Life Is What You Make It | Nick Verron

The lovely and inspiring Nick Verron has recently discovered the exhilaration of playing with images. As Janet Weight Reed is often saying, art in all its forms is a way through life that brings comfort, joy and understanding, whether it’s your living or not. It is something few governments have ever grasped.

I just wanted to put a quick post together, to give you a sample of the different photography related stuff I’m playing with. To ensure some variation, and to make sure I’m not closing any doors, I’m dabbling in everything right from digital art through to wannabe photography.

I’ve noticed many parallels in understanding between life and photography/art. I’ll share with you a photo/picture, then gabble away a bit about it…

Source: Life Is What You Make It | Nick Verron

James Gillray’s missing leg | The Printshop Window

James Gillray was a famously prolific artist who produced well over a thousand engraved satires in his lifetime. In later years, when his mental and physical health were visibly deteriorating, George Cruikshank would regard the speed and ferocity with which Gillray worked with something approaching a sense of horror: “Sometimes he would at once etch a subject on the prepared copper plate… unable even to submit to the process of drawing it upon paper… he worked furiously, without stopping to remove the burr thrown up by the [engraving tool]; consequently his fingers often bled from being cut by it”. When not actively engaged in the business of making caricatures, Gillray would draw and paint constantly, his body becoming so accustomed to the habit even when he was at rest, his hand would “pulsate electrically… moving as if in the act of painting”. To observers like the young Cruikshank, it must have seemed as…

Source: James Gillray’s missing leg | The Printshop Window

Victorian Occultism and the Art of Synesthesia | The Public Domain Review

I have a mild form of synaesthesia – I’m spelling it the English way — and see days of the week and months of the year in coloured shapes. My fellow blogging synaesthetes include Linda from Country Woman Paints and Benjamin from Expressions of My Life. I dedicate this reblog from The Public Domain Review to the two of you!

Originally posted The Public Domain Review

Victorian Occultism and the Art of Synesthesia

Grounded in the theory that ideas, emotions, and even events, can manifest as visible auras, Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater’s Thought-Forms (1901) is an odd and intriguing work. Benjamin Breen explores these “synesthetic” abstractions and asks to what extent they, and the Victorian mysticism of which they were born, influenced the Modernist movement that flourished in the following decades.

“I have always considered myself a voice of what I believe to be a greater renaissance — the revolt of the soul against the intellect — now beginning in the world,” wrote William Butler Yeats to his mentor, the Irish nationalist John O’Leary, in 1892. Yeats believed that magic was central not only to his art, but to a dawning epoch when spirituality and technology would march together toward an uncertain future.

Thought-Forms, a strange, beguiling, frequently pretentious, utterly original book first published in 1901, emerged from this ferment of late-Victorian mysticism. It was written by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, erstwhile members of the London Theosophical Society alongside Yeats, and it features a stunning…

via Victorian Occultism and the Art of Synesthesia | The Public Domain Review

First Night Design | Me, Paul Klee, and Scleroderma

Originally posted on First Night Design.

It’s a very strange feeling when you discover that an artist you admire had the same disabling illness as you have, especially when it’s relatively rare, not to mention impossible to describe succinctly. Paul Klee — though it wasn’t diagnosed until ten years after his death in 1940 — had Scleroderma, an autoimmune condition that can be utterly debilitating. I have wanted to write about Scleroderma and its affect on my life and work for some time but I never thought I would be doing so with reference to Paul Klee!

In essence, Scleroderma in all its forms is a chronic circulatory and connective tissue disorder in which the body’s defences attack its own organs and tissues. The Raynaud’s & Scleroderma Association website describes it thus:

‘Scleroderma is an uncommon disease of the immune system, blood vessels and connective tissue. In this condition the skin, usually…

via First Night Design | Me, Paul Klee, and Scleroderma | First Night Design.

What are YOU looking at?

Off-topic:
Christopher John Ball hits the nail on the head about bullying of the disabled. As I have commented on the original post, my disability is not as obvious so that while I have not experienced some of the extreme circumstances he details, I do get that low-level, unwanted, attention which wears me down. Makes you ashamed to be a human being when there are fellow humans behaving like this! My condition is only part of who I am but it nevertheless informs most things I do and many of my ideas about life, justice and equality. The Coalition has done irreparable damage to our lives with their wholesale demonisation, not to mention their benefit sanctions. and I’m sick of an unelected government that not only lacks compassion but is hell-bent on enriching ‘them’ at the expense of ‘us’. It is criminal. It has to stop.

Christopher John Ball

“Asylums with doors open wide,
Where people had paid to see inside,
For entertainment they watch his body twist,
Behind his eyes he says, ‘I still exist.’” – Atrocity Exhibition – Joy Division

It is sad to say that many of us who have a disability or impairment will be able to recall experiences of having been bullied, picked on, singled out and abused, both verbally and physically, as we go about our lives. Would it be fair to say that we often take this abuse as being a ‘normal’ part of our daily routine, experiences that we have perhaps come to expect and, in the eyes of many as I will explain, something we should ‘put up’ with?

