It only takes a minute

Coming back to the computer after a day of gallivanting in town, I found it had closed itself down, as it sometimes does, and had also changed the wallpaper on the desktop, as it should but sometimes doesn't. 

During the latest incident of "it's going so slow, I'd better back up immediately before it dies altogether" my son had helpfully got rid of all the things I don't need: "They slow it down and make it work harder, Mum, and when did you last use them?" All too true, but when do we ever make time for computer housekeeping?

But this is not about that - what sparked this little story is seeing the photo that happened to appear from the many possibilities in my files.

Lovely drawing, very striking - but as a photograph, it's dreadful. There are the reflections, which in situ you can't do much about ... what you can do something about is the "composition" - get that square thing squarely into the frame! It just takes a moment to tilt the camera or smartphone.

This is where "post-processing" is so useful. The editing in the camera or phone might not be able to straighten up that picture, but Photoshop and probably other editing programs can.

I've had to do this often, and use keystrokes. Control-A selects the entire photo - you see dotted lines around it. Control-T is "transform" and puts boxes (handles) at the corners and middles that you can drag out into the background till the lines of the picture frame are parallel with the edges of the photo. Click to accept, then use the Crop tool to get rid of the unwanted background.

Now that my screengrab of the photo was starting to look good, I wanted to get rid of the recycle-bin icon. With the Clone Stamp you select a "good" spot to use as a replacement, and overlay that onto the unwanted bit - it works like an eraser -

Getting your "wallpaper" from you photo files is rather frustrating. You have no clue about the picture - when or where was it taken, what does it show? Usually you do remember why you took it though - in this case, because I struggle with depicting rocks (among other things!) and wanted to look at how this artist (name lost, of course) did it.

Should have taken a moment to get the framing right ... saves a bit of work further down the line.

Treats

What we're having for dessert at the moment, on sunny summer evenings. Yum!

Poetry Thursday - Thule, the period of cosmography

Thule, the period of cosmographie,
Doth vaunt of Hecla whose sulphureous fire
Doth melt the frozen clime and thaw the sky;
Trinacrian Etna’s flames ascend not higher.
These things seem wondrous, yet more wondrous I,
Whose heart with fear doth freeze, with love doth fry.

The Andalusian merchant, that returns
Laden with cochineal and china dishes
Reports in Spain how strangely Fogo burns
Amidst an ocean full of flying fishes.
These things seem wondrous, yet more wondrous I,
Whose heart with fear doth freeze, with love doth fry.

(Anonymous; found in Poems of Science, which has been on my shelves since 1984, when I met one of the authors)

The words sound so wonderful, even without knowing what they mean (Trinacrian Etna??). Attempting to finally "understand" this poem, which I've sort of known about since taking an interest in madrigals back in the balmy 1970s, I found this succinct explanation on the Paris Review site:

This anonymous love lyric about the polar regions was set to a madrigal by the composer Thomas Weelkes in 1600. Four hundred years ago, poets had the luxury of looking at the horizon and marveling at what might lie beyond it. We’ve since lost that hopeful curiosity about the external world. The natural wonder of volcanic eruption is now classified as a natural disaster, and the once romantic Andalusian merchant is now seen as a capitalist pig. Having run out of physical space, exploration has turned inward. Thule is now the period of an interior cosmography. We go there not as heroes, but as a collection of anonymous users. 

The point of the poem—and I think it endures—is that the commonplace grime and dirt of our own feelings is still more powerful and exciting than the Thule of either cosmography.

But more useful was Ruth Padel's expose of the poem (here), which looks at its musical setting and explains some of the wording - why "period", for example ... it came to mean "farthest limit", and Thule came to mean anywhere in the frozen north.

In 1597 Hecla, a volcano in Iceland, erupted for more than six months. Fogo is another volcano, in the Cape Verde islands, off Senegal ... or might it be Tierra del Fuego?

Padel writes:

What this madrigal breathed was a right to the elsewhere, claimed by a culture where everyone was grabbing at places and artefacts that had been written about but not seen. An over-the-rainbow period (“period” in the temporal sense), of making the foreign your own imaginatively and commercially; when blue dishes and scarlet dye were suddenly chromatic in the visual sense; when fabulousness did not stay on the page, or far-off in Thule, but came alive in English words and music.

Many versions of the madrigal are on youtube; try this one, it has a comparatively good sound quality ... but even so the words are difficult to make out!

