Thursday 28 October 2010

Of Tents and Cathedrals

So I was at a friends wedding, turned up early for the reception so drew this to pass the time


It came out really well and Al (the groom at the back there) stood up at just the right time.  One of the kids at the wedding managed to identify three people in there, so that's got to be a good sign!

Something else I'm liking right now is 'The Pillars of the Earth' they're showing on Channel 4 at the moment.  I read the sequel book, 'World Without End', without realising it was a sequel, but I enjoyed the way all the characters lives twist together, and the long period of time it covers.  Both the book and the series cover at least 30 years, something you don't see a lot of, and I liked it.

Plus the title sequence is pretty cool.

Tuesday 26 October 2010

That warm fuzzy feeling...

Well I've been a busy little body lately, partly because I've finally made the official start on my first 'proper' project, by which I mean one where it actually matters that I perform to a professional standard, and also one where I will recieve money at the end.  So hoorah for that!  Maybe once it's all done I'll put a few things up here, along with some links to the final video which will be viewable online, but until then I'm going to have to sit on it.
Also a busy weekend because two of my friends got married on Sat 23rd (to each other!) so a little flotilla of cars made it's way down the M5 to Oxford for the wedding.  I managed to get a little drawing done too, but more on that in the next post.

Rather ironically, or at least dichotomously, I found out that my Grandad has suffered a heart-attack while at the reception party.  Obviously everyone was a bit scared but he's doing fine.  It does kind of throw up the dualistic nature of life on planet earth -these two drastically contrasting events can happen right next to each other.  When I told my friend she said (meaning well, bless her) "Wow, it's almost like Four Weddings and a Funeral" to which I rather wryly replied "Sure, except there was only one wedding, and no funeral at all."  But I know what she meant.

In addition to all that excitement, I've managed to carve out a little time for some reading and also some arts and craft time!  Yeah!
Based roughly on these instructions from the {NewNew} blog I felted a jumper I bought from a charity shop by putting it in the hot wash (and accidentally shrinking it because I forgot to take it out before the spin-dry started), and after some cutting, sewing and generally seamsressing, I produced this:

My hot water bottle fits neatly through the turtleneck and once I tie it closed it is a lovely fuzzy bundle of warmth to rest on during those specially chilly nights -which has been pretty much every night for the past week, so good timing there!
My friend Anna Purver is going to make me a little bird to sew onto it since my own sewing is actually not that pretty.  Sturdy, but not pretty, and I can't use a sewing machine either :)  
You can see examples of her lovely creations over at her blog, Needles and Buttons, and I think a little fabric bird will make a great finishing touch and add a splash of colour.



Thursday 21 October 2010

A man who knew where his towel was

"From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie."

~Hokusai

Monday 18 October 2010

Wearing the Clever Trousers

I seem to be interested in prodigies of late. Geniuses, savants, people of unusual intelligence. I always like to see characters with a brain being appreciated and explored since a lot of attention is usually given to the more athletic and therefore more physically attractive characters.  My current favourites are Spencer Reid of Criminal Minds and the boys from The Big Bang Theory but I seem to have picked up a pattern in the films I've been watching lately, and discovering more in them than just admirable intellects.

My favourites seem to deal with the dichotomy of genius, which is that a mental ability in one area can be accompanied by a deficiency in another. Sometimes it's a simple lack in social skills from too long spent outcast from the popular kids, or a mental illness that counterweights their genius, and sometimes is what makes it possible at all (e.g. Reid shows mild signs of Asperger syndrome, and Rain Man's Raymond is autistic)

So here's this week's playlist:
(Titles link to trailers)

Good Will Hunting
When I read the summary I assumed it would be the classic case of 'Lonely Nobody discovers he has Supernatural Abilities. He is now a Hero!' Almost like a superhero, Spiderman maybe. But instead it focussed on something I hadn't considered before- unfulfilled potential.

Will, the protagonist, is incredibly gifted. He can work out problems overnight that took his professors years to solve, he understands mathematics the way Mozart understood music, and can recall hundreds of facts at a moments notice, yet he spends his time working as a janitor in MIT and getting into pointless fights.

When one professor discovers Will's talents he decides that such a great mind cannot be wasted and bails Will out of jail with great ambitions for him, including formal lessons and therapy. However as Will slowly begins to speak with Sean, the only therapist to survive his vicious repartee, we see that it isn't that he is unaware of his own intelligence -on the contrary, he is so aware of it that he deliberately and antagonistically runs mental rings around anyone he meets just because he can- but that he has been so emotionally damaged by his life so far that he refuses to attempt anything he really wants, for fear of losing it.