The ‘incident’ that inspired this article occurred on Saturday 14th March 2015. My partner and I were waiting to catch a train to Euston from Watford High Street Overground Station…

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First Night Design | The Next Morning | New Year’s Day

Still trying to recover from the festivities? Here are some suggestions.

On a side note, all is not rosy in the garden since Mr FND’s computer keeps shutting down involuntarily every few minutes. Hey ho!

First Night Design

[Photo credit: Wikimedia]

Oh, oh, the shenanigans of the night before that ruin the morning after, whether it’s the bitch of a hangover or the sickening memory of what we did or said!  Most of us have been there.  My worst morning-after was a New Year’s Eve during which I drank a home-made punch that I swear had been spiked with something untoward. So untoward that I couldn’t move the following morning, let alone search for a hangover cure.

Most hangover cures fail.  The only one that works is not to drink too much in the first place, or not at all; but that wouldn’t be much fun, would it!

Curing the Holiday Hangover | Dr Mandy Silverman

As Dr. Mandy Silverman says on her blog, one should  eat a bloody good meal in advance and drink one glass of water to every alcoholic drink to counter the dehydration. Ever…

View original post 206 more words

First Night Design | The Next Morning | New Year’s Day

[Photo credit: Wikimedia]

Oh, oh, the shenanigans of the night before that ruin the morning after, whether it’s the bitch of a hangover or the sickening memory of what we did or said!  Most of us have been there.  My worst morning-after was a New Year’s Eve during which I drank a home-made punch that I swear had been spiked with something untoward. So untoward that I couldn’t move the following morning, let alone search for a hangover cure.

Most hangover cures fail.  The only one that works is not to drink too much in the first place, or not at all; but that wouldn’t be much fun, would it!

Curing the Holiday Hangover | Dr Mandy Silverman

As Dr. Mandy Silverman says on her blog, one should  eat a bloody good meal in advance and drink one glass of water to every alcoholic drink to counter the dehydration. Ever since my punch debacle, I have tried to stick to this sound advice. What I didn’t know until I read her post today is that ‘the liver can only process one drink per hour, so do not exceed this!’ Very useful to know but not so easy to adhere to in a party situation.

Eggs Benedict [Photo credit: Wikimedia]

‘Eggs Benedict?,’ I hear you cry.  Yes, Eggs Benedict. Apart from being one of my favourite dishes, I have found it very beneficial when I’m trying to recover from a hangover.  I have no scientific evidence that it’s remotely helpful but it’s my tuppenny-ha’penny-worth for that point in the day when you suddenly know that you have to eat or die!

Eggs Benedict with creamy orange sauce (nigella.com)
Traditional Eggs Benedict (foodnetwork.com)
Gordon Ramsey’s Eggs Benedict (bbcgoodfood.com)

Bird Song New Year Card

Take care and keep laughing!

Related articles

• Tips prevent and help a New Year’s hangover (pix11.com)
• We Found the Best Hangover-Free Drinks for Celebrating the New Year (healthland.time.com)
• Your Complete Guide to the Science of Hangovers (blogs.smithsonianmag.com)
• How to survive the morning after (iol.co.za)
• Hangover Hacks You Can Hang Your Hat On. (zedie.wordpress.com)
• Stock up Asparagus and Other Hangover Foods Before New Year’s Eve (lifehacker.com)

Dishfunctional Designs: The Truth About Wealth & Fortune

via Dishfunctional Designs: The Truth About Wealth & Fortune.

The Lady in the Big Hat Invites You…

The Lady in the Big Hat #1 Personalized Announcements by FirstNightDesign

I am delighted to tell you that I have just sold one hundred invitations of  The Lady in the Big Hat.

I often used to draw but over the years, it had became increasingly difficult  because of the way  Limited Cutaneous Systemic Sclerosis (LcSSc) affects dexterity.  I’m certainly not suggesting I was an extraordinarily talented illustrator but I could get by and I enjoyed it enormously.

A couple of years ago I discovered LiveBrush software from Adobe and realised I could start drawing once more and without the associated pain.  I was over the moon.  The problem is that my first attempt was The Lady in the Big Hat and it felt like an utter fluke, that I would never be able to create anything comparable.

I have let this stupid lack of confidence stop me in my tracks when I should simply dismiss it with a snap of the fingers – a painful activity! — and just keep ‘doing’ it, keep drawing, no matter what.

Saying is one thing and doing it another.  But this weekend I’m going to give myself a good talking to, lift up my LiveBrush ‘pen’ or ‘pencil’ and go for it.  Life is too short.  Carpe Diem!

Here’s wishing you all a joyous and productive March.

Take care and keep laughing!

 

*February is Raynaud’s Awareness Month

Related articles

• LiveBrush
• Raynaud’s & Scleroderma Association (RSA)
• RSA on Facebook
• RSA on Twitter
• Autoimmune Skin Disorders