Shadow Play 5b

 

I got's myself a shadow play. I picked it up today, a WHSmith sketching pencil, I am pretty sure I know who's pencil this is, so I may have to give it back. I have no idea what 'shadow play' means but this is a nice pencil for working tonally, very dark, lovely texture, don't get me wrong clearly it is as ugly as sin but nevertheless a damn good pencil. I find more and more that I prefer these relatively cheaper pencils. the thing that lets it down is the design, it is a hexagonal pencil for starters, it is the dullest battle ship grey you could make and has appalling typography, badly set, But worse of all I bet you can't buy them separately, I bet they come in a set with 12 other pencils that you would never use.

Pencil stories

I had an teacher once who would come round to your desk, and if you had a HB pencil would, without hesitation, throw it out the window (we were on the 5th floor).
 No pencil lighter than a 2B was his rule and I find that even today, nearly 20 years on I still shudder at the sight of a H pencil in my drawing classes and find myself thinking, I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna go and throw that damn abonimation of a pencil out the window, but I don't mainly because I teach on the ground floor and I don't think the effect will be the same.

Tangents, Mallards and peoples heads

A ha! for the avid I'm periodical reader(s) there is some news, I have another blog. Peoples heads is a blog I am dedicating to drawings of peoples heads, faces and other bodily parts, above is Boris Johnston with what can only be described as a Mallard, I have no idea what that could mean.

Organs of Sense

In the way we talk about crying, it is often said that we are ‘moved to tears’ like it’s a small town outside Dorset; some strange emotion reassignment or at the very least to a greater place or space that we are not normally present in, so completely immersed are we, that it is impossible to think that it is within us, a part of us, a sensation that we truly inhabit, no – that’s just not British.

But maybe this is the answer, that tears are a physical manifestation of sensation, something that we all too often believe we posses, or are put on us ‘that film made me cry’ and so on, the truth is nobody really knows why we cry emotional tears, and maybe that is because we are so lost and distanced to the ‘now’, to the world, that we miss the obvious. Maybe its something that cannot be explained through science, of course we can dissect tears, induce tears and factualize about tears until we are blue in the face but so far we haven’t found anything concrete, because perhaps like religious / spiritual belief or art, science cannot pin it down, there is no answer. Nobody really knows why we believe in god. So strung up are we in trying to explain everything through this over used language, naming things, explaining things using limited culturally specific grunts known as words, that we could miss that alongside art, music and poetry, tears are a highly expressive form of communication as the English poet Abraham Cowley once wrote ‘Words that weep, and tears that speak.’

image by H.V Carter MD from Gray's Anatomy

I've been sleeping

It would appear i have not posted for some time, a strange but true fact. One might think this is because I am slack and that after finishing my MA I have done nothing - this is not the case. I can only apologise to anybody (if anybody) looking at this blog wanting more than biannual updates, although to be fair this blog is titled I'm Periodical, giving me at least a little leeway. perhaps.

so if nothing else I have been thinking about doing stuff