Rowland Writes and Draws

Thankyou, Lawd, that another tinpot dictator has resigned

2010-12-06T18:19:00.001-08:00

It's almost too much to hope for: two tinpot dictators out within two weeks of each other. The air in B.C. just got that much clearer, if only for the few days of drift and confusion that will occur before the owners and authority and corporate figures bring their plans together. Sadly, two more Tweedledums and Tweedledees will be rolled out for the electorate. Each will receive massive TV coverage. It won't seriously matter which one wins. Nothing will change. But for now, we have a few days of blissful unknowing.

"Cancelled" sail-past a winner

2010-12-05T16:21:00.000-08:00

So a dozen lighted ships circled off the village of Cowichan Bay for the delight of shoppers visiting the waterfront strip from five PM yesterday (pic above from 2009).

The only issue was that according to the local Black rag, the News Leader, it was not happening. The Wooden Boat Society, which claimed to run the event, announced that the society would not be running it this year, and so according to them it was not happening.

Of course, the sailpast happened anyway: try holding determined skippers back! Bay Pub publican Chris Killam led the way with his grandfather's 70-ft Greybeard look-alike adorned with a magnificent swizzle stick about three storeys high.

Skipper Rowland followed in Calypso, which appeared and disappeared regularly as all its lights flashed on and off.

Other gaily lit vessels crowded with laughing and babbling passengers made for a great show.

Later, all aboard Calypso headed for the Emily Morgan studio, where the vernissage proceeded apace, and later a select group made their way up to the Morgan residence overlooking the bay. All raved until late.

These home-made events make politics irrelevant.

Horgan: clinging to James's skirt

2010-12-02T14:11:00.000-08:00

John Horgan MLA, one of the brightest MLA's, unfortunately has spent most of his career working as a political assistant, one of the "back-room boys" who grease the wheels of politicians. Horgan has been an MLA for six years, and his record has not been notable: for example, his personal campaign to reduce the price of gasoline. What was the point of that? Did ne not realise that the oil cartel and its 40,000 North American gas stations would never take any notice? The price would go down exactly when they wanted it to, and not before. Anyway, why should gasoline prices be reduced? Why should people be encouraged to drive? They are already slaves inside a massive gasoline machine that makes driving almost unavoidable. Horgan should have been pounding the table about public transport, urban planning, transition and smallness. He seems to have no knowledge about green policies. Now he is sticking to Carole James when she is doomed. Oh, John, what a shame!

Leaders dictate because TV news dictates

2010-11-23T21:12:00.000-08:00

According to B.C. blogger Peter Ewart, the two large provincial parties have dictators for leaders because the parties are coming apart. His claim that James and Campbell are getting tyrannical because of the impossibility of their party's mingled support, has only a grain of truth.

It is commercial television news that has created the demand for one-line solutions that sound strong and conclusive and decisive.

Whereas, any reasonably well-informed person can only observe that the stronger,
the more conlusive and decisive any politician sounds, the further they are from understanding the crisis facing everyone.

Canada is avoiding the fossil-fuel crisis. Victorians are keen to spend $70m (official) to $140m (unofficial) on a car-bridge downtown. Canada is dreaming of wealth from the tar sands, without realising that the USA will gobble the oil up long before Canada or China does. All we'll have left is lakes of pollution, and a wrecked environment and climate.

As in all oil-rich countries, the masses of Canada are heading for impoverishment. It's so-o-o sad. Can nobody deliver us an ecologist in Victoria?

Yellow scarf dictatorship

2010-11-21T11:04:00.000-08:00

The use of the yellow loyalty wrap at Carole James's acclamation in Victoria yesterday was pathetic. After the triumph, one union boss said (according to the T-Col): it's Carole or the ocean. So those who disagree with loser Carole's diktats should simply walk out and join another party. Well, there aren't any other parties, because of our unendorsed FPTP electoral system. Even the Green Party can't get a single seat.

We're stuck with a two-party system, both currently led by paranoid fuhrer types who will only tolerate flat-on-your-face kowtowing from their fellow MLAs and party organisers. I have no idea who represented the Cowichan constituency on my behalf in Victoria: nobody chose to tell me. It's a farce.

Our new MLA in our new riding, Mr Bill Routley, has sworn his undying loyalty to his new leader. She seated him in the first place, and now he is paying her back. His enormous salary, the biggest he has ever incurred in his life, his staffers, large constituency office, and the luxurious pension he is in line for all no doubt played their part too. If he can get a Cabinet post, he will be in clover. Where am I, an elector, in all this? Except for living in a so-called safe seat.

Yet again, at the next general election (its date stupidly fixed US-style), the electorate will be presented with Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

It's not surprising that the NDP barely exists any more except for its Union base.

Campbell's carrot thrown on the dump

2010-11-17T22:00:00.000-08:00

"The British Columbia government says it will suspend a planned further 15-per-cent reduction in personal income tax rates for the first $72,000 of personal income."

Apparently the decision was made "by Cabinet". I don't think I remember the last time a decision was reversed "by Cabinet" that had already been announced by the Premier.

Gordo seems to be out of it, while still occupying the Premier's office.

It's no wonder the public is bewildered. The HST demon is still in office, while his compensatory carrot has been kicked out of the window.

Furthermore, few people understand Gordo's last-minute redesign of the Government so that it can approve corporate resource extraction more quickly. Nobody except Mr. Campbell and the corporate friends for which he acts as errand-boy wants such a reorganisation or facilitation.

Clearly, Gordo was running the Government out of his back pocket. That's why he has to go: immediately.

