This is no way to start the New Year

Today, the terrible scenes I have seen in Gaza can only be described as hell on earth as the enormous black plummes of smoke willowed upwards, it was nothing less than 9/11 visiting us all over again, as countess of bodies, mostly children laid lifeless on the streets and innocent people panicked not knowing where to run whilst Israel plummeted bomb after bomb over their heads, buildings literally cut in half. I ask, in what kind of world we are living when this is alowed to happen ? Why our government and the United States have kept mute whilst all this is going on ? No condemnation from our leaders ? when there has been widespread condemnation from ordinary people who have taken to the streets to protest ? There have been demostrations in London including by Jewish organizations in front of the Israeli Embassy, in Jordan, Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, Spain, Australia, Jakarta etc. The Jordanian people have even asked their king to severe ties with Israel, such has been the outrage felt all around the world.

The Israli state has only been founded 60 years ago, in the heart of Palestine and over its few years of existance, it has only created brutal and deadly confrontations with its neighbours like a cancer in the Middle East. The whole experiment, it is a failed experiment that cannot ever lead to permanent peace in the area but just chaos, death, brutality, aggression and more violence.

Happy New Year!

Not everything is doom and gloom, whilst there are a lot of businesses failing and going bankrupt, there are others who are having an unexpected sales boom. One of these, is the owner of the Istambul shoe company who produced the famous shoes which served as a missile to the Iraqi journalist Muntazar al-Zaidi who threw his shoes to President Bush. The shoe company who made his shoes, has been swamped with orders from across the world, so the owner of the company has had to hire 100 more workers to produce 300,000 extra shoe orders to meet the unexpected demand, model 271, which is four times more than their annual shoe sale. Orders have come mainly from the U.S. and Great Britain and from neighbouring Muslim countries. 120,000 pairs have been ordered from Iraq. A sharp rise in orders has been recorded in Syria, Egypt and Iran where the main shoe federation has offered to provide al-Zaidi and his family with a lifetime supply of shoes.Well, it is just a matter of time before someone produces a stilletto shoe, with a target seeking missile, to have the same sale phenomenom. Have a Happy New Year everyone !

Why do we eat turkey on the big day ?

Hi everyone, talking about quizzes and for a little bit of entertaining on these festive days, does anyone know why the turkey is eaten for Christmas ? When did the Christmas tree become popular ? Why is Christmas celebrated on the 25th of December ? Why are mince pies eaten at Christmas time ? Who is the real Father Christmas ? Any guesses anyone ?

To announce Douglas Baxter has joined the blog.

Hi Dougie ! Dear friend, it is great news to announce your coming to this blog. As the saying says... when one door shuts... 100 doors will open ! The way I have announced it, it is as though I am announcing the coming of the Messiah ! I am very happy to have you here and hear your unique points of view which are always vivid, funny and colourful. You were just too damn happy and carefree for that other unmentionable blasted site, where laughter was frawn upon and dissent was punishable with expulsion. Although in my particular case, it had to do with posting these flower pictures you see here. As soon as I got a compliment these, naturally had to go and quite suddenly afterwards Stephen Ryder announced that it would be Ripper related pictures even though as you quite rightly point out, there are non-Ripper related pictures before and after my flower pictures were deleted. Then I expressed the opinion that Ally had deleted them because she was jealous of the attention I was getting. Then Stephen Ryder wrote me a Private Message accusing me of liabelling his lover and told me he as closing my account for two weeks. I wrote him back a private message telling him where he could put his site and also his lover and it came as no surprise to me that shortly after that, my vanishment had been made permanent. Then I thought if I am in a stupid site where posting flowers at the behest of other is punishable with a two week expulsion, I really don't want to be there and open up a blog where I can publish all the pictures I want, plus talk about Art and life instead of murders the whole time. The reason why I stayed there was because from time to time they mention a distant relative of mine, Sir Bernard Spilsbury who was the precursor of Forensic Medicine. His discoveries about how you can tell the difference when a body found inside a swimming pool has been a drowning or whether the body had suffered an extrangulation its what makes the difference between a murder or an accident.

Cubism

Yes, indeed Cubism is considered the final liberation of painting from accepted traditional values. Its strange sense of space, which rejects any attempt to create an illusion of the real world and yes, several views of a single figure are combined in one image, that sort of thing. But I still fail to understand what you mean by " democratic " since art on the whole, is democratic in the sense that everyone can see it and appreciate it or hate it and unlike a book which needs to be translated if its written in Chinese, a painting has a direct message to the viewer.

Hi Robert, I have never seen Dr. Terrors House of Horrors. But all figurative paintings have an abstract element to them. In every painting you will discover either a circle, a rectangle, a cube, a pentagon or any other geometric figure to bring the picture together. That is called composition. For e.g. if you see here, as an experiment the first picture with half closed eyes, you will discover that I have use circles to depict the top of the trees, and are arranged in a triangle to bring the eyes, towards the middle of the picture. The mountains, in its simplest round shapes are also enclosing the sheep in the middle. Anyone who wants to attempt to do a painting, has to think in those basic abstract forms first, before anything else can be developed, it is, if you like, the skeleton of any painting.

Stephen Powell

There is another friend who wrote to me this morning and he has informed me that he is still busy preparing the draft for his book. I wish him well in his endevours.

Australian Surrealist painters

Victoria, one of my favourite Australian painters is Sir Sidney Nolan, I do not know if you know about The Ern Malley Hoax where two young writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart, believing much contemporary poetry valueless, mixed up a set of poems from arbitrarily selected quotations and references. They submitted these under the pseudonym of ' Erm Malley ' to the literary magazine: Angry Penguins, which published them with a cover by Sir Sidney Nolan. The hoaxers then confessed, but the poems were defended by many for their surreal imagery and suggestive powers.

Victoria thanks for the information and description about the painter Brett Whitely Baci and for your kind comments about my bucolic autumn scene with sheep, unfortunately the sheep in the foreground did not come out completely, as the picture was too big for this format. This painting in itself, its not too large, but it was too big for the scanner. So it was a matter of putting it with just the background or just the foreground, it is an awful compromise that has chopped up my original and complete composition. I gave this painting as a present to my aunt Dora and my aunt Norma liked it so much, that she asked me to paint the exact same scene for her living room too, so now there are two paintings of the same scene !

If someone is colour blind, they cannot see the mellow yellow colours in this painting. I devised this picture in a way that when the sun hits it, it literally glows all around the walls of the painting, it was a phenomenom that I still do not quite understand how I achieved this. One morning I came to work to my studio, and as I went up the stairs, I noticed this unusual mellow light bathing all the walls of the studio, as I arrived to see what it was, to my surprise, this painting upon being illuminated by the rays of the sun, it shone in a way that the mellow colours irradiated the light all around the pink walls as well. So I asked Peter to come up to see this, he could not believe it and neither could I. Now my aunt Dora has positioned her painting where the morning sun shines over it so that she can enjoy watching this mellow effect whilst she has her breakfast.

That is pretty irracional Robert, but I suppose in a panic situation it is possible not to think straight and some people can't quite have the presence of mind to realise the gravity of their predicament. Monty Python is too gruesome to find it remotely funny for me, but some people do find it funny.

Victoria, I tried to find Brett Whitely Baci and found just a quote in Italian, maybe there is more about him, I gather his paintings are on this surrealist vein we are talking about.