Walking the Capital Ring - section 1

We started at Woolwich Foot Tunnel and made our way to Falconwood to get the train back home. (This is South London ... whereas North London is "home".) The 78-mile route has been divided into 15 section. This one has some uphill bits, and some panoramic views. And lots of lovely woods. And a castle. But it's short on the lunch and coffee stops - and crossing the main roads is - even with traffic lights, but without pedestrian indicators - not for the faint of heart or slow of foot!

Woolwich is downriver, and there's a little ferry 

Old signs

Into the parks - to find meadow flowers

And a red-bodied dragonfly

 Lots of information boards, in all the parks -

 Lunch on a bench in the shade ... so good to sit down! -

Finally we come to Severndroog Castle, one of London's hidden treasures -

At last, coffee and cake!!

 Built in 1748, it's a monument by a loyal wife to her husband, who fought and/or quelled piracy on the Malabar Coast. Apparently the view from the roof is great, but it was closed today.

From the path you got some idea of the vista -

 And in the woods you might find ... what ... art? mementos? wierdnesses? ... on the trees -

 and trees with interesting growth habits -

 "It never rains but it pours" - a short walk to another cafe ...

After which, through yet more lovely woods to the station and the end of Section 1.

Drawing Tuesday - Wellcome Collection

Last Tuesday was a very rainy morning so I sat in the cafe for a while to dry off, and got out the pieces of fresh chalk I'd collected from the cliffs at Saltdean during my cat-sitting weekend. While wrapping them in tissue paper  so they wouldn't make a mess in people's bags, I started drawing some of them from various angles, using an indigo inktense pencil -

 and experimenting with using the chalk to smudge (and intensify) the colour ... which led to trying other types of pencil.

 Eventually I went into the Electricity exhibition and mussed about with this'n'that -

The film by Bill Morrison was great - an animation of the physical basis of electric current, and its distribution. See scenes from it here. "In a commissioned film, American artist and filmmaker Bill Morrison used material from the Electricity Council archive at MSI (the Museum of Science and Industry) in Manchester to create a visual journey that explores the production and distribution of electricity and its profound impact on our daily lives. "

Michelle had based one of her drawings on the film - and the other, the sprite, came from a vintage label -

 Jo was intrigued by this early electric motor, the Barlow's wheel (1822; read how it works here) -

 Mags found Edison's first lightbulb -

 Janet K put a lot of nails into this Nkisi figure -

The "round" fish on Najlaa's ancient plate is electric -

 Carol limited herself to using one colour -

 Judith was upstairs drawing the marvellous staircase -

 ... and here it is on its lower level (with an Antony Gormley sculpture nearby)

 Sue found a striking head -

 Extracurricular activities

Janet K has been drawing the nasturtiums on her patio

Carol has been examining and capturing irises

  Coincidentally...

Great minds think alike...

And again, a visual coincidence 

... which gave us another chance to see Mags' "electric" sketchbook

My first quilt

It's had another wash, that first quilt, and is hanging up in the bathroom to dry -

It's quite a thin quilt, made with polyester wadding and calico backing in 1973 or perhaps it was finished in 1974. The quilting is "in the ditch". It's all it needs.

The pattern, if there can be said to be a quilt pattern, is  just squares, 6" squares I think, laid out so that the greenish bits were in the middle and the navy-ish bits round the edge.

Most of the fabric came from garments acquired for mere pence at jumble sales (ah the days of jumble sales!). The geometric fabric was "a gift from the gods of garbage" - I found it on the street in a "nice" part of Cambridge, and to the horror of my friend, picked it up and took it home. Washed it of course, and here it still is.

On consideration, the bright blue patches in the edge section are a little bit wrong, in terms of the other colours. Or maybe they're the subtle spark that brings the rest to life?

My son takes the quilt to the park when he meets up with friends. "Seats six," he says; "usually there isn't that much room on a blanket."

I'm so happy that this humble object, made with energy and passion before that child was born or even conceived, is still getting good use.

Still life

Inside and outside

Waiting

A glimpse of the RA Summer Show

The textiles (there were others, too) -

Miranda Argyle

Scarlett Bowman (top); Zak Ove (doilies and hardware, below)

What the camera saw -

David Remfry (disconcerting effect of detached shadow)

Mali Morris

Basil Beattie's "stairs"

Large woodcut by Jim Dine

My favourites so far -

Monoprint by Jenny Morse

Tom Cartmell

Collaged photographs by Ian McKeever

Mick Moon [and an example of how not to photograph something]

[can't remember who the artist of this large drawing is, sorry]

And there were some important works that I forgot to photograph - well done Ramona and Michelle!