Revenge of the electors

2010-11-17T08:21:00.000-08:00

The announcement that Ida Chong MLA will be the first MLA to be voted out of office using recall legislation is encouraging. Besides taking thousands a year in lunch money, Chong has spent the last decade running errands for Campbell, the corporations' errand-boy. She has commanded several Ministries, acting on orders from Campbell all the way. She even acted as Minister for Community Affairs in a province where few "communities" exist, and in which communities the elected officials are obliged to parrot the provincial government's policies.

Ida Chong was a key conspirator in introducing the HST directly after the 2009 election in which an HST was never mentioned. She stole her legislative seat on false grounds, and should lose it as soon as possible.

For those interested in the wider world, the Tonga-like constitution of Great Britain has actually introduced the Right to Recall, believe it or not, and Britain's students are going to bring recall measures first against the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, one of the world's biggest political swindlers, who morphed from opposing student fees before the general election to participating in the Cameron government which is tripling them. Clegg should be the first British MP to lose his seat by popular revulsion.

LINK: http://www.metro.co.uk/news/846108-turncoat-nick-clegg-will-be-haunted-say-angry-students

Carole James is a socialist but that's not good enough

2010-11-15T14:48:00.002-08:00

The left complains that Ms Carole James, NDP BC leader, is not a socialist. (http://www.marxist.ca/content/view/615/1/) But a socialist is no longer enough: we need a new kind of person and a new kind of politician. Someone to usher in a new electoral system and usher out fossil fuels.

Carole James is a socialist. She lines up with the big three union bosses in this province, and tells everyone else to shut up or leave caucus. That is socialism of the Stalinist type that ruined the potentially magnificent Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union, remember, abolished money. It guaranteed everyone a job, an apartment, cheap drink and cheap books. It kept the entire cultural apparatus (ballet, choirs, theatre) of each member state going (bar the Church) and published in dozens of languages. It was a genuine alternative to capitalism, and paid the price when Hitler launched all Europe against it.

Compared to the Rt Hon Mr. Campbell, Ms James certainly is a socialist. A friend of unions, an advocate of better pay and services for the poor, she would have been thrown into a concentration camp in Hitler's national-socialist paradise.

The problem is that socialism is no longer enough. It's an idea that was already developed when the French Revolution occurred 221 years ago. At that time, the three "estates" were the aristocracy, the clerics, and the rest. The first two constituted only seven per cent of the population. Ninety-three per cent of the population were the rest. Do those figures remind you of any figures published today?

Socialist, maybe, but today the very fabric of our environment is being torn apart. Human greed is in the driver-seat, and ecologists are hiding penniless in cabins. The Green party finds it almost impossible to penetrate our outmoded democracy and exercise real influence. Fact is, that both socialists like Ms. James and capitalists like Mr. Campbell hate ecologists.

We urgently need a new democracy. A changed voting system that reflected our modern reality would definitely be a step in the right direction, but how long do we have to wait for that?

Vancouver Island rail service: boss should resign

2010-11-15T10:18:00.000-08:00

In July, the provincial government announced that after spending a fortune on research they will not be spending a penny more on the Vancouver Island rail corridor.

Its sad little one-carriage train will continue to potter up island when everyone wants to come down, and vice versa. The current service is a farce aimed at getting the rail service cancelled.

The Government made the announcement in the holiday season, for obvious reasons: no one knows about it and few will.

Some eight weeks later, the rail corridor boss, a well-known Cowichan Liberal, Mr Graham Bruce, made no mention of his government's failure to offer one solitary penny when he appeared on C-FAX radio. (http://www.cfax1070.com/newsstory.php?newsId=15802)

Nor did Mr Bruce mention his financial failure as head of the rail organisation, which owns the corridor land and aims to raise money for trains on it.

Instead, he announced that the $100 million that the Government rejected investing will in reality only be $15 million in partnership with the federal government. And for some reason, he hopes to get that from the goons who banned spending one more dollar on it,

Mr Bruce intends to relocate the rail HQ to Nanaimo and start a service south in the morning. This is an admirable plan, but first Mr Bruce would do well to follow the example of his Great Leader and summarily resign.

Malahat Drive southwards: where are the viewpoints ?

2010-11-15T06:01:00.000-08:00

One of the famous North American scenic routes, the Malahat Drive, is no longer the engineering triumph that it once was, with unsurpassed views of Mount Baker and the US Gulf Islands (the latter formerly ours, but handed over by a UK high court judge in 1905). They are viewable at a couple of viewpoint stops on the way north, but drivers going south don't get the opportunity to enjoy a single view. They are also deprived of any facilities at all on the drive south, including washrooms, cafeterias, interpretative material, and telescopes. That's nearly 30 kilometres of driving without the opportunity to stop, let alone relieve oneself or survey the unsurpassed scenery. How did the idiots in the B.C. Tourism department manage to organise such a torture trip?

The wide views going south, suggested in this archive photo, have been destroyed and no viewpoints, car parks or other facilities have ever been installed. The Malahat Drive south is a disgrace to the Province. The state of Washington should sign a contract to run it.

The trip south on the Malahat Drive should be formally announced by an official sign saying that there will be no stops for views or conveniences for nearly 30 kilometres. The fabulous views that the route once commanded have been thoroughly overgrown, and the drive south is now a featureless ordeal. If you manage to catch a fleeting glimpse of Mount Baker on the way, you will be risking your life because there is nowhere to stop.

