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Author: penwithlit
Freelance writer and radio presenter
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A House in East London
Thanks for the technical details relating to the colours. Does the currently low angle sun have an effect on the colour/tone perceived?
Here is a Victorian terraced house in East London.
This was a commissioned drawing. Thank you to my client for the commission and for their permission to post the picture here.
There were two interesting challenges in this drawing. One was the fact that the front of the house was obscured by parked cars. The other was the characteristic colour of the brickwork: a clean and lively yellow. I wanted to draw the fence without the cars, so as to show the whole house. And I wanted to get that yellow right.
I was stationed on the other side of the road. There were cars parked nose-to-tail on both sides of the road. To draw the part behind the parked cars, I crossed the road and had a look then come back and sketched and then wandered about…
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Lovely patterns!!
I just finished logging my currently inked pens on the wonderful fountain pen companion and I was a bit shocked to discover that I have 30 fountain pens inked up (each one with a different ink). This is of course the result of the Inkvent madness and my insistence on actually filling pens with the samples in the calendar instead of just using a dip pen.
I’ve written Solar Storm (day 4) dry and I’ve dumped Spruce (day 3) because of the smell, but I’ve kept Pick Me Up (day 15) despite the smell, because of the rich chocolate shade that it has. Since creating this list I’ve also written Jingle Berry (day 8) dry and Spiced Apple (day 5) is about to join it. I’m likely going to be forced to dump and clean out some of these pens, but my goal is to try and write and sketch…
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The time scale here appears to be just a week but might be left more vague and therefore more universal. Some lovely imagery..
Another time, this same moon, which free-hands its flat arc across a fathomless slate of nighttime sky, supplied so much duplicitous reason that the warmest stretch ever of endless kissing seemed also to signal an endless love. Have others believed in such infinite moments? Maybe the fire and the jazz and the lips touching just right? The palm of conversation folding in whatever tender confidence came to mind? No way, back then, could that peaceful walk at dusk— the slow sun tingeing stray clouds pink over a tiny inland lake—have led to the sorry war to come, the saddest set of regrets that still colors my occasional wandering. How could once watching waves etching a shore have also meant the meanest goodbye would eventually roll its own way in? How could catching together the brilliance of high light glancing among bright white slopes have groomed a final run so treacherous…
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Diego Rivera: The Rivals (1931)
Amazing riot of colour.
“The scene, inspired by “la fiesta de Las Velas”, depicts an annual tradition indigenous to the Isthmus region of Oaxaca for which women wear embroidered huipiles or blouses, attractive gold jewelry and their hair pulled into moños (buns) and, enaguas or skirts in bright colors. The feast has indigenous roots, and is celebrated during the month of May in honor of family patron saints, amidst exotic palm trees, and papel picado or delicately cut multicolor sheets of tissue paper strung from the roofs to enliven the festivities.
Yet the theme, so profoundly Mexican, is not necessarily the painting’s most captivating feature, but rather the modern use of multiple planes coupled with the artist’s chromatic sensibility which Rivera makes full use…
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Most interesting and informative!
As you can see from my reviews of Anita Brookner’s novels which are within the obituary I wrote on the occasion of her death in 2016, I thought I had her ‘pegged’ as an author of bitter-sweet stories of intelligent middle-class older women reflecting on their poor choices and their wasted lives. These women were emotionally stilted, isolated from society and disappointed by men. I admired her writing, her brilliantly perceptive descriptions and her often droll style, but I always had to be ‘in the mood’ to read a Brookner.
But…
An episode of Backlisted (about Raymond Chandler, of all people!) began as usual with the chat about who’d been reading what, and Andy Miller told the listeners about a Brookner novel I didn’t know, quite different to the others I had read:
Latecomers, he said, is an incredibly moving book about two men who came to England as…
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Island Castle, Chenonceau, France
Interesting ideas here and it also reminds me of the converse too. So I hear that song- “Sommertime….and the living is easy, fish are jumping and the cotton is high”. We also need the times when nature and life feel thoroughly generous as well.
- Wanting An Easy Life.
Michael Azgour – Snapshots from a Train [2015]Gandalf’s Gallery. Flickr.
“I don’t know that an easy life is really all that easy.”
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It is easy to assume, when we take a quick mental snapshot of someone appearing to be having a good life, that their days on earth are always like that…. happy, relaxed, trouble-free. Suspended in time, such mental images may never change; the subjects are preserved forever experiencing life as constantly joyful.
If we use a camera, these pictures represent moments that are truly frozen in perpetuity…… in the image below, the smile will never fade, the sun will always shine and the beautiful, lustrous, reflective bubbles will never burst…..
Yet can life ever be as ‘easy as pie?’ What would this even mean? (This phrase has actually developed from ‘easy as eating pie.’) Might our happy, bright bubbles never burst…
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Tree House, Seattle, Washington
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All the fashion: 1 Seamstress
I have been reading how after the Russian Revolution many emigres – the women came to Paris and became seamstresses. Their embroidery skills being especially appreciated.
Fashion thrived with the growth of cities across Europe during the nineteenth century. This weekend, I look at a selection of paintings showing both sides of the fashion industry as it grew in the last couple of decades before the end of that century. Today starts with the many women who sewed garments for money, those seamstresses and dressmakers who were paid a pittance to decorate the wealthy, and tomorrow I focus on milliners.
For centuries, garments were stitched by hand, and large numbers of women laboured with needle and thread. By the middle of the nineteenth century the first sewing machines were revolutionising the work of the seamstress.
Wenzel Tornøe (1844–1907), Seamstress, Whit Sunday Morning (1882), oil on canvas, 40 x 36 cm, Randers Kunstmuseum, Randers, Denmark. Wikimedia Commons.
Given the dramatic reduction in time to make garments, among the most enthusiastic early adopters of these machines were professional…
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penwithlit 