Some over-enthusiast videographer seems to have applied a blur effect to my life. I am really in need of a good weekend-long sit-down and an endless cup of camomile tea. Weekends have been frantically busy since the wedding, what with the painting of the parents' house, the courses, the house, the people. The people!
Yesterday was the final day of the Intaglio course. Intaglio is the most weep-inducingly frustrating and yet, wonderfully promising and surprising technique I have learned thus far, in my long and illustrious. I worked a series of three of these, with variations:
One had some geese migrating over it in a NJ kind of way, another some colour, another, a deeper colour. The idea was to show some progression of time through them - a narrative sequence - so I made a few in a series. I had every kind of small annoying fly in the ointment from oops! dropped the paper in the carefully rolled acetate to oops! printed on the wrong side of the paper, (the one with my initials on it). It was maddening and at the same time, tantalizing, because you can see how good the results could be, potentially, if you could just leap deftly over the hurdles, while calculating prime numbers and holding a raw egg in your mouth, without breaking it.
Our teacher was encouraging and seemed to think I could go ahead with it, that it might suit my drawing. I don't know though. Prints - they can be beautiful, evocative and perfect, to say nothing of highly saleable, but, (see above), that way madness lies. Still A and I have inquired and will probably go back for another course in the new year. (Hmm. Typepad keeps correcting my Hibernian English spelling. We are not wrong Typepad! neither better nor worse but merely different. I wonder if there are other Irish folks using it. I would have to guess yes. Unique as I like to think of myself as being (if not very deft in the sentence forming dept) not even I can believe I am the only one in the country to have stumbled upon it.)
Today I got up at 6.58am and lept on my bike to hare over to mind Spike while Brother went to a rugby match in Toulouse. (He does this as casually as if it was a trip to Bray to go on the dodgems. Am I (and Kevin from Grand Designs) the only ones that worry at all about the effects of flying on global warming?) Spike was sleeping in his parents' bed, breathing noisily through his congested nose and flailing about like a horse with colic. When he got up his hair was pouffed up at the back like Russell Brand's. He was a bit tired after the party last night, but rallied gamely when Gan came to visit. He can say so many things now, it's charming. For the moment. Soon it'll be time to tell him to sit down and shut up.*
eg of nephew genius:
Where's Gan gone?
and on his flash cards, which show opposites, he says BROKEN and FIXED instead of BROKEN and WHOLE.
Which is very sweet.
Oh, there's so much to know, in this human life.
My college colleague E and I went to look at bikes. The fear (that we share, ehem) is that with time we might actually merge into the same person. We call this horrible vision of our possible enjoined future FREAKY EM-BIE. The funny thing is, the more we try to avoid it, the worse it becomes and the more we spout the same nonsense at the same time.
A nice man in an Aladdin's cave/clausotrophobe's nightmare of a bike shop seems to be willing to help us find a suitable frame and bits. In truth he will probably be happy to relieve himself of the alarmingly high piles of bikes, dead and alive, that are lining his workshop to the point where you have to edge by them, nervously, afraid you might touch one and cause them to come crashing down on top of you.
Getting up at 6.58 really makes for a long day. Feels like 7 now, for instance.
I enjoyed the cycle across town under the lightening sky. The streets were so quiet.
Ma says she and Da need to be put down (lookit Typepad, Da is a word. So is lookit, come to that). They are in worse shape than Smokey, the Oldest Horse in the World.
Da has had (in the last 2 weeks)
1. A dodgy knee
2. A hiatus hernia
3. Suspected enlarged prostate
Ma brings up the rear with:
Her usual complaints and:
1. A back sprain that turned out to be a kidney infection
Poor things. I mean to get down and light up their lives with my presence asap. (ha ha) Not really, but I really should go down and tend to Smokey, TOHitW. It's just been terribly busy, and I have to present my work (yet) again to the group on Tuesday. Which means I must clarify my thoughts to the degree where they can be translated into actual words.
Spike made chocolates for us. They are call-call-calling me, or that might be the cinnamon buns Ma made for Johnny. We suddenly are adrift on a sea of baked goods.
I must away. More Irish spelled drivel later, I promise.
*(Not really. I'll leave that to his parents)