Compare & Contrast: Sennelier & Schmincke watercolour

I am preparing my travel bag and had one of the two watercolor palettes in the bag.

I did a comparison last night, and think I'll take both.

Sennelier & Schmincke 12 pan metal palattes ©

The Sennelier is a nice palette but like Graham has a wee bit more honey in it for my personal taste and dries slowly.   I don't have a complete Winsor Newton in a 12 pan set, and have a much larger Daniel Smith paint Schmincke palette.

In the end I prefer Winsor Newton & Schmincke paints more than Sennelier, Graham and Daniel Smith watercolor which I use for botanicals.

We all have our preferences.

Do you know: Marc Taro Holmes

If you don't know or follow Marc Taro Holmes blog, Citizen Sketcher, you might consider it because he not only draws and paints like a Master, he often explains how he accomplishes it.

Now he's published a book, "The Urban Sketcher."

It is not like any of the other urban sketching books I have or have seen.  Why?

Marc Taro Holmes

It is all Marc.

It is all teaching, learning, seeing, exploring.

It is all clear, and friendly.

It is Marc on paper and not just at Citizen Sketcher.

I just got it and already love it!

See some of Marc's work in this interview

Old Work 2, Abstracts

Gifted to Red Dog Scott in exchange for a tarot book

Knife in the Water

Experiment with walnut ink

If my eyes don't deceive me these were made in 2002;  the first two small abstracts in a Jonathan Talbot workshop (Warwick, New York).

I am closing down a very old website that has languished for many years and for which I have a quarterly fee.   Rather than try to find these images which are probably lost in computer moves and losses, I copied and pasted them here.

Old Work, Exquisite Corpses 2003

How Global is too global: Waldorf Astoria, New York

Park Avenue, facing South

So how Global should we be? 

The Waldorf Astoria, built in 1931 and a New York City landmark has been sold to a Chinese insurance company.

In my lifetime the changes in the City have been enormous.  If you live in the Apple you may not notice those changes, but when you leave as I have and return, you realize the extent of those changes, many radical.

Who owns a property is not often the subject of news and property does change hands with some frequency.

Neighbourhoods have face lifts.   Some become popular, others become passe.

But Park Avenue has been rather emblematic of chic, and often even too elite to traverse. 

However, Park Avenue is a wonderful thru way for traffic Uptown & Down with a wider expanse, similar to a boulevard, and yellow taxi cabs are often the predominant vehicle on the Avenue.  It also takes you directly to Grand Central Station.

Exterior Grand Central Station

Sometimes change is good; sometimes change is too abrupt, too radical, too swift for my tastes.

Is the Amazon that long?

According to this piece,  Amazon, the mega on line retailer, will open a bricks & mortar store on 34th Street, New York City.

A great name for the retailer as the Amazon River is perhaps the largest to discharge in the world.

And the retailer sure knows how to race across a Continent.

The Hacket on Hachette

The authors uniting. 

Prize winning author Ursula Le Guin, three of her books in my re-read pile, including The Left Hand of Darkness, says:

“We’re talking about censorship: deliberately making a book hard or impossible to get, ‘disappearing’ an author. Governments use censorship for moral and political ends, justifiable or not. Amazon is using censorship to gain total market control so they can dictate to publishers what they can publish, to authors what they can write, to readers what they can buy. This is more than unjustifiable, it is intolerable.”

Other notable writers engaged include Philip Roth, Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul and Milan Kundera,

Book Stores: Lamenting, at a distance, another closure

Twin Cities, MN 1963-2014 RIP

Synchronicity, Time Management & Writing

I don't suppose Jung invented the word, but he certainly explained synchronicity in his writing, often, and so when it happens to me, as it does with relative frequency, I ponder why I don't go back to the Institute.

Quo Vadis blogger Leah Hoffman wrote about Time Management recently, and in my to read file I finally got to "The Psychology of Writing and the Cognitive Science of the Perfect Daily Routine" at BrainPickings.

Routine is one of the key words in the title because it seems, for me at least, without a routine, I don't write enough or on the subject(s) I want to explore.

Distraction is another factor to seriously explore in my non-routine.

And here James Elroy, with 19 hand written novels under his belt, talks about how he doesn't permit distraction.

When I wrote each morning, not leaving my seat until one thousand words were manufactured, I had few distractions--no internet, no email, no phone calls permitted, no garden to attend, a large wonderful writing surface and the ease of an adjacent carafe of coffee.

Writing Hat, gift Shirley Valentine (alias) ~ 1990

And my hat.

With my hat in view, and a major change in plans because of the abrupt change of season cold, I also explored discardia, the art of not saving stuff you don't use, and decided it was time to let go of my dancing shoes.   They were not aiding my energy level, I wasn't dancing around the studio and they wouldn't help me write.

Leather skin dancing shoes, gift RS 1994

They, like the writing hat, were a gift from a friend.    I don't recall the circumstances surrounding the gift.  But RS, an artist, lived in a terrific loft near the Italian District on Atwells and permitted her friends to use the space.   During my sabbatical year, and before I went off to see the US in the Spring of '92, I went over to the loft once or twice a week, used her big screen Mac and spread out work I was working on.   It was this friend with whom I did Morning Pages where I fleshed out some tough stuff. 

I won't miss the shoes.  I do miss RS.  Sometimes I miss Shirley Valentine, now in Birmingham (England) but I still have my hat.