They just spent a lot of money modifying access to the stopping point nearest the north end of the Malahat, but not one penny has been spent on improving the southward route, which cannot access any of the northerly car parks against the oncoming traffic. Isn't it about time that the B.C. government built a significant viewpoint going south so that the claims about the Malahat still have some validity and are not just a distant memory recalled by a photograph taken in 1914?

Obama expenses could be true --- if only for his companions

2010-11-09T16:59:00.000-08:00

The Indian government source who said that Obama's current trip to India would be costing some $200 million and would be supported by thousands of Americans, plus dozens of US navy ship and warplanes, might not be far from the truth. Obama is playing a very dangerous game by sending robot bombers far into Pakistan, and there was a hubbub when he failed to mention Pakistan in his opening speech. Obama is a warmonger, but so is mainly Hindu India: in a stand-off with Islamic Pakistan over the Kashmir.

A Pakistani paper, the Daily Times, said today that "a civil war in Afghanistan post-US withdrawal...will spill over into both Pakistan and India, leading to a widening of the war."

Imagine that: the staged 9/11 events of nearly a decade ago could yet cause an enormous conflict in the Indian sub-continent. The stakes are clearly very high for the US administration. A big investment in this business trip would be in order, perhaps.

Anyway, 200 top US CEOs are presumed to be with Obama, and they, if not the US President, would require massive security.

Four year-old flies round world nearly three times

2010-11-07T21:02:00.000-08:00

Suri Cruise: massive disruption of Earth's ozone layer

Why should anyone think about the hazards of jet flight when someone like Tom Cruise, adored by billions, viewed in every cinema on the planet, has his four-year old daughter clock up 65,000 air miles in a year and a half , not far short of three times around the planet?

LINK: http://www.madeformums.com/celebs/suri-cruise-clocks-up-65000-air-miles-and-thats-just-within-the-last-18-months/10706.html

None of the jet-set and their wannabes seem to be taking a bit of notice of jetting hazards, not to judge by Air Miles, which says it sells its products everywhere in Canada. Even the Royal Bank of Canada had a major air miles promotion this year.

The general public seems to be quite happy to pay for developing air travel, too. Victoria B.C. International airport says "to accommodate increased demand in the mid to long term, it is anticipated parking spaces will have to increase from 800 to 1,400 spaces."

Furthermore, tens of millions in public money has been devoted to creating a new traffic interchange outside the airport, as if the industry has a booming future!

When I was writing the book "9/11 Revealed" it was astonishing to find out about the US corporate jet-set and just how much they fly. One guy on Flight 175 supposedly was headed to the West Coast from Boston just after flying the other way. Another was crossing America for the day, after he had just returned the day before from a junket to Italy. These people used scheduled flights as casually as taxis.

The number of passenger kilometres flown on UK airlines increased by nearly 50 per cent over the past decade, from 213 billion kilometres in 1997 to 314 billion in 2007. International travel accounted for around 97 per cent of it. The figures are similar world-wide.

You can't help wondering why NASA writes on its own website: "there is insurmountable evidence that human activities are disrupting the balance" of life-preserving ozone in the upper atmosphere.

LINK: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/about/fs10grc.html

Pot minority banned again

2010-11-06T17:33:00.000-07:00

How can a majority ever vote for a minority? How can the majority vote against what they're told on the televisions they watch for three or four hours a day? How can any minority expect fair treatment from such a brainwashed majority-voting public?

The California public voted this week against decriminalisation of pot possession. Only by 56 per cent to 44 per cent, but that's the name of the game when it comes to majorities crushing minorities, e.g. white Californians cheating First Nations out of their land, or locking up their Japanese compatriots and selling off their property in World War Two.

It's not a pretty sight, seeing Californians obeying Obama and voting against pot. By doing so, they voted in favour of gangsters staying rich, keeping $14 billion flowing underground annually, continuing the gang mayhem in Mexico, banning innocent Calfiornians from having 25 square feet of pot plants in their own gardens and in favour of thousands of harmless pot-puffers going to jail for possession. That's the kind of genius that comes out of televisions. The entire TV/Cable industry should be suppressed.

The marijuana minority had better give up on the idea of social acceptance for their drug habit. Californians would have to accept that booze is more dangerous, that tax revenues could be raised from legal sales, and that prison numbers could actually reduce instead of increase. All these are impossible while they watch poisonous television.

No, Californians will have to ask their doctor for a prescription for marijuana until the cows come home, I'm afraid.

Media concentration continues

2010-11-06T12:32:00.000-07:00

Keith Olbermann is on the street, removed from his influential commentary position on MSNBC. Olbermann's virtual desk is being sold to Comcast, the US cable media giant, and Mr Olbermann's scathing views of the Bush administration and the failings of the Obama administration will not accompany it.

The trend of US mass media towards consolidation and monopoly continues with this ponderous take-over, and independent
views like Mr Olbermann's will be relegated to the internet. Television, the holy-of-holies for the US Pentagon and its industrial machine, will continue to sell conformity and war to mortgage-bound suburbanbites. Its "news" broadcasts will continue to have more to do with the plans of General Electric corporation than with reality.

The most alarming aspect of this mega-absorption is that its gigantic scale throws the US Government even further into the media complex, as its FCC quango controls deals worth billions of dollars and billions of viewers world-wide.

Olbermann has been booted out by bigness, but I think he will be happier expounding his views to millions on the internet. Welcome, Keith!

Car alarm magnate will boss Congress

2010-11-05T10:38:00.000-07:00

Above is a kit to install one of those noise-horror car alarms. Note the enormous siren that is its main feature, Such sirens star in the feature film Noise, starring a coolly hysterical Tim Robbins smashing and dismantling them. Latest paranoid news flash: the man who made hundreds of millions out of car alarms will now boss Congress around as part of the new majority.

