Merry Christmas everybody and I wish you peace in your lives.  I was lucky enough to get some new technology for Christmas which will help me to make better art.  Thanks to my husband Gordon I now have a new drawing tablet and all sorts of you tube videos to help me to make better art.  My grandfather would have approved he loved electronics of any sort and was going to be an electronic engineer but insisted he wanted to become a cartoonist.
 He worked for the Daily Record drawing cartoons and writing funny stories for many years and was know as "Arty Clarkey" I say this because in my early years I was encouraged by him to draw to create and have fun..So now I have all this technology and hope to learn to use it quickly then I can pass on my knowledge.

Here is a picture I did today. It is a space landscape and is for my husband who likes sci fi.    However although I have not yet visited any planets - my imagination has been influenced with the many science fiction films around .One could say my art is inspired from the things around me as I wander from place to place just as Timo Jokela describes in his book.    www.environmentalart.net/.../wanderer_in_the_landscape.doc

Today we went on a Christmas walk -   One of the best presents for me, today was to encounter a large line of freight trains with some very inspiring images on - thanks to the graffiti artists -between the Ayr and Glasgow train stations. So my context for learning and growing as an artist just now is to keep wandering, and exploring and look at images in different ways. I aim to keep recording the most inspirational images by camera and to make more images using real and imaginary images and the new technology available..

Hello everyone  I hope that you are well.  The most difficult thing about doing anything creative is waiting for approval from others. So one has to get over this early on if you want to continue to create what you enjoy doing.  Then we have the age old problem of following your instinct and making what you like and enjoy or y  to pander to what you think others might like.. It makes sense to be able to know what a client wants and try to make it so- and then you get paid.  I suppose I am only surmising as I have never worked and got paid as an artist yet.. This has helped me to develop my own interests and style and make me quite happy to do so..
 The advice given to me in my teens when I said I wanted to be an artist was "make sure you have something to fall back on " and I took that advice and do teaching in the Primary schools and really enjoy this and am able to do art as well.  I even find - that I am the traveller/wanderer discussed   by Timo a wonderful artist who does ice sculptures and community art - we watched some great lectures from him recently.
  As I travel around the country to the schools I see the countryside in different times of the year and in changing seasons and different times of the day. This is very interesting and it inspires me.. The backdrop for our world changes every day.
I am very lucky to be working in a school just now in which there are some great teachers who use creativity in their teaching every day and I will be taking some pictures of their classrooms -with their permission- just to show that creativity can be used well in the classroom. It's the wonderful displays they do which really change the environment of the school like a changing landscape and this keeps the pupils focussed and motivated to learn.

As we go home at night or as we travel early in the morning we see wonderful sights which I would normally miss and so I do feel blessed to be like a wanderer in this wonderful land we inhabit. My hope is that I can keep on developing my technical skills to enable me to reflect what interests me. I think one has to be quite headstrong to be an artist and maybe this skill is one which can be transferred into other areas of life. !!

This image is based on the wonderful lights and colours we see in windows at Christmas time.

This morning was beautiful as the sky was clear and the grass was frosty.  The stars were still there and I knew that Gordon could have named them all.  I think I recognised the North star and was amazed at the different sizes and shapes- and the difference in brightness of the stars.  The clouds seemed to make the scene almost musical the way they danced around in the sky.
Well yesterday I was lucky enough to be working in a school for a day when the Christmas Fayre was on.  I felt so Christmassy at the end of the day and went home with a magic Santa's key, a beautiful penguin card a small geranium and a decorated candle..It was a successful day for the school and they raised loads of money for their school funds.  Christmas crafts were everywhere.  The boards on the wall were all decorated with lovely Christmas scenes. I saw some lovely Winter scene paintings which were being painted with a snow like glittery substance which really enhanced the pictures.  The pictures were mounted onto shiny foil backing which really enhanced the pictures.  I have seen some wonderful examples of creativity in the school I am at just now. I work there for three days a week and then do supply on the other days and get to experience different approaches to the curriculum.
In  the Infant department where I do the three days - there so many creative teachers and  I asked if I could photograph their rooms as they are set up in amazing ways. It makes me glad to be able to experience the success of these teachers in creating a successful learning atmosphere. It was the igloo which really impressed me made out of empty milk bottles and stuck together with a glue gun.. Pictures will follow next week.
My class will be visiting the P 1 class with the igloo in as we had an impromptu lesson about Mr Jack Frost last week. We discussed how we felt when Jack Frost touched our fingers and our toes and I was able to use the active inspire programme on the large interactive board to draw what we thought Mr Frost looked like.  The pupils said he would have spikey hair and pointy shoes. Then I asked the pupils to draw his wife and family and what their house would look like - hence the reference to an igloo.  I will also photograph the lovely pictures the pupils made..

