Fish on Red

This painting is inspired by A Nos Pinceaux blog, one of my favorite blogs of art challenges. Evhe posted the photo of fish in the basket at French market in summer 2012, but only this February I could get to the image, stuck deep in my head for all this time.

Today I test web-service IFTTT. It is very simple, in comparison with its complex name. Now, when post is ready and I push  "Publish" in my favorite Blogger, the post will be automatically duplicated in Tumblr, Flickr and Facebook. Of course you can duplicate manually (if you are interested to do it at all). But I always considered and proved with my actions that laziness is the main engine of progress.
I look forward to see how if it works.

And now my short notes about latest reading discoveries.
"I Remember Nothing" by Norah Ephron seemed full of banal and obvious statements when I started the book. But when I finished everything was different. Book is so wise and simple in a way when "simple" means experience and depth of  talented, clever, funny and wise 69 years old woman, dying of cancer and knowing it.

Another book is "Art and Fear" by David Bayles and Ted Orland.  It is about fears and doubts living in a head of the creator, about rivalry and originality. The book helped to realize that my reflections about artwork are on one wave with many artists - painters, writers, musicians, and that fear and doubt are serious enemies, but they can be overcome.

Hospital Building

I made a photo of this beautiful building in the summer and at last sketched it at home.
But so far when driving around the building of this hospital, I have plans to be back in the spring for the plein-air.

Recently I have watched "The Hobbit" (to tell the truth, I was forced to, I neither read Tolkien, nor watched other movies of "the Ring" series). It was too noisy and too straightforward for my taste, but the king of gnomes was very handsome and this fact helped me to get to the end of the performance.

Weeks passed, but I continued to recall one character of the movie, Gollum, as symbol of duality, of incompatible characters coexisting inside one person. 
And I recognized something about myself in Gollum. Often happens, that you are calm, benevolent and positive and suddenly, under influence of unexpected change of circumstances or stress, the beast inside you wakes up. And voila! he is the boss, he pays no attention neither to education, nor to experience, nor to rules of society. And then suddenly, unexpectedly, it is hidden back. And you are back to your normal, peaceful self again.
Is this duality familiar to you? In yourself or your relatives or friends?

Birds Feeding

This tomtit and its two relatives come flying every day to my balcony to eat.

I have made a feeding rack from 5litres plastic bottle, having cut out windows in it and having plastered edges with adhesive tape (what if the edges are too sharp for little birds' legs???) and hung out the rack out of the balcony.

The basic dish - raw sunflower seeds mixed with pearl barley (I read somewhere that tomtits like pearl barley but my visitors do not look too happy with it). And a slice of bacon on a chain turned out to be the most favored dessert.
Considering their activity and frequency of  visits, soon the windows of the bottle will be too small for these gourmets. 

Figures of Posemaniacs.com

Posemaniacs.com is always there to help us with figure drawing.

Q 10

I have recently discovered and want to share the text editor program, Q10. Here. It is free and simple and small. And it has clear interface and it inspires you to write, to create letters, words, sentences. You can (as I did) save it to usb-flesh drive (it can be portable) and write text, poem, novel, thoughts, ideas, diary - whatever hits you, in most comfortable way and in your language.
That's the monitor screen when you start (It looks so fresh and distraction-free after overloaded pages we get used to). I took image here.

Of course I consider piece of paper and pen to be the best text editors ever, but still, Q10 is good.

My illustration today shows the cafe corner where we met with my friend two weeks ago, made with ink and 2 neocolor sticks, cobalt blue and burnt sienna.

Time Management

How is your relationship with time going? Mine is difficult, time is accelerating.

Here my strategy and tactics for time management:
- A "must follow" schedule of my activities on weekly basis. It includes most of the aspects: family, work, development, movement, entertainment, rest. Mind map (here) is great help in making the list, it really wakes up my mind.

- A table, with empty columns, where I enter my activities in half hour periods. That is where I see the "lost" time and the "found" time. I made it in Excel and print weekly: I keep Saturday always empty it is my day of freedom.
- A timer, my best assistant. Time of a hard work takes turns with time of rest. Now it is 45+15, but depending on amount of work ad obligations, it can change. Timer installed into my mobile phone suits perfectly, mechanical timer works fine, too:

- Internet, my weak link. I use internet during the day for my office needs without limits. But I may visit Blogger, Google reader, Livejournal, Facebook only during time limited by my browser (I will go into details later, links work from 21-30 till 24-00).

After a month of using this method I can see where my time goes. It turns out that my day is not so bad and chaotic, as it seemed to me earlier.
There is still one unsolved problem, the speed of my personal time. I mean the situation, when task which I carried out earlier for half an hour, now requires hour, and even an one and a half. Certainly, it maybe my aging. And I am glad to confirm any theory, except to to admit that the reason is my age.

My illustrations today are the last sketches from the trip to Georgia: the view of the window in my aunt's house and the stock of red wines and pumpkins in her kitchen.