Without the state:

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July 27, 2010

Mailing List

You can see a link on the sidebar to my mailing list. I'm about to send out my first newsletter, so if you want to sign up, now is the time. This first one is simply a test of the system so won't be very large. You can unsubscribe at any time, so there is nothing to lose - sign up now.

Posted by Ian Bertram on July 27, 2010 at 07:49 PM in Arts | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

July 20, 2010

Reverie

In this book from The Tate about the artist Sir Terry Frost, I found this:

"To look at a painting which gives you the opportunity to have solitude, to be yourself and to be able to wander into reverie, is more than hedonistic, it's spiritual".

Until now I have never 'got' the work of Mark Rothko - I loved his way with paint, but never understood the paintings themselves. Somehow this quote managed to pin down for me their essentially meditative nature.

Which leads me to this from Rothko:

"Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness. "

In a strange way this has also given me a focus for my own abstract work, where I have I think always had this guilty feeling that I was simply making patterns - which for me is decoration not art. Consequently I am preparing a series based on this idea of reverie and on the idea of looking into and through a painting and finding yourself as much as the artist. Time will tell...

Posted by Ian Bertram on July 20, 2010 at 04:00 PM in Arts, Books | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

July 13, 2010

Alternate History

I have always liked the alternate history genre. I'm currently working on one of my own based on a slightly different outcome to the Easter Rising in Dublin 1916. I'm posting these to the Usenet group soc.history.what-if where you can join in the discussion (not that there is much currently) and I will be archiving them here as they are written, although currently the links on that page are to the usenet discussion (repeated below). You can also see a link to that page in the side bar on the right hand side.

Creating the Point of Departure from our time line

Part 1 February 1947

Part 2 Johannesburg May 1947

Part 3 Aftermath of the Easter Rising 1916-1920

Part 4 Glasgow uprising 1919

Posted by Ian Bertram on July 13, 2010 at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)