Starry Starry Night

I am typing this on my Google Nexus 7. Gordon bought me it just because he thought I might like it!

The quote of the week is 'Contemporary art reflects contemporary issues' Diarmuid McAuliffe.

Today when I went into the class that I was assigned to teach,there were pictures of famous artists. These iincluded Gustav Klimpt and Van Gogh. I wondered if their art reflected their contemporary issues.

Last night I heard another interesting statement. Diarmuid had asked secondary school art teachers to only teach using modern female artists, and this significantly changed the output of the classes.

Then I realised that I was a female artist ( who was not dead) and I felt very empowered.

So when I saw the art on the wall, mass produced, popularised and far from its time and context, and the meaning cheapened, and emotion diluted and lost in the churn of modern culture, and the life of the artist just... lost.

So the dilemma is - do we keep our artistic antenna tuned into the past, or do we encourage useful creativity in everyday life to enhance the lives of others?

Or maybe art will continue to eat itself and gestate a new generation of backward looking forward thinking creatives?

I think we should celebrate the creation of art as a way to uplift the artist and the beholder. Rather than art being a medium to an end.

Children in a class imitating Starry Night, crayons on paper.

Or children drawing their own art - what do I see at night?

Mountain Dew

This morning it was very cold and when I went a walk with the dogs and surveyed my environment.  I was struck by a bright coloured bottle- ( at the moment I am interested in bright neon colours).  This one was fluorescent and very sturdy.  The walks I go on are made more interesting because of the rubbish which is thrown down especially by the Secondary school pupils from a nearby school. This bottle was much more interesting visually  to me today than an empty mars bar wrapper!

It appealed to me because of its bright bold colour and the label partially remaining - Mountain Dew -!    Advertising and design work together to sell a product and I am surprised at the sort of  items which sell well.  The neon bottles of Mountain Dew were selling well as I found three empty bottles in the space of three minutes..

I gathered them, hoping to photograph them or make a collage later.  Meanwhile I will make a visual picture using either the Art rage programme of the Paint package.  I was watching films about the Art group called K.O.S. -  kids of survival - a group of young people who developed an artistic movement and who originated in the Bronx in America.  These artists like text and language inspires them. I find text interesting and Mountain Dew seems to be an absurd name for a drink which is encased in a sturdy plastic bottle - very far removed from a nature The name is all wrong and does not reflect the truth I thought cynically.

I am grateful to be able to use images to put across a point and I hope that you the beholder understand what I am trying to say !!! Its a statement reflecting how wasteful we have become.

The work of Warhol sprang to mind there because he would use an everyday image and make it into something more interesting. The beauty of using the computer is that I can make different images in minutes... 

Hello everyone it is nice to be able to blog about the art in my life and how it can influence for the better.  I have worked in three different schools this  week and gone from one extreme to the other i.e. one day in Nursery and another in P7.  In Nursery art is always on the go. There is always a craft table for creating collages or making seasonal crafts.  I always find some good ideas at Nursery level which can be adapted to the rest of the school.  For example the children were sprinkling glitter onto tea light candles which had some glue on them to reinforce their Diwali theme.
 Diwali as you know is in November and Hindu people celebrate with lots of bright lights in their houses. The home corner had a little kitchen in it with Diwali cards on display and a real shari if you wanted to try it on.  The display table had all sorts of statues and other artifacts all to do with Diwali.  The art of Display is very important at any stage and Nursery teachers all seem to be experts at this.  I think we should have lessons on display as student teachers however we learn as we go.
The environment we create as teachers does promote learning and I know that the display of work is very important and we must do it with good taste.
I am just so aware of the sea of red and white which is in all the big shops already - to entice people to buy  for Christmas.

All festivals have a huge artistic element in them it seems to me or am I just more aware of it now after studying art again.!! I just love glitter and glue, red and white and Christmas! I am looking forward to producing lots of Christmas crafts with my class this year.

Hello again and here are some pictures which were inspired by subjects which are of concern to me- this week anyway! (i.e.the strange weather we are having).  I am using words and colour in an attempt to express my observations of life and am experimenting with colour and words in an attempt to create an image which is pleasing to the eye and gets across a message.  I am definitely influenced by the work of Banksy as he is brings humour into art and Carla Black as I love the colours she uses.

I also saw some lovely images in Glasgow at night which I will be working on this week.