It seems impossible, but a man who made a fortune out of the biggest noise-pest in North America, will now be a big noise himself in Congress. US Rep. Darrell Issa even recorded the "stand back" horror-voice that came with his Viper car alarm. http://jalopnik.com/5675587/remember-when-us-rep-darrell-issa-was-the-voice-of-viper

2008-12-03T09:28:00.000-08:00

In Canada we are coping with the inevitable transition from First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) elections to the more representative proportional electoral system. Because no political party will ever actually introduce the latter, we have to go through various contortions to make the FPTP system work like proportional representation. The Coalition is the contortion and it has to happen.

The old FPTP system was never presented to the Canadian electorate. Electors never approved it. The system was simply handed down as a tradition --- in what area of society do we accept handed down traditions any more? Society is becoming more complex, particularly with the newly recognised ecological component, and proportional representation of some kind is the future.

The political parties have negotiated a coalition that will see off the billionaires and their so-called Conservative party. It is high time. Consider Saanich-Gulf Islands constituency: we had the election rigged by con-men who performed a fake "robophone" campaign the day before the ballot, causing thousands of NDP votes for a non-existent candidate and thereby causing the Conservative incumbent to win. Those criminals should be investigated and thrown in jail. The people who employed them are in power in Ottawa and they must be removed immediately. The new Coalition is the way. It will be imperfect, and it will make mistakes. It will probably throw money at the incompetent automobile industry, and at the clearcutting logging corporations. However, that is preferable to having cirminals in power, and is a cost I am willing to pay. Which is why I am placing this 62 per cent logo in my drawing slot.

Photo Synthesis

2008-11-14T11:59:00.000-08:00

David Dees spent many years promoting consumer products, and then promoting Hollywood movies. Eventually, his political awakening came when he realised the the 9/11 events had been an inside job, organised to trigger a new cold war, enrich the military-industrial complex and hand totalitarian powers to the booming world of spooks. When he collided with the MSM clamp-down on 9/11 scepticism, he adapted his skills to creating satirical political art that could populate the internet universe, and subvert the imagery presented by the corporate whores. There's a load more of his pictures here , or there's a slide-show on YouTube. There are about two million Americans who list themselves as artists. I wish more of them would turn their hand to this kind of art and make it current in schools and on campuses.

The picture above illustrates the juggernaut effect of NAFTA, spreading big-box outlets, freeway consumer hangers and exurban automobile mazes across the old woods, farms and market towns of the earlier U.S. and Canadian landscape. Where I live, we have a new Wal-Mart, western Canada's biggest, where every shopper goes in a carbon-guzzling automobile. This is exactly the opposite of the kind of integrated, energy-saving, locally-controlled communities we need, and Mr. Dees's picture says it all at a glance.

Phantoms in the sky

2008-11-11T12:49:00.000-08:00

Before the Pentagon exploded on September 11th, 2001, people around the panicking White House looked up and photographed or videoed a white plane that was circling about 500 feet overhead in the most interdicted airspace on earth. All non-military aircraft over the USA had been ordered to land. This aircraft was identifiable as one of the Pentagon's fleet of four converted jumbo jets known as "doomsday planes" because they are equipped to run the U.S. security-state in the event of a national emergency or nuclear war. This shot, included in a commercially available DVD called The Flight That Fought Back, shows all the key elements: the white colour (for protection from heat) the blue stripe on the side, the flag on the tail-plane and the distinctive dome behind the cockpit. There can be no mistake, this aircraft is an E-4B doomsday plane. View full shot here.

Even though so many people saw the aircraft (and there is even a BBC video clip that records someone shouting "it's the doomsday plane!"), the Bush Pentagon and the Bush FAA and the Bush Secret Service all flatly denied any knowledge of its existence that day, circling low over the White House in full view of thousands of U.S. citizens.

Governments have a free hand in the sky, because humans cannot fly and are powerless to know what is occurring, except when bombs or bullets rain down and smash and pollute their habitat. And so this E-4B, normally equipped with from 50-80 technicians and a shed-load of communications gear, plus top Pentagon officials, flew low over the White House before the Pentagon exploded, but as far as officialdom is concerned, it never existed.

The news channel CNN also videoed the doomsday plane, and its news bulletins briefly showed it circling at the time, then suppressed the video for six years, before internet revelations caused CNN to broadcast a four-minute news item confirming that the jumbo actually had been seen, even though the newsclip noted that officials denied it. None of the other news channels took any notice, and the news story died for a second time.

Now an author called Mark Gaffney has produced a book , The 9/11 Mystery Plane and the Vanishing of America, in which you can read about this cover-up that proves official deception around the 9/11 events. Use Amazon to send a copy of it to your legislative representative and demand they read it and call for a new public inquiry.

Model poses

2007-04-23T07:41:00.000-07:00

Models in life-drawing sessions may be unaware of it, but they adopt poses that reflect western artistic assumptions. Henri Matisse helped to reinforce such assumptions in the 20th century. There's a photograph of middle-aged Matisse in his Granpa three-piece suit and spectacles examining a naked model that says a lot about the Bohemian artist-model relationship. The painting above similarly shows Matisse formally dressed, with a scantily-clad model. This scene is never reversed, with a formally dressed woman painting a naked man. The poses adopted by models in life-drawing sessions today reflect the Bohemian life-style: they are typically the poses adopted by mistresses or servants, submissive to their master artist. Obviously, women expose themselves naked to men most commonly in the bedroom, particularly now that central heating is widely available. But there are other traditions. Models should be thinking about autonomous poses that reflect the new reality. Some religious traditions offer postures that have a mandala-like completeness. Models should explore folk dancing and yogic poses that convey female independence.

