via Radimus
Author: Paul Greer
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This is my variable collection of things I’ve read, seen and heard on that internet.
The weather’s turned (see above) so we have gone straight to autumn here in the UK but it does mean we get to have fires and other autumn delights.
Most of this post is automated so it doesn’t take long to assemblt once I have bookmarked things.
Hope it’s of use.
Spring trip to Berlin.
aka: Intermittently Regular #365 Sketch Project Update 172-182
It’s been a while so I am all out of sorts with drawings and order etc.
This is a batch from our Spring trip to Berlin. I have some more of these and I will post them in due course as some of them were scribbled on site and need a little bit of finishing off.
There’s some good advice here on drawing animals by Aaron Blaise, which could be applied to drawing from life of any kind. Mainly:
- Draw from Life
- Do your research before you go out.
- Bring the right supplies and be prepared.
- Observe first draw later.
- Keep it loose and make quick observations.
- Adjust revise your proportions as you go.
- Take lots of pictures and build your personal reference library.
You should definitely read the whole post here.
Anyways, back to Berlin:
During out stay we were fortunate enough to visit the Rudolf Belling exhibition at the Hamberger Bahnhof museum. I was relatively unfamiliar with his work before this but we all really enjoyes seeing his work.
This from Wikipedia:
At the very beginning of the 20th century Rudolf Belling’s name was something like a battlecry. The composer of the “Dreiklang” (triad) evoked frequent and hefty discussions. He was the first, who took up again thoughts of the famous Italian sculptor Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1570), who, at his time, stated, that a sculpture should show several good views. These were the current assumptions at the turn of the century. However they foreshadow an indication of sculpture being three-dimensional.
Rudolf Belling amplified: a sculpture should show only good views. And so he became an opponent to one of the German head scientists of art in Berlin, Adolf von Hildebrandt, who, in his book, The problem of Form in Sculpture (1903) said: “Sculpture should be comprehensible – and should never force the observer to go round it”. Rudolf Belling disproved the current theories with his works.
His theories of space and form convinced even critics like Carl Einstein and Paul Westheim, and influenced generations of sculptors after him. It is just this point which isn’t evident enough today.
I hope to make a more comprehensive post about his work in the future.
“What was the comics scene like in Argentina…”
“..in this period in the 1950s and early ’60s? You were there with all these people I’ve already mentioned along with Oscar Zàrate and so many others. From reading about it, it feels like this was a really creative and dynamic time.”
– “Yes, it was a paradise. There were different languages, backgrounds, cultural viewpoints that were circulating around and trading funny and/or tragic stories with each other. The stories mixed together fluidly, spontaneously, through films, historietas, literature, and radio. There, reality and imaginative fiction and other fantastical stories came together to produce an intimate mix that, it seems to me, encouraged us greatly. We lived near, and in, the wide open spaces of the Argentine pampa lowlands, something that needed us to fill it with stories. I and others believed that everything that we read, watched, and listened to was happening to us, was happening there. Parallel realities leapt out from the pages and the screens into our surroundings, into our souls. Argentina tried, but did not fully succeed, in making immigrants forget their pasts. And Buenos Aires was infused with a cosmopolitan atmosphere; we were and we could be, anywhere. Calé, Arlt, Ferro, Borges, Solano López, Hudson, Dickens, Bradbury, Monicelli, Bergman, Bioy Casares, Oesterheld, Breccia, Pratt, Roume, Chandler – they all spoke to us of Buenos Aires, of Argentina, and of the world that surrounded us from the pampa to Irkutsk, being everywhere all at once. I suppose it was the same in New York. I imagine it that way as well, feverish.”
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We’ve been away and I have been keeping of the internet to a degree (it always catches up with you though) so I have drawings and things all backed up and out of sequence.
This still works thought, the assembly is automatic from my bookmarking and music listening so it just takes a bit of finessing and it’s ready to go.
This is working for me now in a way that Tumblr used to.
The image is of the railway line at Collumpton Services where we stopped on the way back from Cornwall.
Be warned there’s a lot of politics this time but it’s been difficult to avoid.
Some things have to be said.
Book review: “Rabbit, Run” by John Updike.
A really intense, gruelling book about a pretty loathsome wretch. Horrible thing is there’s a billion Rabbits in the actual world. Ahead of its time in many ways. This is my first Updike. His writing is profound. But yeah. Relentless.
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There’s building work occurring next door, they’ve dug a deep hole which we were hoping might be for a swimming pool but is probably just a basement.
Here’s this weeks big dup of links, hastily assembled. I’m keeping record of where I’ve been on the net. That’s my excuse this week.
On Anxiety and Practice.
This article, shared recently by an internet friend, outlines three methods of coping with anxiety that closely align with my procedures for increasing artistic practice.
They are:
1. Do it badly
““Doing it badly”, without worrying about how it’s going to turn out, will not only make it much easier to begin, but you’ll also find that you’re completing tasks much more quickly than before. “
2. Wait to worry
“If something went wrong and you feel compelled to worry (because you think you screwed up), don’t do this immediately. Instead, postpone your worry – set aside 10 minutes each day during which you can worry about anything. If you do this, you’ll find that you won’t perceive the situation which triggered the initial anxiety to be as bothersome or worrisome when you come back to it later. And our thoughts actually decay very quickly if we don’t feed them with energy.”
3. Find a purpose in life by helping others.
“Being connected to people has regularly been shown to be one of the most potent buffers against poor mental health. The neurologist Viktor Frankl wrote: ‘For people who think there’s nothing to live for, nothing more to expect from life … the question is getting these people to realise that life is still expecting something from them.’”
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Here’s a round up of links and culture from the last week. As ever I’m always debating whether I should share links and finds one by one like a Tumblr or just put them all in one post in a more of a newsletter type format, like this, often coming to the conclusion that this way is less annoying for the reader, in that it’s more easy to ignore in one go.
I want to blog more. This is me blogging more.
The above moving image was auto-generated for me by Google Photos.
It begins after the break.
Paul Greer 