Happy Halloween

During the October Holidays instead of jetting off to somewhere warm - I enjoyed a lovely holiday at home!!!

One of my favourite pastimes is taking the dogs a walk around the golf course while keeping an eye open for unusual images.  One day I found a cloud of mist which had left everything it touched laced in dew.  The sun was shining brightly and I could see some lovely images which I captured on my digital camera.  

I then processed these images using lightroom on the computer and was glad of the images I made and feel that the images are ones which inspire and interest me.

  I would use the image above to do with Halloween, the next image could be used to create a t-shirt or a repeat pattern on material.  So so long as you have a good image then you can manipulate this image using post photo production  You can crop the image change the colour and hue.  You can even enhance it by improving the exposure. This other spider web  image below, once downloaded does not look as good as the one above because it is meant for a different purpose. The image above could be used on Facebook as the profile picture.

Here are some more images all have a different purpose. See if you can guess in what way they could be used commercially !

The graffetti images could be made into canvas paintings and the middle picture of the cobweb?

It could be used as wallpaper on a computer screen or made into a picture for your front room. That's my thoughts anyway!!

Bye for now!

Here are some other images which I manipulated using the Lightroom programme. Thanks to my husband who taught me how to use and export the images.

Here is an image of Ailsa Craig.  One of the well known landmarks found on the West Coast of Ayrshire.    One sunny day I saw the tiny cloud on  top - it just looked perfect and I wanted to record this.  On another day the sky was white and rainy and there was a partial rainbow beside the Craig.  I am enjoying using different techniques to do my art.  Ideally I should have a camera with me at all times.  However I try to enhance the image using my artistic licence.!

Like the A/r/tographers I like to depict phenomena and the above picture is an example of that - based on reality.  One day while off to visit some friends in the country, I saw a heart shaped cloud almost above the friends' house. I used the heart shaped cloud  and added a huge puddle in a field to make this  image.  I hope you like the images. Please leave a comment  if you do..

The language of art is very far reaching and that is why art historians are taken along to interpret ancient paintings. In these paintings we can learn so much about another culture.  It is the language of art which fascinates me.. What can be said in one "motive" can be very interesting.

 When I was bored at school I would doodle on my jotters and that did make me feel better and my jotters were improved by being covered in images of far way places - visited only in my dreams.  Reality was cold and grey at times and boring..

So it is with the trains I am seeing at the other end of the golf course where we walk the dogs.  They are ugly rusty and huge and a blot on the landscape.. However during their journey from Glasgow to Ayr, some creative people have dared to make these huge monstrosities look better.. 

I was looking out for the latest graffetti on these local coal trucks and was amazed at the latest version and how much more interesting the  trucks looked after their make over.. The graffiti artist's canvas was a metal grey one and the palette  dark green, and their brush a paint can.

 The word WEANS was elegantly sprayed on several times in repeat pattern which looked quite beautiful from a distance.  There was a good use of the arrows and dots in the writing which pleased me as I am beginning to see a use of artistic genre here. 

The significance of the word WEANS as a tag only  makes me think of some groups of bored youths hiding near the railway sidings - fed up with life and almost crying out for attention. Art therapy indeed! Yes both the beholder of the work and the creator should benefit.. I can only hope my teacher was uplifted and not annoyed by my works of art on my boring jotters.

Maxine Greene suggests that art must come from without and from within and that helps to make a person whole.. I agree..

Here are some of the images I got from the trains.

However I could not do them justice as the original images were more like a pattern one would see on a pair of curtains until you looked closer and realised it was graffiti.

 

The Vitech children's video retails for about £40 and is an amazing piece of technology.  It enables you to take videos and stills and has a selection of frames to put the pictures in.  Our son just loves playing about with this and he is learning about technology and is downloading his videos for his blog etc and is really motivated to take more pictures.
I was looking out for trains tonight to take pictures of real graffiti  but I could not find any and so had to make up my own.  I used Artrage because it has a metallic background and metallic paint facility and so I started with a grey silver background and added in what I thought looked like lettering.  The image of a v came into mind in the second image.  It then became an arrow and reminded me of the images I made of the tops of pepper pots.

So here they are!!

I have to add that I like trains, as they have a family connection.  My great grandfather on my mother's side was a railway policeman and my own dear father worked on the railways as a signal man for years before he became a transport executive for Strathclyde.  We always got free train travel which was great fun.  So I have a strong affinity with trains!