War Artists

2007-04-16T17:15:00.000-07:00

The US war machine only has three war artists. That's surprising, considering how thoroughly they normally cover all media, even including strip cartoon books. (In the linked picture, only an artist is able to insert Mohamed Atta where officialdom asserts he was, since no other evidence exists.)
The drawing here was sketched by Michael Fay. He told the BBC he was "inspired by the golden light and purple shadows as marines set a trap for Taleban snipers who had been shooting at them near Kandahar, Afghanistan."
Kandahar region happens to be where no fewer than eight Canadian troopers died last week, six of them in one explosion, two in the other. Does war get dirtier than this? Only an artist could evoke the "golden light and purple shadows" to describe the sordid scene he is depicting: grown men setting deadly traps for each other in a devastated village.
I met Leonard Brooks a few weeks back, a gifted Canadian water-colourist who served as a Canadian war artist in the world-war-two part of the 75-year war. He was a dutiful believer and fully embedded: he even took charge of a captured U-boat and (courageously) held a gun on its fanatical crew members.
Graham Sutherland made a more objective witness of the same war, perhaps because he depicted its brutal effects on the streets of Britain.
The Pentagon probably retains war artists to adorn the walls of its own scores of miles of corridors in its 500 bases world-wide. Its intelligence branch has plenty of ways of fixing pictures of its own, including Photoshopping them for their war-making propaganda, e.g. the "future force".

Botticelli's iconic woman

2007-04-01T20:25:00.000-07:00

Botticelli only signed one picture, the Mystic Nativity, in which his single 'three beauties' model is replicated into a whole choir of dancing angels. Here she is in a drawing that plainly had to be attributed to Botticelli, even if unsigned. For it is she. I'd love to examine this picture closely in the museum that holds it. She is clearly talking, presumably something she did very much, although possibly not to Botticelli except when he was drawing her, because she may have been his servant and not his mistress. (Botticelli was probably gay: one of the few things we know is that he was arrested for sodomy in 1502, when his career was in freefall). Her plaits are bound at the side of the head in the manner of ancient Iberian women, who appear in the Valencian sculpture. So, it's a classic hair-do of the Mediterranean and can probably be found on the ancient mosaics in Crete and Santorini. Her bust is untypically full: the Gothic nudes of the era had little more than snake-bites. The nipples and aureoles are visible under her filmy garment, a modern touch. But her breasts may not have been drawn from life: they don't fall quite right. The artist makes her float by the device of having her hair and ribbons waving in an up-current, suggesting she is moving up and down. Her head angles to her right as if banking, and her mouth is open, perhaps in a cry of joy. She's not pregnant, indicating that she is not married and thus a virgin --- hence, perhaps, the breasts? I don't think any early Italian renaissance woman actually wore such gauzy garmentation: it's a meme replicated by Botticelli --- his signature style if you will. We'll never know who this model of Botticelli's was, (we know little enough about him) but in today's overcrowded world her figure and above all her face, are assured of immortality.

The Crucifixion Expert

2007-03-27T20:09:00.000-07:00

Pieter Paul Rubens drew a crucifixion with special expertise. In the long war between his patrons, the house of Hapsburg in Flanders, and their opponents, the Dutch protestants, there was a crucifixion or a hanging at almost every crossroads in the Netherlands. Thus are memes replicated: the holy symbol becomes reality on the highway.
Here's what one website writes about the war: "(The Duke of ) Alva's errand was to punish those who had been concerned in the disorders at Antwerp and elsewhere. For this purpose he established a Council of Troubles, which was soon called by the people of the Council of Blood. Thousands of men and women, guilty and innocent, were put to death. They were hanged on scaffolds, on trees, at the door-posts of private house. Many of them were poor; but some were the chief citizens and nobles of the country. The whole business of the land was stopped; grass grew in the markets. Every family was in mourning. And against these cruelties the people could do nothing. They had had no experience in war. They were shopkeepers and schoolmasters. The Spanish soldiers had them at their mercy, and they showed no mercy." (The Baldwin Project)
Men crucified everywhere were morbid enough, but Europe had not yet witnessed the first Great Terror, in which the revolutionary government guillotined thousands of French nobles while "les tricoteuses" knitted and gossiped in the front row of the assembled crowds. The British internment and elimination of tens of thousands of the Boer warriors' families in South Africa followed. Turkish genocide of the Armenians came shortly afterwards. The unthinkable slaughter on the battlefields of World War One followed. Then in the 1930s, the Soviets introduced famine as a political weapon, and the knock on the Kulak door in the night. "This is nothing personal, you are being exterminated as a class." Finally, the appalling debauchery of the so-called "final solution", and the complete prostration of Roman Catholicism before the madness of the Bavarian Nazis (Bavaria being Roman Catholic territory). So, you can't help wondering how the Crucifixion of their founding martyr, and its memetic use over the ensuing millennia, helped the Christians develop a fierce sense of compassion for their fellow man. The only Europeans who displayed such feelings were the on-the-ground Communists who actually fought Nazism door-to-door, instead of hiding piously behind their crucifixes.

Five minutes

2007-03-25T17:41:00.000-07:00

Life-drawing jams always include the one-minute impression and the five-minute sketch. I'm trying to improve but I usually spend time on just one part of a nude instead of capturing the essence of the whole in a few broad strokes, as Susan Underwood did here. She also used a big drawing surface and treated it like a memo pad. The result has a zen-like finish.

