balsam in the paint makes it set right away, even though the linseed oil will take a week to cure.
The work. I am still translating the article about Philo of Alexandria. I spend a lot of time looking up how to create in HTML the particular greek letters. The letters themselves are easy enough. You simply have to know their names. For example you produce “alpha” like this: α, and you produce Alpha “Α” like this: &Α. However, Greek letters can be combined with diacritical marks. There are separate codes for these marks, but at least in the browser I use, there is no way to combine them. But there are numeric codes, all too many codes, which each represent a particular letter combined with a particular diacritical. For example, α with an “oxia” or acute accent is made with this code (which I know by heart) ά—ά.
So here in a list are some of today’s words:
November 30/December 4. I have just finished reading “Arthur Mervyn”, a novel by Charles Brockden Brown, set in the year 1793, against the background of an epidemic of yellow fever in the United States. Which book can be found at: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18508/18508-h/18508-h.htm.
December 5, 2007. I just obtained an electric guitar which is working out nicely. One of my first examples is on the music website, and the piece is called “Ode to a Lady”: