Clarinets, prints/other artmaking, and the coronation
I guess the biggest news of the week is of course the coronation. I was asleep at the time, of course, but just watched the replay from the Royal Family’s channel:
I’m not a big monarchist, though all things considered if you have a decent king, it can be the least worst mode of organized government… that’s a big if, though. When you don’t have a decent king, it’s no better than mob rule or plutocracy or tyranny. Mostly it’s no better than whatever bullshit we’re currently stuck under in most of the west.
Anyway, happy for the dude. And for Camilla; she seemed nervous and worried the crown was gonna slip off her head.
I kinda like Camilla, actually. Diana played the martyr but let’s get real: she was a manipulative bitch like any other, and couldn’t wait to spread her… um… “wings”… once the divorce was final. And maybe even before then.
Ol’ Liz shoulda just let Chuck marry Camilla right off the bat in the 70s. Well, I guess it worked out in the end. And I’m happy for them.
Anyway, at 16:45 mins into that video above, when Harry shows up trailing behind Andrew and the York girls, as they approach their seats people are clearly smiling and nodding at Harry and you can hear a man with a microphone say “Good morning. Welcome back.” It seems it has to have been directed at Harry, since as questionable as the accusations are about Andrew, he’s never left, even though he’s had to stop doing official appearances… and interesting that you don’t hear other snippets of conversation so loudly as people are coming in, some very quiet “good morning” type greetings, but that one was very audible and clear.. kinda seemed deliberate.
Well, maybe if Harry divorces that gold-digging shrew and grows the fuck up at least a little bit, he can go home and rejoin his family. It seemed a good omen IMO.
Anyway, nothing that pertains to me beyond curiosity, of course.
I guess I should slap some updates in from stuff I was whining about last week: the sunburn isn’t as bad as I feared but I should still remember to wear a big hat when outside and not be out as long as I was.
There was no cracked filling; just a few extra sensitive spots we will monitor, and it’s a lot better now than last week. Turns out goobering up a spot with Sensodyne does start to have a positive effect after a few days of doing so regularly.
The bass clarinet arrived on Tuesday and sounds great.
It’s a Selmer 1430LP, low E-flat. I have short arms so I can reach the bottom keys but just barely… and I really have to watch my posture to reach everything. But it’s doable and I really ought to improve my posture anyway.
We’re trying a different mouthpiece for the regular clarinet and that’s proving way easier to play, plus I have a different BG ligature which is also helping.
Kinda funny if it ends up that like 95% of my difficulties with clarinet over the last couple years is because I picked the wrong mouthpieces and a terrible ligature, lol…
What else…
Well, there’s the painting in the gallery show as mentioned elsewhere. I went to the opening and there were a ton of great works in all sorts of genres and mediums.
Mine is towards the front of the gallery and off to the side, next to a huge wood and mixed materials sculpture of a geisha, which I kept wanting to check out the details on. As such I did notice several people checking out my painting and fortunately since I’m new, no one knows me yet and thus I could have eavesdropped easily but every time opted to move out of the way. It seems people like the painting, though, so that’s good.
I’ll check back in once a week or so. Not sure I’ll bother getting a selfie in front of it; not really my style for social media posts, though I get why others do it… I just almost never post pics of myself. Hell, I don’t take them, either.
Not just that I need to lose some weight and all, because even when I’ve been thinner I still only took pics if I had to, like when I had a new maQLu EP coming out and needed something for the one-sheet and other promo materials, and it was always a major pain in the ass.
I should probably rephrase that into some sort of art jingoism about identity or whatever and point to artists like Banksy who are never seen… but that’s bullshit too because I do show up to things, or at least I’m starting to.
On that note, I popped by the beginner’s printmaking drop-in at Ladysmith Arts. I wrote about that more here, so I’ll just post my favorite (I think) of today’s Rickys:
I think what I’m going to aim for from here on out is one day a week of prints, be it monotypes with the press at the studio drop-in or gelli prints at home (either with Akua inks or acrylics) or maybe some lino cuts… though I’m kinda liking the spontaneity and surprise factor with monotypes and (to a lesser extent) gelli prints.
