in search of a new gallery

yahoo photos are shutting down... hmmmmm, i will have to look for a new home for some old favourites... what about flickr... well I dropped my pro account when I was made NIPSA, so i only get to display 200 photos

AND now HORRORS of HORRORS I'm rated UNSAFE... which means I can publicly display ZERO

This hurts a bit as I have been an advocate for Flickr self filter systems... and I was diligent in rating my nudes... so why am I unsafe?... why am I a loose cannon, maybe it because I stand up to bullies and self opinionated morons...perhaps it is just that other see the nudes and i get lumped in with the pornographers, the picture thieves, fakrs, spammers and other low light making flickr into something more like the wild west than the creative place it should be... AND I'm too tired of all the jibberish to participate in the current Flickr Censr(ship) debate.

but let's not cry over split milk... i will just need to find a different on-lime home for my sketckbook pages... c'est la vie

A short break

soft pencil on paper

There is a lot going on in my life at the moment so this may the last sketch posted in here... well for a little while

just a bit of fun

"That's quite interesting camouflage"

For Illustration friday's topic camouflage

Colour in a torso

water colour and aquarella pencil on paper

seems I am not the only one to have their use of colours in a torso questioned... far greater men that I have walked there before me

"Try to explain to Monsieur Renoir that a woman's torso is not a mass of decomposing flesh with those purplish green stains with denote a state of complete putrefaction in a corpse."
Albert Wolf on Renoir's Nude in Sunlight.

But I will not give in, the female torso deserves colour, and appreciation, and so does life

Bullying & throwing out the baby with the bath water

seems like a lot of folk are getting a bit over excited and carried away now with the censorship issues over on flickr... (see also my earlier blog)



I think the flickr self-filters are a good thing, they do give you the freedom to express yourself, but act responsibly.... my worry is about all those that try to impose their will on others and there has been a lot of unnecessary name calling and bullying... here is just one example

Tantrictim
Originally uploaded by Sassy Fox

this guy doesn't deserve to be recognized, because he seems to be a campaigners for the rights to express and make our own judgment and yet he has so many images that have been taken from others, time to grow up mate... and as for calling, those that point this out names, well that is totally childish and bullying is not acceptable behavior for creative folk... delete yourself or tantric one (you wish)! not the groups you have gained control of.

she was magnificent

watercolour and aquarella pencil, this is an immensely personal work that has taken me a long time to do.

TWICE or thrice had I loved thee,
Before I knew thy face or name ;
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame
Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be.
Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing did I see.
But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
More subtle than the parent is
Love must not be, but take a body too ;
And therefore what thou wert, and who,
I bid Love ask, and now
That it assume thy body, I allow,
And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.

Whilst thus to ballast love I thought,
And so more steadily to have gone,
With wares which would sink admiration,
I saw I had love's pinnace overfraught ;
Thy every hair for love to work upon
Is much too much ; some fitter must be sought ;
For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scattering bright, can love inhere ;
Then as an angel face and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear,
So thy love may be my love's sphere ;
Just such disparity
As is 'twixt air's and angels' purity,
'Twixt women's love, and men's, will ever be.

.... air & angels by John Donne

Censors will steals your eyes

Censr steals your eyes
Originally uploaded by pioforsky

There is a fair bit of buzz going on in flickr at the moment... the sad part is it will not be reaching the places it needs too ...in singapore, korea and germany (yes germany) you may only be able to get in to view safe content (no opportunity to do otherwise...) but in china you now have no hope of even getting in at all... its not just flickr affected, many blogs are being taken down or barred ... when I was in sinagapore even I recieved a email from my ISP questioning the appropriateness of the nudity in this very humble blog

the saddest part is that it is not about nudity, nipples and sharing more intimate photos/moments, which you can legitimately do by appropriately using the flickr's self filtering system ... the actual reason is just political and obsession with control and power.... giving people the opportunity to actually see and express what is going on is what is at risk!

Please blog about this yourself.... raise the concern with everyone you can ...the freedom of what you can hear and see is as precious as the freedom to express yourself

a postcard in RL from SL

today i got a postcard from second life ... well I really did, from my friend in there Wings Ares, she's quiet a stunner and she has visited LeMusiqueFire and wanted to share that with me... its not everyday a postcard arrives from the virtual world, with a nice note as well... something worth sketching and as i began I realised that I more clearly understood what it was about SL (Second Life) and all the glamor that had previously distressed me ... it is so super real in overwhelming detail but at the same time spooky and way to difficult to sketch ... I had the urge to simplify, just take in the mood and romance of the place... leave out the detail...and soon i realized an ultra-reality virtual world doesn't need an artist... well a human one ...the computers can do all that if you have the time and money.. (there is a lot of shopping to do in SL) you can surround yourself with delicious textures and colours and things that are so difficult to collect in RL (Real Life)... but then i realized just as soon that others can create beauty with love, and romance, and relationships ...all I have is some pastels and paper.

