Rainy Morning

I re-read my last post and it did quite well to betray my state at the time, although I've written much funnier / surreal things when on the verge of sleep. In any case, nothing much to report in the past few days as I catch up with work and chores.

Link of the day: http://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/
What is it: a website dedicated to publishing daily entries from George Orwell's diary. Bostonian weather has certainly come a-calling. The weather for the last few days have been chilly and cold and rainy - what one would generally associate with this city. I used to think one only writes about weather when one has nothing else to say. Orwell proved me wrong. He's quite the writer, authoring classroom classics like Animal Farm and 1984, but if you look through his diary entries, he devotes quite a bit of his ink to observing nature, especially the weather and ripening of vegetables. In fact, he almost begins his every entry with a line or two about the weather. I suppose this is no different from art. Artists-in-training are always encouraged to sketch constantly in their sketchbooks and the most obvious things to observe and record are weather-related, as weather changes from day to day.

Artist of the day: George Innes
Who is he: a landscape painter of the mid-late 19th century. I first saw one of his "approaching storm" paintings and was drawn by the way he used a bright reddish orange near the center of his composition to "gather in the storm." It was a very daring feat since the bright color will inevitably draw the viewer to the center of the painting first and hold him captive, preventing the eye to take in the rest of the work. Perhaps it was the proportion of colors he used or it was the way he surreptitiously carried the colors throughout his piece in hardly detectable ways, Innes was able to achieve a harmonious yet moving whole. Unfortunately, I cannot seem to find the painting I just described, but google image has a number of his other landscapes available.