After all, I need to get ready to have an Etsy shop and next year attend some art fairs and the like, and that means I will need inventory. Plus if I do 7+ prints in a day, that’s more stuff to post on Instagram throughout the week.
But also it’s fun.
In prepping my business cards, I mentioned before about taking larger gelli prints, drawing on them with pigment pens, then cutting them into cards. I was going to write my info on the back, and I did for a bunch of them, but that got old very fast, lol… so I ordered a stamp for future cards and will have it next week.
And thus I had to really think about what I wanted the cards to say. My name, obviously, and the URL of this website, and my business email, and my instagram link, but then what? They’re the cards for me as an artist, and the reverse of them has a tiny fragment of a sample of my work just as many artists get professionally printed cards with an image of one of their works (I opted not to do this as I figured it would be hard to pick one and then if I did a big run of cards I might be stuck with a card showing something old and out-of-date, plus I have a short attention span so I like them being different).
But there should also be a verbal tagline or description of what I do. Specifically, I mean. Which meant I needed to narrow that down and focus on what I do the most. Finally I came up with this:
Cartoons • Monotypes • Mixed Media
That kinda covers it. Cartoons are the backbone of my practise (and even show up in my prints and paintings. I’m getting more and more into monotypes and expect to do a lot more of them in the future now that I have regular access to a press and that I know how to make gelli prints at home. And when I paint, they’re almost always mixed media: I may start with acrylics on canvas, but then sew an ink-on-paper drawing onto the canvas, add beads and textiles, add mediums, etc. And even when I just work on paper, I may do a water color or gouache and then add acrylic paint marker on top and I was experimenting with embroidering on those papers, too. So… “mixed media” covers it well.
And I’m not boxed in with any one particular subject or theme, though we all know I have certain themes I always come back to, lol…
Speaking of one of those, I think this is the winner of the week as far as ol’ Bono Mouse goes:
Still makes me giggle days later, as with the whole project.
Well, it’s time to move on to the garden.
I thought I saw a wasp nest starting on the top of the covered patio and sprayed it with wasp spray at dusk tonight, only to then get a look at it afterwards and I think it might just be some sort of paper tube that got up there somehow… dunno. Just to be sure, I’ll spray it again tomorrow and then get up on a ladder to remove it.
I did for sure see a wasp starting a little nest in a low lilac shrub and spray thed shit out of that even though it’s barely the size of a cotton ball. Screw ’em… you wanna be left alone? The neighbors have tall trees at the back fence line… as do I.
You build low and close to my house, you get the spray. You’re not welcome here.
The mason bees, however, are very welcome. And some tubes in the new mason bee houses are now full and capped off; very exciting.
The furthest house from my house doesn’t have any capped tubes yet, but I have seen the odd bee hanging out there. The main hangout is still the old original bee house, of course.
And lastly before a few flower pics, it was time to remove the giant grass from the corner of my front yard. The tag said 3’x3′. It’s taller than me and the base of the damn thing was at least 2′ across but at the widest part it would flop out to at least 7′ across… and it kept spreading.
I got my dad to help me remove the stump and he guessed it must have weighed 80 pounds.
Things look messy due to all the snowdrop foliage, though there are other smaller grasses that I think I might also yeet in favor of roses or something like that. I can’t plant anything too big as the sewer pipe runs under there, but I want something that will still be visible in the winter. Maybe a rhododendron if I can’t find an edgeworthia to replace the one that was here but was smothered out by the grass.
Or I do I have a small hydrangea in a pot that could go into the ground here.
Or I’ll just fill it with hollyhocks as they tend to stick around most of the year here.
In the meantime, I planted some snapdragons around the hole.
And now for the pics:
