Or Stitches in Time…
Oh do I hate smashing up my hands.
Like everyone, I have done it a few times, but it doesn’t take much to put me out of commission. How does Harrison Ford do it? He even clambers atop crumbling cornices in the teeth of a positively diluvial deluge with two broken fingers held in place with a bit of scotch tape or a hanky to battle renegade replicants, but if I turn a nail, I’m out for the count…
This time I have done a serious number on the middle finger of my (what else?) right hand. It was a novel experience to actually SEE my tendons, but the doctor said they looked nice and healthy. No fractures either, ( undoubtedly all that extra milk from Polly, our milk cow, when I was a kid – “If you don’t drink it, we’ll have to throw it out.”) so in a week or two the stitches come out and it shall be as good as new.
TRANSALPINE
Switzerland is one of these wonderful countries where you don’t need your passport to cross into a foreign land. Bellinzona is enchanting, and while the many pretend you’re still a little close to the Alps’ shadow, and real Ticino begins at Lugano or Locarno, for those of us resigned to rotten weather coming off the North Sea, it is already the outskirts of Rome…
Bellinzona was originally a Lombard city on the edge of rather wilder marches, with three castles guarding the valley, one perched on a huge rock in the middle, and a wall akin to the Deeping Wall closing the valley from side to side. About half of it is still there, now surrounded by back yards and factories, but it takes little imagination to wander along it into the Middle Ages, when the valley to the north was empty and Bellinzona sat secure behind crenellated ramparts, facing the south, back turned to the brooding snow-browed Alps.
Very inspiring (making notes in a mental sketchbook all the while).
But the most curious thing was actually the rather crippled drawings I ended up doing at the signature session. Usually the charaters I draw are quite stern, with furrowed brows and a focused and intense gaze. This time arond, not daring to try anything even vaguely ambitious, I stuck with Gandalf, but every portrait shows him looking rather distracted, a little uncomfortable and vaguely unhappy. It was eerie. (Admittedly eyes are hard to draw when you can’t move your wrist, or hold the pencil firmly, but it was disconcerting.) I had to give up after a while when even that began to go awry. I think the expression on my face was akin to the drafted Gandalfs… uncharacteristically bewildered and a bit lost.
Photos by Pungolo, the rest of them are here.
Thanks to Fataneh and Dana, who wrote all the “For…“dedications for people, to Christine Kaech of the OLF who did all the driving, to the Libreria Taborelli for looking after us so well, and to the local Tolkien society for the brooch and t-shirt…
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SPIDERS FROM MARS
Wallpaper, anyone? I think I must make a collection of things like this. A Flying Alien Space Shelob about to devour a strangely familiar Sam…
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SPEAKING TOO SOON
I won’t be in Geneva on the 26th after all.
The conference has been postponed, but since the posters are quite nice, here they are anyway…
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Posters © Carine Jaques
IN SITU
We have not been idle with the site either (or at least up until last Friday) and I am ever-so-slowly but nonetheless steadily going through the site updating the printed material and above all linking each cover or proof to the original artwork. Hopefully this will make wandering around the portfolio a little easier. I also hope to create many more links inside the portfolio, so that the texts can read from painting to painting, which should be more interesting than just a succession of images and categories.