There's a lot in this movie; the desire for success versus the perceived shame of failure, what happens when the need for recognition takes over, the assumptions we make about other people's lives, how fear can paralyse and isolate us, the effect cruelty and rejection has on people, the cost of abandoning troubled youths to the judicial system, the merits of intelligence versus empathy, and why we need to know ourselves and examine our actions carefully. It's a very moving film in places, funny too, and surprisingly profound in the aftermath. I highly recommend it.


Proof
Catherine Bryggman struggles to make sense of her life following the death of her father Robert, a great mathematician. When a proof is found in her father's study that may resolve an important theory in the mathematical world, and which Catherine claims to have written, she has to come to terms with the fact that as well as inheriting her father's brilliant mind, she may also be carrying the mental illness that haunted him until his death.

The cast is small which makes it very intimate to watch -the play it is based on only has four parts and they mostly keep to that- and the relationships very tangible. I like the quiet of it, the long pauses, the silences it leaves, and the math joke (I'm a sucker for a nerdy pun). While Proof deals with the same topic as A Beautiful Mind, that of fearing your own mind, I think I prefer Proof for keeping it small-scale and personal rather than going for the career-spanning grandiose air that A Beautiful Mind has, although each is justified in it's filming style for the story it tells, it's just a matter of taste.



A Beautiful Mind
John Forbes Nash Jr. is one of those guys whose ideas and discoveries are behind a lot of the processes we take for granted today. His work as a mathematician focussed on using maths to describe and analyse human behaviour and strategies, and the patterns and effects caused by variations in the environment (please excuse my Laymen's, all those with better understanding of it). He also suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. Many people get schizophrenia confused with multiple personality disorder (I did until I looked it up), where the sufferer switched between personalities, but schizophrenia is more like switching between versions of reality. The sufferer experiences things that simply are not there, hallucinations and delusions, while often appearing perfectly normal in all other ways.

For most of his career Nash struggled against the advance of the illness, and the film (based on the book of the same title) shows him trying to reconcile with the fact that his most treasured possession, his mind, is also the source of his greatest suffering.  It's a window, albeit a decorated and slightly Hollywood-ised one, into the fascinating life of one remarkable man, and just how resilient humans can be.


Rain Man
This is supposed to be one of those films that 'Everyone Has To See', so I gave it a go. For the impossible few that haven't heard of it the story revolves around Charlie Babbit, a young man very bitter towards his estranged and recently deceased father, who discovers that he has an older brother, Raymond, who is autistic and living in a care home. Their father bequeathed three million dollars to Raymond in his will, only leaving Charlie his old car, so in an effort to claim 'his share' Charlie hits the road with Raymond, hoping to use him as leverage. However the more time he spends with his brother, the more his attitude changes towards both Raymond and himself.

Rain Man doesn't really fit my genre since it's more about Charlie learning how to be loyal, compassionate and generally less of a selfish ass than he was before than it is about his brother's genius, Raymond is just the catalyst that begins that transformation and it is his disabilities that are the real focus.

In that sense Raymond's mind isn't really explored much, but the portrayal of autism has been highly praised and that's important because this is the other way of approaching the topic. The other movies (Proof and A Beautiful Mind in particular) show highly intellectual people holding the fort of cleverness against the onslaught of mental illness or emotional trauma and for the most part succeeding. Rain Man approaches it from the other end of the spectrum. Raymond has never fought as John and Catherine fought, because from the moment he was born he was already lost to autism, but rather than portray him as someone to whom mental illness represents a long fall into darkness Raymond is shown as a complete person, and not a lesser one for being autistic. He is eccentric and bound by the need for routine, but he is complete. Moreso than Charlie in many ways, and as he learns to recognise Raymond as a valuable human being he has a connection with, Charlie is humanised in turn.

Friday 15 October 2010

Bowing and scraping

Hello hello, I'm still alive.  Apologies for the long absence, up here in the university town of Loughborough we have been having Freshers Week (fortnight!) so a hundred and one things have all been crying out for my attention. 
As a peace token I offer you this picture of a funny man.
I drew it as a commission for a friend, and she was very specific about what the style, colours, everything was going to look like, right down to the exact tone of red for the background.  It's just a straightforward portrait but I rather like it.  He changed a bit from the sketching stage when he was a lot more angular and stylised.  Billy Connolly is a very funny guy, but darn it when you break his face down into it's constituent parts he has got some scary features!

Here he is in sketch stage and a different style that got rejected for the final version, with his squinty little eyes, big black eyebrows and some pretty awesome hair.  I do like drawing longer hair, it's just more fun.