A rainbow surrounding our home

Yesterday we had an amazingly clear rainbow. And it happened at just the right time of day (4:20pm) that the sun was in just the right place that I was able to step back from the house and frame it entirely within the rainbow. Here it is, straight off the phone, with absolutely no retouching:

These are dark, dark time. But at the risk of sounding like Movie-Sam trying to encourage Movie-Frodo with greetings-card sentiments that Tolkien would never, ever have written, it does help every now and then to see something like this, almost supernaturally beautiful.

Three recent meals

On Monday last week, I made pizza from scratch for the whole family: but because it’s hard to separate a mass of dough out into five equal parts, I made enough for six pizzas, and saved the last dough ball for the next day. This is my lunch last Tuesday:

That’s a home-made dough of course, topped with a very simple tomato sauce, mozzarella, thinly sliced chorizo and jalapenos.

Paint the whole world with a rainbow

Back on 12 December last year, we had a spectacular rainbow out behind the house — so clear it felt you could reach out and touch it. Here’s a photo of it that I took on my phone, completely unedited:

That’s all: just something beautiful for these dark times.

Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the statues?!

Ian Malcolm and Dar Williams on modern art

I stumbled across this old favourite moment from Jurassic Park:

“If I may. I’ll tell you the problem with the art you’ve made here. It didn’t require any discipline to attain it.”

Etch-a-Sketch ruined castle

For some reason, in the autumn of 2010 I decided to draw a ruined castle on an Etch-a-Sketch. I just stumbled across a photo I took of the drawing, and quite liked it, so here it is.

A Thursday in December

Starring Gandalf the Grey.

It’s probably best thought of as a sound collage, and one that I find strangely relaxing.

A treble clef in the wisteria

Late last year, I spotted a treble clef, growing naturally, in the wisteria on the front of our house:

Three short videos

In this short video installation, “Plug on floor”, the viewer is thrust into a conceptual space replete with an implicit socialist/capitalist dialectic conveyed through subsemiotic narrative. The artists speaks of our shared need to contextualise truth-as-a-totality into a postconceptual discourse.

In this second of a short series of video installations, “Extension Lead”, the viewer is invited to consider the penetrative/explorative nature of industrialisation, it distortative effect on gender-performant patriarchialist objectivism, and the pervasive influence of constructivist/deconstructivist nationalism in the age of Trump.

The third in this series of short videos is a post-feminist feminist statement, reversing the traditional gender roles in a neoconstructive discourse where a female is anointed with the heirophantic/patriarchal role of technology tutor. Is this a subversion of expectation? The very fact that it can be perceived as such is a narrative of futility, negating cultural discourse in favour of entrenched presemanticist/postsemiotic theory.

 

Artwork from 1980

I wonder, does anyone recognise this?

My mum found it recently, when she was throwing out some old stuff. It came with a note carrying my address and saying that I’d drawn it when I was 12. I am pretty sure we sent it to 2000 AD (hence the note with the return address) and I think they published it in Tharg‘s Nerve Centre. But, stupidly, I don’t have a copy of the issue that included it.