                                        

Here is my attempt at graffeti

I recently had an interesting conversation with our son who has just started his third year at Secondary School.
I asked him why he had dropped art as a subject and he told me that it was too boring..
"Why was it boring son," I asked dreading the answer..and remembering with gladness that our oldest son had followed an artistic career probably because of the interesting and relevant lessons taught to him by an artist primary specialist who constantly used art to enhance the school curriculum.
"Well mum we did boring stuff like drawing ellipses from a pile of cans and this exercise lasted for six weeks"..

Why don't we teach art regularly in schools ? From experience  it seems to be now resigned to a discrete subject along with handwriting!!!i.e art and handwriting only have a small and insignificant place in the curriculum - not!!
"Mum if they showed us how to draw a dragon on the computer then I would have certainly taken art again,"
he said. Showing me speed draw. It seems to me that if you want to motivate pupils then you have to give them interesting work to do.  My great example of this was the English teacher who always gave us wonderful short stories to read and scintillation poetry with hidden meanings. Such a teacher helps the pupil to think outside of the box and brings reality and feelings closer together.

What interests me just now is the graffiti I see locally which changes every day because the art is on the sides of the trains which park near to where we take the dogs a walk. I like the colours and the different text which is used.  I feel that my technical skills on the computer will help me to make some interesting images over the next few weeks.. Its certainly more inspiring than looking at a pile of empty cans.

A Victorian Balloon chair.They are very well made and have lasted about a hundred years.  I was going to throw them out due to a lack of space but instead I have decided to throw away or recycle the Stressless recliner we have had for a few years.

I really like the design of these balloon chairs and am now looking for more furniture of this era because I know that they were made to last.

Old and new - Great Britain, a wonderful country full of tradition and innovation.  I was thinking along those lines while sitting at a red light and waiting.  Looking around for something interesting to pass the time I saw the old theatre in front of me in a different light.  It had been upgraded to a night club and was now closed and boarded up.  However I remember with fondness being taken there by my father to watch "Half a sixpence" when it was still a cinema.

The art deco building was painted black. However the signs of its former beauty were still there.  It was interesting to note how  the designers had place a neon squiggle underneath a panel of original art deco decoration.  This seemed to be an example of how designers should be sensitive but were not as it looks a bit crude.  This building is now in my opinion an eyesore.

Across the bridge are two lovely buildings which have been painted pink and are about to be renovated to make the town of Ayr look more welcoming.  So I have decided that people are aware of what makes an eyesore and they have to use their understanding of art and design to measure up what is an eyesore and what is not. This seems to be more evidence to answer the question - should art and design be an important part of our lives?

Well these are images of the same building. They both look out of place - the building could be
renovated and made into an arts centre! However it is in danger of being demolished and made into a shopping area. Sad but true!

When I am out doing gardening I find inspiration in the plants around me. Here are some images I made using Artrage.  The good thing about using this type of computer package is that you can change the background colours easily and add in extra ideas.

Here are some of my ideas using my favourite colours to depict my favourite themes using the computer package called Paint. It is great fun to create images quickly and it means an artist could try out an idea and colour schemes without having to find the exact pigmentation in an oil paint.  I remember my tutor advising me that the red I needed to paint skin tones well, was called crimson not rose red. So if you get mixed up with your prussian blues and rose reds  This form of art means one can indulge their ideas and mix colours online without having to leave the office to buy paint!

We are surrounded with beauty.  Hundreds of years ago people would have maybe noticed the cycles of nature more than they do now.  People are more preoccupied it seems with who is going to win X-Factor than noticing a new moon or raving about the delicate colour of a flower or moth. It is the artist's job then to show people the beauty around them.  The artist's dilemma is to make money from their art and to have an income an artist will usually have to do art work that others want i.e graphics work on the X Factor!

This year I intend to buy some lino cutting equipment and work some of my computer sketches into that medium. Its good to learn and grow in new ways.  Hundreds of years ago artists would use wood blocks to make their art with and this contrasts with the way we make art nowadays using the camera and the computer.  Thanks to my computer literate husband who enables me to understand the technology.

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Yesterday was a lovely morning and I took the opportunity to walk the dogs before anyone else was awake. I am so glad I did because I saw a beautiful butterfly.  It was a lovely purple colour and was so delicate and light and the colour was so intense on the top and underneath were some beige spots.  These images are recorded above in a sketch form because  I would not be able to remember the colours if I had not recorded these earlier.  This seems to be my online sketch book now and I am glad that I can share it with you.  I can see that these sketches could be combined together and made into something bigger and better.