Manography

2007-03-21T12:26:00.000-07:00

This picture is by Tara Juneau, who drew it before my eyes at Xchanges a few days ago. Tara says: "I am mostly self taught and have always been passionate about drawing. About two years ago I became very inspired by realist Tony Ryder after reading his book 'The Artists Complete Guide to Figure Drawing' , and have just recently taken a figure drawing workshop with him in Seattle."
Mostly self-taught: that just shows what passion can teach. Tara is working adjacent to the New Realism school and IMO would enjoy hugely a spell with Daniel Greaves at the atmospheric Florence Academy of Art.
She employed an unusual drawing method for the picture above which she explains as follows: "I used masonite prepared with tinted gesso. I like the surface that the gesso gives, it has a little bit of tooth. It was drawn in 4h and hb graphite (pencil), heightened with white charcoal. I used the harder pencils because they have a higher clay content and give a softer, lighter tone than say a 4 or 6b."
In pondering this realistic mode of drawing, I had several thoughts:

Realism, while ostensibly reducing stylisation to a minimum, is actually a strong stylisation of its own; and
Hockney's book The Secret Knowledge is proved false by the knowledge of these artists, which is no secret; after all, I saw Tara draw the above picture, using no machinery at all and barely the use of a pencil-tip to take the odd bearing; and
Monochrome photography is being beaten at its own game.

In the shower, I decided that a new coinage is required: Manography, derived from Latin manus for hand, and Greek graphos for design. Welcome to the world of manography and Tara Juneau.

Signature Portrait

2007-03-14T22:58:00.000-07:00

Is this a portrait? A cartoon? Or a signature? Answer: it's a bit of all three: a signaitoon. The wonderfully precocious Jean Cocteau drew this when he was just 21 years old for his older pal Eric Satie. Imagine having the chutzpah to hand someone this idiosyncratic sketch, confident that it would one day be worth big money! Perhaps it's surprising to think that the composer of those delicate Gymnopedies for piano was a Sigmund Freud look-alike. But he had looked somewhat wilder 10 years earlier, in 1900. Cocteau captured him making what was evidently a characteristic gesture, pinching his pince-nez, or spectacles, on to the bridge of his nose. It would have been instantly recognisable to friends of Satie. Picasso met Cocteau and his circle in 1917 and worked with them and Diaghilev on the ballet Parade, to Satie's music. Picasso duly did his own portrait of him in 1920. It's interesting to compare the two, because Picasso much later did signaitoons himself. But his came decades after Cocteau's. Everything Cocteau did had his imprint all over it, and he didn't change styles every few years, the way Picasso did. Cocteau's last hot love affair was with Jean Marais, and get him. His confidence over the Satie sketch was warranted, because Cocteau ended his days, not dying in the gutter like Modigliani, but wearing smart suits in a nice comfy chateau in the country.

Image manipulation

2007-03-10T09:57:00.001-08:00

These two nudes found their way on to one sheet of paper, showing how artists manipulated images millennia before computer whizzes resized, altered and pasted them on screens. In both images on the page, I portray the same model, and so the impossible is laid out before our eyes. It has been shown that Degas used the same method to place dancers originally drawn individually in his studio into groups. In fact, just about all groupings in historic art were produced in the same way. An individual (human, animal) was drawn in the studio, either directly into the group-work, or resized and added to it. You can be sure that Rubens did not gather the family of Jan Breughel the Elder into his studio to paint them all at once. Nor did Botticelli happen upon beautiful, blonde, identical quintuplets in the streets of Florence and invite them to pose for La Primavera. In this way, historic art was closer to drama or masque or tableau than to photography. The artist, in turn, was closer to a magician or conjuror, as he not only created images, but manipulated them. In the virtual worlds conjured digitally today such manipulation is anonymous and routine. In the case of my drawing, it was originally a way to save paper before I noticed its aesthetic appeal. Shame about the missing left hand.

Simulacra

2007-03-10T07:28:00.000-08:00

Simulacra are vague likenesses, and they starred in Jean Baudrillard's 1981 book, Simulacra and Simulations. Baudrillard loved juicy disinformation, and illustrators are past masters of it. Nothing can distort and misinform quite so well as a thoroughly misleading drawing. Here's an example: on the right are shown three different skulls in profile, Caucasian, African and Chimpanzee. The African profile is faked to look like a chimpanzee's. On the left are the three supposedly corresponding faces, sharply emphasizing the vast chasm that separates in appearance the god Apollo, a so-called "Creole Negro", and a particularly poorly-drawn chimpanzee. The purpose of these images is to reinforce white racism and Imperialist overlordship. The victim here is the African: such simulacra were deployed by the Nazis to degrade Jews.
The chimpanzee skull is accurate enough, as is the human one. However, the simulacra do not include the skull of the baby chimp, which is far flatter than the adult's, reflecting the Darwinian observation that human adults have an infantilised face.
Meanwhile, the "Creole Negro" skull is a grotesque forgery, as demonstrated by this African skull found in a slave cemetary in the USA. Such racist forgeries were common at the time, and even corrupted the world of science in the notorious case of the Piltdown non-man. Note the latitude for forgery in drawing, as opposed to photography.

