It's been a long time since I posted anything meaningful here, and my excuses for this long absence are... "Wasn't in a mood", "Too busy trying to earn a few pennies", "Taken up a course", "Too angry to write", etc.
Anyway, I tried my first acrylic painting, and here is the completed one:
I guess you are staring at the screen and saying "What the f... ?", soI should explain a bit. All the things in the picture are what I saw this summer in London:
Flowers at the top (including the red one with white outline)
From the tiles of Islamic world at Victoria
& Albert museum. Since I was little, I have always been attracted to the
Middle Eastern and Central Asian stuff and I spent quite a long time in the
Islamic section in the museum.
Purple dots and grey sky
Ceiling in our favourite café
where me and my big girl eat Arab food and my wee one has fish and chips.
Flowers at the bottom
Gold flowers on a headdress from an
excavated tomb in Afghanistan. I paid £10 to see a special exhibition at the
British Museum, which was worth more than £100!
Profile with red outline
One of many wet specimens at
Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons. It is a right section of a child’s face, which
was dyed to show the tumour inside the nose, but the dye ended up colouring the
whole skin and the face looked as if he died only 5 minutes ago. (He lived in 19th
century, I think…) We joined a free guided tour at the museum, which was very
very very good. (Yes, I’m a nerd:)) )
I painted the profile without much detail to remember that we visited Tate Modern to see contemporary art. The red line kind of suggests that his face was sliced in half.
I painted the profile without much detail to remember that we visited Tate Modern to see contemporary art. The red line kind of suggests that his face was sliced in half.
Blue lady on the centre-right and rainbow on the left
London Pride (gay parade) and the air kiss I got from the bloke in sparkling
blue dress and blue make-up, of course;) The rainbow is not like a natural
rainbow because it is meant to be a huge long cloth that filled the whole
street during the parade.
Hand and clown at the bottom-right, and potted plant at the top-left corner
We went
to Barbican Gallery to see a special exhibition on animation, and The Hand by a
Czech animator Jiri Trinka was the most memorable and impressive for all three
of us. I should have taken you to the exhibition! It was fantastic!!! After
coming home, I managed to get hold of the DVD which contains "The Hand" and other
short animation works! Thanks to the DVD, now I’m reading The Good Soldier Svejk.
Girl on slope
We spotted her while eating sandwiches on a bench
in Kensington Gardens. She must have been only 3-4 years old, and she was with
her mother and another set of mother + little daughter. The girl suddenly
started making a yoga pose in front of us, while strolling behind her mother,
which was very comical. (Her mother looked a posh upper-middle class who eats organic food and practises yoga.)
In the painting, I just let her grab the rainbow.
Wanted her to bring down the world in a way that no adults could ever do.
Pink glasses
Worn by a heroine of the film we watched in
London. The film was made by a Chinese-New Zealander woman and the title is “My
Wedding and Other Secrets”, which was a special screening at a New Zealand Film
Festival. One of the actresses made a speech before the film!
My girls instantly figured out what each thing in the painting was, so I'm quite happy about the result. I didn't know painting can be so time-consuming, but it was great fun!