One morning on the way to work I caught an interesting glimpse of how a village might look in a story book and painted this image on artrage at home.  I especially liked the cloud formation which God had produced at the time and using an abstraction of line I made this sketch.  It is the kind of image I will go back to in the Summer Hols!!! and go into in more detail. I am finding that the best images to work with is one that interests you and makes one more likely to keep on working it until it looks right.
On the other hand if art is a therapy- then I take an image and then try to make an image which helps to extricate the desire for chocolate or fancy cakes and by putting the image onto the page something happens to stop the need for that particular item.

The reason I am saying this is that I have about five boxes of chocolates in the house from the class I was teaching this year and two bottles of rose which I wont drink at all.  So watch this space as I try to extricate the need for chocolate at every meal in the next few days not onto paper but onto a computer screen.

Hello I am back again !  It is a holiday I have more time to think of the images I would like to create and so I do the other essential things in my life and allow myself some creative time.  This really rejuvenates  me and helps to get rid of negative stuff.  The image of bubbles keeps floating into my mind and kind of reflects how we are all interlocked in some way and how fragile life can be.  It also reflects how predictable life is i.e. if I was a bubble I would know that my life would go pop one day.  Many people wonder about why they are here and I am glad I found some of the answers as to why we are here through my faith which is the Mormon faith.

Happy Jubilations to every one as we celebrate the reign of our Queen.

I am fed up of seeing red white and blue everywhere - even the cupcakes have red white and blue. Today when I saw our son blowing bubbles some rainbow colours emerged and cheered me up.  We have also had some wonderful sunsets during the last few weeks which is very inspiring.  I also love the rainbows which are associated with the Olympics.   There is the huge amounts of bunting everywhere symbolising where the torch is being carried in a town near to you. Celebrations of any kind always seem to have bright colours and graphics and even sculptures i.e those mascots !!!  I feel a bit overwhelmed with it all and will be glad when its over.  The art used to portray these big events this Summer has not been innovative but show the importance we as a society place on visual images and symbols.. In fact we would be lost without all the bunting and rainbows this year.  I hope it has cheered up your world.  God Bless the Queen !!

Art can be many things to many people. This month for me it is therapy. Its a long story and begins with my husband using his hypnotherapy on me by kindly fitting a hypnotic gastric mind deep into my subconcious mind. It is working and I am eating less and feeling better. Tonight I was taking a cup of tea to him and the thought of a nice blackcurrant and apple pie drifted past. So I heated one in the oven and was tempted to eat one myself.On looking at the calorie content I stopped - 236 and that would be gained in one minute. I actually refused it and ate some fruit instead. That was a breakthrough for me to refuse food like that. Then I had an arty moment as I looked at this sworn enemy - food - I saw why it looked attractive the colours and ther was a small design on the pie crust and I created in my mind the picture of the pie and the words" Better to observe than to conserve as fat." and that is my new motto. Around the house there was a pretty pink packet of chewy sweets with a picture of real fruit on the packet. Then again I managed to refuse and eat some savoury seed mix instead...

What has this to do with art?? If I can replace my desire to overeat with a different interest in food i.e. to bring out the beauty - weird - in it then that might help others to look upon art which is of an ice lolly rather than to feel they have to eat one all the time. They might feel positive without having to eat the rubbish. I would also like to warn people of the dangers of eating too much just because I know how tempting it is.

Well anyway I really enjoyed using text colour and a message with this image...and will do one of a balckcurrant pie next. I particularly liked the colours in the ice lolly.

Life does funny things sometimes and this month was tough. We had a close relative pass away suddenly and I had lots of work to do at school. I enjoy work and cant complain. One of the off spins of work is that I have to travel to get there.. My little red car and I go through country roads which have a beautiful backdrop to them. I try to record the images and one morning after waiting at a red traffic light was amazed to count twelve layers of hills and trees all with different tones of green and grey to them. I began to think outside of the box and decided to use these layers as a starting point upon which to build my colour schemes. I get bored with green and grey artistically speaking and wanted to use the lovely bright colours we see in nature and on cakes and sweets..

.It was Mothers day this month and I found myself face to face with some delicate pink and white cakes in a baker shop as our son was waiting to collect a hot sausage roll. This gave me time to take in the colours  which attract people to buy . Without realising it they are using their artistic senses to make a purchase. Maybe that is why I love shopping. When you are surrounded by bright colours especially shops like Lush and any Bakers shop then I am happy. Anyway here are some of the images I recorded in March..
The weather was amazing and in the morning the countryside looked wonderful. There was a slight dew because of the heat which made the scene look like Italy or somewhere. In my  mind I thought I could use the colours I like and impose them onto the lines I like to get an abstract based on reality.

The name day glo sprang to mind and seemed to work ok for me as it is a representation of the wonderful day.