Sketch portrait

2007-03-09T08:39:00.000-08:00

Don Bachardy is a master of the sketch portrait. This one of my hero, Aldous Huxley, probably took him no more than twenty minutes. It's hard to persuade a subject to stay still for much longer than that. It's always been a fantasy of mine to wear a bottle-green corduroy suit, carry a clipboard and pad, and do sketch portraits for money in Montmartre. Bachardy did the same, except around the salons of Los Angeles. (His book of portraits was called Stars In My Eyes.) Last year, it was reported he was still doing it, drawing movie-diva Angelina Jolie in Paris, the pictures to go into the Jolie collection at her hide-out in Namibia.
The sketch of Huxley was done in August, 1962, just fifteen months before his death, which occurred an hour or two after the assassination of JFK on November 22, 1963. To me, there's something wrong with Huxley's hand in the picture, and I don't mean just that it is pointing towards the tongue in which Huxley had suffered fatal cancer since 1960. Either his palm folded in a most unusual way, or Bachardy simply fudged a finger that went wrong. That, or he relocated the edge of the hand. That aside, Bachardy makes Huxley into little more than one line, from above the elbow through the narrow face to the carrot-top hair, which Huxley kept just a little long in the Oxbridge intellectual style. Huxley was very tall, and that's reflected here in the length of the wrist, which looks vulnerable. The eyes are a bit soppily done, glamourised even, considering that Huxley was nearly blind (originally from a nasty disease caught from horrid surroundings at exclusive and expensive Eton College) and normally wore spectacles with thick lenses.
Bachardy's entree into L.A. celebrity circles began when as a young man he moved in with Christopher Isherwood, another Cambridge U emigrant (like myself, although I got my Honours degree, he didn't). They were together for decades, and Bachardy has done numerous nudes of young men. His spare drawing style became his trade-mark, with shadow and line given equal emphasis. However, this sketch of Huxley is a bit of a "sell". I'm not sure Huxley would have approved, assuming he ever saw it properly.

Getting the outline right

2007-03-06T15:22:00.000-08:00

This model I drew at a workshop in West London, England. She grew larger each time she posed. She is Brazilian and with her partner was saving up to buy a home in Brazil. I had only just begun life-drawing, and found in this session just how slow using a pencil is compared with Conte pastel. With Conte, which is a stick of solid medium, you can shade with the broad side, filling swathes of paper at a stroke. With your sharpened tip, you can pick out line and detail. But with a pencil, you just have your sharpened tip and nothing else. The shading you have to do by cross-hatching, something I had not learned then, and still have not studied.
You can see that I was obsessive about getting the outline, a characteristic I can't shake off. I wanted to express the image in a single outline before I did any other work on it. Wrong! You can do just as well by first drawing only the shading, and detailing outlines later. Here, I have not learned more than a French or Spanish cave-painter two-hundred and seventy centuries ago.

Cheesecake nude

2007-03-04T12:16:00.000-08:00

This is a copyrighted image from the 1940s by T.R. Braithwaite, who after art training spent his life toiling in the "creative" departments of corporate advertising. Advertising permanently taints the creations of those who practise it. Braithwaite probably drew a decent nude before he put on the spectacles of commerce. The result is a nude that has been cheesecaked. It means the picture is selling the attractions of the model to me, instead of just delineating them and allowing them to speak for themselves. The genre grew (inevitably) out of US consumerism and the popularisation of young female beauty through Hollywood leg art, which is neither about legs nor about art, but about merchandising. At the same time in the 1930s and 40s, arted pin-ups entered circulation. The most famous exponent of this genre was Vargas. I think the cheesecake giveaway in Braithwaite's nude, called Diane, is the foot, which looks as if it is in a high-heeled shoe, even if it is not. The most famous exponent of shoes in the 1940s and 50s was Andy Warhol, who had already made a fortune out of drawing shoes commercially, long before he launched into his second career as a pop artist. Vargas pin-ups are rarely without high-heeled shoes. The conjunction of legs, degrees of nudity and high-heeled shoes was obviously a powerful turn-on for earlier generations, being a uniquely American blending of consumer packaging with ancient lust. It was so pervasive at the time that poor Braithwaite was unable to draw a nude in any other manner.

Schematic drawing

2007-03-04T10:57:00.000-08:00

Here's a drawing by a Finnish sceptic of how the World Trade Center towers were primed with explosives to make them collapse after airliners hit them. The drawer notes that "This drawing is schematic only. The actual towers were much taller and the observed arch of destruction of the energy-directed thermonuclear device was correspondingly more narrow." Schematics like this must have been the birth of drawing, as early people shared semiotic images drawn with a stick in friable ground. The drawer's text continues:

The Ground Zero here is in the original sense of word, a nuclear blast site. Thermal energy may absorb heat at a rate of 10 E 23 ergs / cm2 sec and near the bomb all surfaces may heat to 4000 °C or 7200 °F igniting or vapourizing violently. Source: US Department of Defense & US Department of Energy, Glasstone – Dolan: 'The Effects of Nuclear Weapons' (1980).

The thermonuclear bomb used was a 'pure' hydrogen bomb, so no uranium or plutonium at all. The basic nuclear reaction is Deuterium + Tritium > Alpha + n. The ignition of this is the fine part, either with a powerful beam array or antimatter (a very certain way to get the necessary effect of directed energy in order not to level the adjacent blocks of high-rise buildings, as well).

