Paintings and Visual Arts, Classical Music, Pop Music, Fiction, Poetry, Plays, Films and Radio

iPad painting by Jeanie Mellersh
Baltic, Kids on Spit, a painting by Jeanie Mellersh using an iPad. Nick and Jeanie’s web site is at www.mellersh.org.
Nick Mellersh by Jeanie Mellersh
Nick Mellersh by Jeanie Mellersh

A friend, Jeanie Mellersh, who I’ve known for many years is what I’d call an experimental artist. Apart from being an accomplished flautist (and having written a guide to the instrument, with her husband, Nick), she has produced works of art that I’d never have thought possible: for example, 3D paintings on the insides of papier-maché hemispheres – you put your head inside and look around. Her latest venture is using the iPad as an artist’s tool. Take a look at her using an iPad to recreate a Hockney painting Video part 1 and Video part 2, or check out her blog for examples of her work.

Impressionism

Antoine Blanchard (1910–1988): Flower Market, Place de la Madeleine, Paris
Oil on canvas, 12½×18 inches

The Arts: Paintings and Visual Arts

Here I’m looking at the more serious side of life, things that entertain me but aren’t usually considered ‘fun’, though some of these contradict this paradym.

Works of art that I like appear in four files other than this one and the galleries of photographs:

Impossible Triangles and Other Things

(Just a thought: if they’re impossible, can they be called things?)

Impossible Triangle Illusion

Here’s a selection of mathematical shapes and figures, all of which are interesting and some, particularly by the Dutch graphics artist M C Escher, are downright impossible, but are nevertheless convincing. See Mathematics — Fact and Illusion. I find regular polyhedra fascinating and beautiful; they are a “natural” as opposed to man-made art form. If illusions fascinate you go there for more impossible shapes and fractals. If you like those, take a look at Conway’s Game of Life. Yes it’s all Art on Maths pages!


Recommended book: Un Mundo de Figuras Imposibles [A World of Impossible Figures], Bruno Ernst (Taschen), 1985 (it’s in Spanish, the original is in Dutch, but I’m sure it’s available in English too).

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Freud by Bacon

Three Studies of Lucian Freud by Francis Bacon,
a 1969 triptych of portraits sold for a record $142m (£89m) in a New York auction

More Arts (Some Less Serious): Classical Music, Pop Music, Fiction, Poetry, Plays, Films and Radio

These are more things and people that entertain me:

Musical notes Books

Fictional Writing

My Stories

I’ve written several stories, mostly short, one a bit longer and more complicated. Let me know if you enjoy them. To start reading the story or resume reading click on one of these links:

Millennium
A very short story set in the year 2999 (written in 1999). Click on the title (left) to read it.
The Plutonian
A longer Science Fiction story set in about the year 2500 (written in 2008). Click on the title (left) to read it.
Prokofiev
A Mystery novel set in the present (written in 2010), with a twist. This story has no connection with the famous Ukrainian Sergei Sergeyevitch Prokofiev, the composer of several operas, symphonies, film scores and other musical works nor with anyone else, alive or dead, real or fictional. It is a kind of whodunnit, but for anyone peeking forward to discover what happens, the author’s advice is DON’T; it would spoil the whole point of the novel for you. And, yes, it does start with Chapter 0. Click on the title (above) to read it.
The Green Flash
A much longer Science Fiction story set in the present (written in 2011); please don’t read the ‘newspaper’ documents until you’ve reached the appropriate part of the story (you’ll know when). I’ve added a real (2014) news story as a reality check but read it after the story.
[In case you take a break while reading this story, here are links to all the other chapters: Chapter -2, -3, -4, -5, -6, -7, -8 and -9 – but don’t cheat by peeking ahead! Click on the main title (above) to start reading it.]
When you want to resume reading,
click on the story title or, in the case of The Green Flash, the chapter number above.

Fictional Writing

Other Peoples’ Stories – ‘Real’ Literature

Believe it or not, I’m not the only person to have written anything! That stuff wasn’t written by the team of monkeys who managed to type out all of Shakespeare’s work (And it didn’t take me a trillion years, as you may have deduced).

No, there are others. The evidence is before you now. Here’s a link to some of my favourite authors;
Chaucer and Shakespeare get special attention.

Non-fiction writers and presenters, for example of television programmes, that I enjoy are in the sections on the appropriate subjects: Astronomy, Science, Mathematics, or whatever.


An Interactive Hyperphoto

Here’s something that quite blew my mind when I saw it on www.theguardian.com: Video Palau de la Musica by Jean-François Rauzier — interactive.
It’s described as an “interactive hyperphoto”. Escher would have approved, I’m sure.

A Grammatical Trap for Foreigners Learning English

I saw a catalogue of paintings by Winslow Homer (1836 — 1910), an American landscape painter and printmaker, best known for his marine subjects; one painting was entitled “Boy Fishing” and another “Shark Fishing”! For more like this see Fun with English.