Thursday, 5 August 2010
What is your most annoying thing ?
For me it is anything to do with the council. Look at what happened only yesterday. I went to the town just to post a package at the post office, parked my car in the only space available there, walked to the parking metre to insert a coin and it swallowed it without giving me a parking ticket. I was in such a hurry that I hadn't noticed that this particular car park machine wants to have your last three letters of your car registration. Like if I'm likely to know it by memory, so I had to camel a long way back to where I had managed to find a tiny space to park my car to read whatever those letters are.. whilst a lady behind me had to patiently wait until I came back with my car registration letters. Anyway, I push the correct buttons for each of the three letters, inserted the 50 pence coin and nothing ! No ticket. I was incensed the machine had swallowed a pound by now without producing the blessed car park ticket. So.. I thought I would encourage the machine by giving it a good karate kick, then another one but the machine wouldn't budge ! Theoretically I had already paid for two hours of parking without having my ticket, so this meant that if the car-park inspector came and see my car didn't display the proof of payment he could slap me with a fine ! Also I would be damned if more of my money would go into this hungry cash-cow machine. When I looked back, I already had a crowd of people around me. So rather than find another machine, I walked out hoping I wouldn't get a parking ticket in the meantime whilst I went to the post office to post my parcel. So this meant I had to do everything in a great hurry to avoid a parking fine. Another annoying thing that the council has done is that they have narrowed the white lines which separate each car, so you can park your car within the white lines but these are so narrow, that there is no room to open the doors ! So needless to say I had to squizze out of my bearly opened door without my handbag and with great difficulty I had to yanked it out of the car... all this I had to do, whilst minding not to scratch the next door car, parked beside mine. It is very lucky that I'm not a fat woman and I was able to squeeze out of a narrow 50 cm space gap. The council does this, in order to be able to squeeze in more cars like sardines in a can. A canned car park. Phew !
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
.jpg)
.jpg)
17 comments:
Maria, I love the latest painting. What is the domed building?
Yes, councils are experts in ripoffs. When they're not corrupt, they're incompetent.
I think all car park spaces should be wide enough to accommodate the mayors' limousines!
Robert, the domed building is the church of Santa Maria de la Salute. We stayed around the corner from this view, just across the church in the Hotel Europa. Our room had the largest balcony we had ever had and from it we could see below the gondolans and the vaporetos. The walls of the hotel were made of different colours of marble and whilst we stayed there, three little birds came in and as unbelievable as it sounds, one of them hopped on my hand to get the crumbs of the biscuit I was having on my tea. We arrived in a water Taxi and the hotel had a long wooden dock where our suitcase and ourselves disembarked. It really is strange to stay in a hotel that its in the water. I have no idea how the electricity works without getting electrocuted. For me, Venice is a real mystery apart from being enchanting.
It certainly is a very strange place. I have seen some maps of Italy, where the town is actually blue, i.e. in the sea, which I suppose is what it is.
Those birds were delightful. They had evolved a strategy of getting fed by the tourists. I remember once seeing some footage of a pigeon who took the tube. He would hop on at one station and hop off at the next.
As an artist, when you look at Venice do you say "Ah, Venice's light is different to the light of other places." I ask because St Ives is apparently famous among artists for the special quality of its light. I was wondering how many other places have their own distinctive light.
Yes Robert, Venice is in a Lagoon and it does have a very special light. Their sunsets can be sometimes pink or orange and the world is reflected like a mirror in the lagoon, so there is an enchantment there.. where during the day and the nights you do not hear any cars, only the murmur of the water and the echo of people's voices and you have the feeling of being transported back in time immemorial, specially when sometimes you can hear the clip-clop of a horse passing by in the still of the night. Many English poets and writers went to live to Venice. Like George Elliot.
Another place that is famous for its light is the Southern part of Spain and a place in Mexico called: San Miguel Allende; in here, the shadows are very sharp and defined.
Ha! I never thought of horses in Venice. But then, why not?
I suppose this business of light is why you get artists' colonies - when they all move to a particular place, it's for a reason.
Yes, that's right. In England and Wales you hardly see any shadows for the most part, the landscapes are like if seen in a smokey haze, but there are days when its clear. I don't know if my brighter colours are because I was brought up in the tropics during my early life that I can go past that smokey haze and paint brighter colours or why.. Some say its because of my upbeat outlook in life. I'm aware that sometimes it depends on how you feel that you can detect brighter colours that are not there or if you are down in spirits duller colours. I do have a picture where the background its a wall of stones and so half of them seem cheerier in colour than the other half. I was thirteen years old when I painted it and sometimes I think I painted better then, than I do now. Its a still life, I will put it up for you to see it.