What? Nuclear bombs at the Twin Towers in 2001?
It's plausible, know why? Because liquidized metal was found under the ruins many days later, and those hijackers (if they existed) could not have known that the towers would collapse as a result of their kamikaze attacks. All the airliner impacts promised to do was make holes and cause dramatic fires, as indeed happened. But after half an hour the fires were actually burning out, something the blackness of the smoke proved. Living people were photographed right at the point of impact, proving that the fires had effectively burned out. A team of firemen high in the south tower radioed HQ expressing confidence that they could deal with the limited blaze confronting them.
The south tower fell first, although it was hit second, precisely because the fires were burning down and the firefighters reported they could deal with them. The brazen Imperial criminals at the controls, probably from the vantage point of the NY emergency bunker in Building Seven, chose that moment to detonate. Later, they ensured that WTC7, too, bit the dust, although it appeared to be undamaged except for a few minor fires that were unattended by the depleted NY fire department. Three steel-framed towers collapsed, ostensibly as a result of fires, on 9-11 although they had never done so in history, and have never done so since.

Gesture

2007-03-04T09:52:00.000-08:00

Here it is, my first submission from an Xchanges artist to the forthcoming exhibition catalogue. It's from Joan Steacy. She calls it Gesture. Joan always has her conte pastel exactly the right shape, for perfect execution. She demonstrates gesture with a drawing that gives the illusion of being dashed off, but is actually the accumulation of many years of practice. Not only do the sweeps of conte-edge grab the essence of a pose in a couple of seconds; Joan then highlights the crucial parts with sharpened conte-tip to complete her zen-like statement. Note how the weight is perfectly distributed, through the shoulders, down the twist of the spine on to the left leg, while the right leg gestures from that position of strength. The axis of that posture is in the parts of the picture highlighted in dark pastel, from the left waist, through the hips and down the right leg. These limning gestures are then pointed up in line. The picture both illustrates a gesture (of the leg), and depicts it by gestures (of the hand).
This contribution is a fine start to the exhibition catalogue that I have been charged with producing, for which I have just half a dozen pictures at the moment. I'm hoping for at least thirty.
Joan is author of So That's That!, an illustrated memoir of life with her Dad, 'Junky Jack' Thornborrow. He raised her in a motor vehicle recycling plant, otherwise known as a junkyard, in which richly inventive environment she grew into a gifted illustrator and here. Joan is married to artist Ken Steacy, who runs kenspublishing.com, promoting the work of artists such as Ralph McQuarrie (copyrighted image).

Desnuda

2007-03-02T16:32:00.000-08:00

This is a half-hour pose from a workshop at Xchanges artists' co-operative in Victoria, Canada. Pat Martin Bates, who helped found the co-op exactly 40 years ago, told me yesterday there's no place left for a small art school in today's economy. By the same token, Xchanges definitely should not exist, but it does, and I am thankful for it.
This drawing immediately presented a foreshortening problem, as the model was recumbent with her head towards me. I drew it in early days at the co-op, over eighteen months ago, while I was still tackling the matter of hands and feet. No drawing is any good that does not grapple with these crucial parts of the anatomy. They are like the signatures of study. Both hands are imperfect here (the left hand and forearm elongated), and both feet unfinished, indeed the right one is hardly recognisable.
Other faults are in the ribs which are too heavily drawn, and the right nipple which gets lost in the blanket (causing my outspoken daughter to name the picture: "the woman with one tit").
Nevertheless, there is a ripple to the whole picture that appeals to me, and I branded it with the Spanish word for naked, desnuda.

The runway nude

2007-03-02T15:17:00.000-08:00

This nude I drew at a workshop in Richmond-Upon-Thames in England in 2003. It's a half-hour pose. The model was about 40 years of age and well-preserved in the midriff and legs. Perhaps she did not own a car and walked a lot. She also had shaved a "runway" into her pubic hair which, at the angle I was drawing her, and with her tight tummy, gave prominence to her pubic mound. I wanted to capture this, and paid attention to getting right the proportions of her legs, pelvic and stomach areas. It was particularly sensitive getting the almost 90-degree angle of her left inner thigh without the use of the plumb-line that John Singer Sargent always recommended an artist should have handy for drafting a drawing. At this stage, I had only a few months' experience of life-drawing, and I had some progress to make on chiaroscuro. I also left too little time to attend to a vital element, her hair. It should have been sketched in with wavy lines instead of heavily hatched in a lifeless way. But I have to admit that in spite of its obvious evidence of inexperience, I like the way this nude leaps off the page. Her right forearm is brave, and her lower body is wonderful --- except for the truncated right foot, of course.

Drafting a nude

2007-03-02T14:15:00.000-08:00

I drew this picture of Eva (a 30 year-old macrame artisan from Barcelona) in my studio in San Miguel de Allende in February, 2007. Aesthetically, it works. By the rules, a body should be about six and a half heads long. This one is more like eight. Of course, it is her left leg and torso that are extended. However, this is a case where the limner can get away with breaking the rules, because Eva is reclining horizontally. If she were standing, the distortion would be instantly discernible by those with an eye for the studio style. By "studio style" I mean the vintage rules for human-figure drawing, deriving from the Renaissance obsession with mathematics and proportion. Many of the Renaissance artists cheated, using mechanical devices to reproduce their subjects exactly, as David Hockney illustrates in detail in his excellent book Secret Knowledge. But equally many, among them Albrecht Durer and Leonardo Da Vinci, believed there were scientific rules of beauty and form. Durer actually travelled to Aachen (with his sour wife) to seek a secret book owned by the court painter of the sister of the Emperor. She, however, foolish woman, wanted to give the book to her new court painter, and so it vanished from history, along with its gnomic formulae.
There's another error in my drawing of Eva: the shading behind her is not completed around her face and folded arms, thus destroying the illusion of contrast between her figure and the wall or background.
But all the same, I like this drawing because it came to me all-of-a-piece and I think it shows. Her head and arms are glamorous, while the rest of her body is all-too-human. In the contrast is some dynamism.