Farewell

Lee Alexander McQueen (1969-2010) and his mother, Joyce (-2010).

We cling together, needing

For all the good it does.

Tumblr poem

A sketch a day...

As part of a birthday present to myself, I got the upgrade to ArtRage 2.0, which makes painting on the computer at last possible (in a price range I can afford). But it's still a question of mimicking the subtlety of hand/pencil gestures with an aged Apple (wired) optical mouse. Pressure-sensative tablets have gotten cheaper and smaller, but only after I've run out of funds, and they're damned hard to find in the middle of the Baltic. So I'll struggle along with what I've got to learn the basic skills - there are surprising levels of complexity in the software now. I'm not displeased with the above, although it seems to be my one and only standard subject these days (la recherche des temps perdu).

Now This is Opera!

Fabrice Neaud

Thanks to Bernard Alapetite I've finally learned the identity of the artist whose work I've seen and admired frequently, without knowing much about it. According to Wikipedia, Fabrice Neaud is a forty-to year old artist/philosopher who uses the "bande dessinée" style as a narrative tool.

He is a co-founder of the Ego comme X association. In 1994, the first number of the Ego comme X magazine was released. In it, Fabrice Neaud published his first works. It was the beginning of his Journal (which is a diary in comics), an ambitious autobiographical project. The first volume of the Journal was released in 1996. It got a prize Alph'art (best work by a young artist) in Angoulême in 1997. Wikipedia

But what particularly caught my attention was his collaboration with Thierry Robberecht on Alex et la vie d'après, a story by about a young man coping with a recent sero-positive diagnosis. It is a 55 page, public service, fully illustrated comic-book edited by Ex Aequo, Bruxelles, 2008 which can be downloaded here. And, although only available in French, is so beautifully detailed and passionately felt that it can be easily understood by anyone. It is also an excellent introduction to Neaud's very cinematic style of rendering and beautiful use of black and white in dramatic compositional variation.

The four volumes (so far) of his Journal and most of his other works are available here and there is a fairly comprehensive English fan site here if you would like to know more.

"Light snow!"

Light Snow, -6ºC (feels like -14º)

Wind: 26 km/h, direction E

Pressure: 982.1 mb, steady

Humidity: 91%, Dew point: -7ºC

Visibility: 3.0 km, UV-index: N/A, N/A

Another loss...

for honesty, intelligence, and American Common Sense.

"His writings have changed the consciousness of a generation, and helped open new paths to understanding and its crucial meaning for our lives," Noam Chomsky, the left-wing activist and MIT professor, once wrote of Dr. Zinn. "When action has been called for, one could always be confident that he would be on the front lines, an example and trustworthy guide."
Boston Globe

Who will tell our story now?

Howard Zinn, historian and author of
A People's History of the United States,
has died of a heart attack. He was 87.