conversation and observation

I can not start the day without a proper cup of black tea, made in a pot. Visiting the delightful and inspiring Tea Appreciation Society yesterday I came across this fantastic site.

Nick Hand has been cycling around the coast of Britain since June in order to raise money for Parkinson's Disease Society. On the way he has been making these amazing short documentaries about artisans and craftspeople he meets: everyone from Billy Bragg and my own favourites, the Fence Collective, to a group of potters in Cley, Norfolk. These wee films are moving and marvelous and I plan to watch them all.

I only heard about Paul Smith 2 days ago, when I found out about him here. I like what he had to say about making things. Nick Hand made a soundslide with him as well: 'conversation and observation and the love of life is far more important than any of the other stuff.'

abc at tea

The picture is from here (though the Archbishop looks more crazed, less furtive, in the original).

David Dark posted the following, from dear Rowan Williams:
Jesus is God’s ‘revelation’ in a decisive sense not because he makes a dimly apprehended God clear to us, but because he challenges and queries an unusually clear sense of God: not because he makes things plainer—on the ‘veil-lifting’ model of revelation—but because he makes things darker.
There is a nice comment thread there as well.

This ties to my post/drawing from September 27th. I think lively faith in Jesus needs to embrace constant challenges to our clear notions of God. This is the opposite of fundamentalism. To paraphrase James Alison further, We worship a God who is Other, not one of the gods.

priest in kavala

One more post for the day. These pictures from artist Cecilia Levy, who spent the last month in Greece, seemed to capture an attentive holiness in the priest - I wanted to draw him and took up the new pens for a quick sketch. I am happy when I am drawing and these posts helped counter today's prevailing bad mood in the midst of ongoing (formal) unemployment.

more colour

I bought some new pens - a highlight of my week.

This was the first drawing, which turned out okay.


The week started slowly. Today was not a good day on the jobsearch front. Going to seek out some inspiration for the rest of the week.

other people's thoughts inform my own

Starting out the week discouraged on the job front. And this drawing did not come together in the way that I wanted. The portrait of Jesus is stolen from Si Smith. His drawings based on Jesus's story are amazing.

the kindness of (near) strangers

Two nicenesses from two artist acquaintances in the past two weeks.

I really like Michael Arthur's. work. He is a friend of friends and showed me his studio last week. He has two excellent op-eds in the New York Times: one on how he came to do what he does, and one on summer in the city. He also performs with Balthrop, Alabama - their site has some great examples of his work. Here's a video he made for Mike Viola:



And I found Austin Kleon's blog while looking for further examples of Joann Sfar's work. I asked Austin for advice on pens and he was kind enough to post in response.

I bought some pens at the weekend. Examples of work with new pens in a couple of posts.

steve/waylon

Steve Earle's hard compassion at the end of The Wire's fourth season blew me away. There is something in every episode of the show that blows me away.

wonky landscape

This drawing is not quite the way the scene really is (for a start, the boat is not larger than the house) but it was a nice reflective moment in the middle of the weekend.

I managed to watch The English Surgeon, which I posted about a couple of months ago, online. Very moving and worth a look if you have the time.

in the long-legged house

A play based on some of Mr. Berry's poems has just gone up in Louisville.

This, from the Omnivore's Dilemma, was very striking:
Take the issue of scale. I could sell a whole lot more chickens and eggs than I do. The're my most profitable items, and the market is telling me to produce more of them. Operating under the industrial paradigm, I could boost production however much I wanted - just buy more chicks and more feed, crank up that machine. But in a biological system you can never do just one thing, and I couldn't add any more chickens without messing with something else. - Joel Salatin.

Seems as though this has a wider application. I am thinking a lot about not just doing one thing and the need for the different things I take in (from food to music, writing, poetry, news, conversation, etc.) to feed one another.

This was all somehow reinforced seeing Howard Fishman and band perform selections from Dylan's Basement Tapes this evening - a really great show, which reminded me of David Dark quoting Dylan on Johnny Cash - Dylan saw 10,000 years of history falling from him. The whole of our gospel-laden history is laid out before us.

fry's delight

I'm having a run of drawings that actually look like their subjects. Hooray!