Monday miscellany

Pattern-making with the colour dictionary
(while using it to find colours for a painting)

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"We live in a time when we are inundated by images: pictures, language, videos, stories, music, bodies.

"99% of those images are made for one reason: to get you to buy something. We artists are responsible for that tiny sliver of images that can be made for every other possible reason: cultural, spiritual, political, emotional.

"In an age of image overload, this is a sacred responsibility."

from Making Your Life as an Artist by Andrew Simonet - available as a free pdf download here.

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(via)

The "top 20" animal sculptures in London  don't include my favourite, the horse by Dame Elizabeth Frink on Piccadilly. (Perhaps the fact that it has a rider takes it out of the category "animal sculpture"?) Pigeons foul it, passers-by and coffee-drinkers ignore it ... but it gazes out as though something requiring attention has just occurred.

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I'm fascinated by the search terms that lead people to my blog. "Milk in my mind" - ?? - had to check that out - and found an image I recognised, from a post called ... Milk on my mind ... 

Google's selection of images for that search term was rather dire - what better test of my theory that "there's always something interesting to be found" than to find that "something"? So I idly kept scrolling till this came up - wow -

It turns out to be granite (from here) - "Art! Made for you by millions of years of life!"

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Drat, missed it

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It's been 30 years since smoking was banned in London Underground trains (9 July 1984). I well remember the nastiness of having to go into a smoking carriage when the non-smoking carriages were unsqueezable-into. And smoking was banned on platforms in 1985. But it took till the King's Cross fire of 18 November 1987, and the death of 31 people and life-changing injury to many others, for people to take the smoking ban seriously.

1970s photo by Bob Mazzer

A smoking ban on buses followed - 1991? - it used to be that the top deck held the smokers (and you're still expected to take your dog up there). It took a while for some people to understand "no smoking" and my early-teenage son worried that I'd get beaten up by someone "dying for a cigarette" after telling them off.

Mainline trains became totally smoke-free in 2005.

And now when someone comes inside from a smoke break - smelling like the Underground used to - it's such a nostalgic thing ... (not).