Well, you certainly painted better then than I do now!
Yes, let's see it, Maria.
The good news is that the buyer of my pastel painting has asked me if he can promote my work. I have said yes. All of the pastel paintings of these series are sold out, he bought the very last one. Two of them sold even before they were hung on the wall, but I can go outdoors and do a new series of pastel paintings.
That's great news, Maria. And the latest painting is truly remarkable. How on earth did you get the glasses to look like that at that age?
A lot of observation and patience. There is a difference between looking at something and observing it. I would contemplate the scene for 10 minutes before I put a brush-stroke on the canvas, all the time working out what kind of blue or brown I would apply that matched the scene perfectly. Then I would proceed to mix the colours in the palette until I found that I got the right tone and carefully paint it. Sometimes I would close my eyes to see how well I visualize the scene in my mind. The more you remember it in the eye of your mind the more accurate the result will be.
Maria, do you find that you can imagine a face or a flower or a building perfectly, in other words that it's just as though you were looking at a photograph of it, or even the real thing in front of you? I find that I can imagine sounds pretty accurately, especially if it's music, but when I come to imagine a face there always seems a certain vagueness in my image.
Yes, yes I can Robert. When I was young, as I went to the living-room a strange man had entered it, I saw him take my father's shoes, unnoticed by the man I quickly went to my parent's bedroom to alert them but my sister was reading them something and I was told to be quiet and they didn't let me speak. Later on, when my father was asking for his shoes. I told him what had happened. I drew the man's face and muscular body; he had his leg platered and had a mustache so the police located him in a building site around the corner of our house, when I saw him, he was still wearing the same clothes I had seen him the day he entered our house and felt pity for him so I refused to point out my finger at him as the culprit. Obviously he was very poor and my father could very well afford to buy another pair of shoes. I think you mentioned in another thread that music sometimes comes to you out of nowhere.. maybe you could write it Robert.
Maria, I think you'd be good at those game shows that ask for good memory. There used to be shows where they would arrange about 20 completely miscellaneous objects on a tea tray, let people look at them for 30 seconds, then ask them how many they remember. Or show them a clip of film and then ask them questions about it e.g. "What was the man in the shop carrying under his arm?" And of course the Generation Game had a prize conveyor belt, where the contestants would have to remember the prizes. If it was me doing it, I would try to remember them as a series of words in my head, as a series of sounds spoken in my head. But you would remember the prizes as images.
Yes, I occasionally wake up with a tune in my head, a good tune I seem never to have heard before. But I can never be sure I'm not subconsciously remembering something I heard long ago, and besides, I cannot write musical notation so I always end up forgetting the tune.
I think most people could write tunes, but most of the tunes will be pretty humdrum, the kind of thing one's heard before. Then there is a scale which leads to interesting tunes, then to the better kinds of popular music like the Beatles, and ultimately to the very top, to the likes of, say, Tchaikovsky.
Robert I heard an expert who can memorise many items in the same order that are passed before hi eyes, saying that the secret to remember everything is to make a story that links one item after the other and you are more likely to remember a story from beginning to end, than just random items passed in front of your eyes. I really think that just about anyone can remember anything if you look at a scene long enough. For instance.. take a simple object like a bottle, and ask yourself: has it got a long or a short neck? is it slender or fat? is it short or long? then you draw a simple cross measuring the length and width of the bottle until you got it right and draw parallel lines along-side the cross to build your bottle. It is really as simple as that. Try it.
Ha! My bottle would look like nothing on earth. I made an egg rack once in woodwork at school. The trouble was, any eggs placed in the rack could only have come from hens reared at Sellafield.
Robert, maybe you could record the songs that come to your mind that you have never heard before, this way you can always play it back if you forget it.
Also, on the weekend I heard a phenomenal musician this was music like I have never heard before and people were buying his CD's It had several instruments and I bought one. He was busking and also selling these CD's like hot-cakes and he also gave me a leaflet to order more CD's which I will, since the music was simply awesome!
Maria, yes I could buy a machine and record the tunes.
What was the name of the person selling the CDs?
The other night I was lying there and just letting my mind wander, and I imagined someone speaking a foreign language, one I couldn't understand and didn't know. It wasn't French, German or Latin. What surprised me was how fluent it was, no pauses or anything. Yet it wasn't gobbledegook like "oba-woba-flim-flam," and if I sat down now and tried to imagine someone speaking a foreign language, there would be breaks and pauses while my conscious mind invented it.
Post a Comment