:: home : bio : blog : art
My copy of Alexej Von Jawlensky "Girl with Red Ribbon", oil, 2024 (detail)
November
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
         

Contact


 

Archives

Recent Posts

Tue, 03 Nov 2020
Late Autumn
# 10:43 in ./general

At the moment, it's raining. It does this a lot in Scotland. This is late autumn if I'm being optimistic but probably fairer to say winter now. With a week of rain and gales stripping the trees much barer of their leaves, it's starting to look like winter again. It's been such a great year that people are already starting to look forward to 2022.

My oil painting energy diminished somewhat over summer, although I did a few and then some larger paintings. Having seen a bad trough of motivation hit a couple of months ago, I managed to pull things together a bit and complete a picture I'm very happy with. I'm about to finish another. It feels like a bit of a slog just now; it's not only writers that get a block. They come and go though, like the gales.

One thing I have discovered this year is that I can easily listen to a podcast whilst painting and not be distracted. I've a lot of podcasts downloaded from the BBC (mostly), including plays, dramas and book readings. These are things I've grabbed over the years but put aside for a "rainy day". Luckily, there have been quite a few rainy days this year.

Some of the things I've listened to include :

  • MR James stories, some read by Michael Hordern. I love these classic ghost stories.
  • William Gibson's Neuromancer and Burning Chrome. BBC dramatisations, done well.
  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. A BBC dramatisation of the book. I read it years ago but it was half forgotten. Quality.
  • Robert Louis Stevenson's The Bottle Imp - a short story dramatised.
  • Whisky Galore - BBC dramatisation
  • Darkness at Noon - BBC dramatisation of Arthur Koestler's novel about Stalin's Soviet Union
  • BBC dramatisation of Dracula in two parts
  • Arthur C Clarke's Rendevous with Rama
  • I, Claudius - Graves dramatised over six parts.
  • Understand - Ted Chiang's short story dramatised. The author of "Arrival", a favourite story of mine.
  • The State of the Art - Iain M Banks short story dramatised.
  • A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller Jr. A dramatisation by NPR in 15 parts. Great cast, beautifully produced radio. A book I really liked.

There have been others and all have been good: this is what the BBC does so well. Luckily there is a large back catalogue because these are hard times for media producers.

As well as Eliot's Silas Marner and Middlemarch, I still have War and Peace to listen to and that's a great reason to start planning a big painting!


© Alastair Sherringham 2023
Powered by Blosxom.
Still going after all these years.