That spooky side of of ultra real amination & robots was called the uncanny valley (others now call it scary valley) by japanesse robotic professor Hirishi Ishiguro... for me I guess I was scared by it and yearn for that softer more primal exotic notion that drove gauguin to the pacific and glorious colour!

inviting the colour in

bit by bit i can see my art... actually becoming decent art... I have let the colour start to position itself and lift the mood, using bolder strokes, an am leaving the detail till the very last minute... having a model full of life, joy and understanding helps

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for
and if you dared to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

...from the invitation by Oriah Mountain Dreamer

a surprise sitting

I was sitting on yahoo... waiting for a different friend... when suddenly an old friend cincy said hello and even posed for a quick sketch... thanks

fragrancy of the tropical light

Whilst I am back in the cold now... I loved the light in the tropics, the richness of colour in the shade... the vibrancy... it doesn't photograph that well and capturing the richness of colours in watercolours is a challenge BUT colour is the key ... exactly as the impressionists realised over a century ago .... art without colour is art without passion and soul

la couleur est la vie

sketching in paradise

for illustration friday's topic your paradise

returning to the sketching

P1010001,
originally uploaded by sigh clone.

Thought it was time to get the sketchblog back to what it was originally intended to be... an online sketch book... so here it is... (but the scanning won't be the best since I'm traveling and don't have access to a scanner so they'll just be photographs or sketched instead) ... as I'm trying out the email to flickr route to do the posts... hope it works

Fields of Gold

So she took her love,
for to gaze awhile,
among the fields of barley
In his arms she fell as her hair came down
among the fields of gold

Pastel on paper

amber inspiration

pastel on paper

The sketch book is dead ... long live the sketch book

as part of stream-lining my on-line existence (trying to get rid of the time consuming bits and stuff that just waste bandwidth) ... i've decide to kill off my original sketchbook ... its not actually the original which was in MSN groups but they threw it over to world groups because it had NUDES ... yes people without clothes ... no one had visited it for years so its gone... but that leaves a big hole since flickr only has my recent work so i'm working on a more refined sketch book using googles picassa web albums and a version on my notebook to managed the big mess that is my electronic scapbook of my work ... so softly ...softly I will create some on-line albums with my earlier images ...watch this blog for links there ... BUT remember there may be NUDITY!

Nudes & Torsos

soft 25 hours of flickr (the rejects)

soft 25 hours
Originally uploaded by sighclone.

Yes this is heavily based on Dali's persistence of memory (better known as the soft clocks) ... i had been invited to the 24 hours of flickr rejects group and realised I had missed the whole thing due to other things taking my full attention on saturday... when i noticed they just had a black icon (at least it wasn't an undefined grey bot) ...and the whole time draped over the tree of life thing hit me ...

By first I must set the scene, I'm having a late night coffee in a cyber cafe and I didn't have much at all to create with... certainly no art gear ...well expect a felt pen... so i scribbled the back of a flyer. Instead of digitizing.. I photographed it on my phone ... uploaded it using bluetooth (with about 5 minutes of frustration in the process) then found the usb port on the cafe computer, and plugged in my memory stick ... with it's portable apps system and specifically gimp.. converted the image to black & white, with a couple of bits to edit and then colour fill ...viola, about 10 minute later my idea is on flickr and uploaded as the group logo overnight...

not bad for an old bloke ...I have even impressed my self

Is this really me ...

I decided I needed a new, more web 2.0 style, buddy icon come profile pic ...Maybe i'm geting old and grumpy but those folk without a profile pic or even some descriptive text all get assigned to ignore land these days ...too many little annoying trolls and otherwise antisocial types seem to hide in the guise of anonymity ...ok they can do that but the will not be accepted as my friends

so conversely I want other to see me as a little creative, not to complex and basically harmless ...do you think this suits me? ... do you even care?

Twiquette

"Should good girls wave at a bligmobile"

car(toon) for Cherrie Exx

what are you doing?

In line with my scaling down for better portability ... I've become a twitter(er) ...its a little strange to describe ... some call it a microblogging ... basically you just use the web, email, IM or even SMS from your mobile phone to answer the question "what are you doing?" ... and then the fun starts BUT beware it can be addictive and expensive on OZ if you do i via SMS ;)

... so if you are interested you can now see what I'm doing, and countless thousands of others are up. look way down the bottom of the righhand side of this blog and you will see the RSS feeds of my stuff and a twitter feed ...watch that cube-head roll around the net ...boring yet! or maybe you's like to join in the conversation?