The Wonderful Blog Which You ve Never Seen

I have spent most of my adult life in a city, London, UK in fact, and travelling to and from cities in one country or another. I couldn’t understand why even though they were havens for chaos I felt at ease in them.

I have spent many years as a graphic designer too, all of these years in fact were in the same cities. Unfortunately being a graphic designer, unbelievably, caused me to miss this feeling, or at least miss-understand what it was. As I believe it, graphics was all about solving other people’s briefs, or theories, over short periods of time; the nature of graphics.

I have often looked out of the window while I was contemplating an idea and something made me feel good, enough to return to the issue with vigour. I believe this was the fact that I was staring out into a city.

Why do I find tranquillity in a chaotic city? A city cannot survive unless it is operating properly, so when I am in London, or Sydney, Singapore City or Paris, and others; I understand that these cities are well established, hence they must have some order.

I was day dreaming in the studio - in my late re-introduction into art, since just before Christmas 2005, after a 5 year break from Graphic Design, I have rented my own studio, and embarked on a fine-art journey, this time solving my own theories - and while taking a break from a very strenuous charcoal and pastel morning, I sat down and looked at all of the bits of charcoal I had accumulating.

My nature provided the first part of my artists journey, fast, furious, and flowing actions. When finished I am “stuffed”. I sat down and noticed all the bits left over from burning away at the charcoal sticks. (I say burning as I have, many times been burnt, forgetting in my passion, that charcoal sticks don’t remain the same length!).

I picked one bit up while thinking, “wouldn’t it be nice to do some smaller artworks, be a change, be cheaper too”, and started rolling and smudging it around a pad of cartridge paper, A2 in size.

It felt nice. I had tons of space, and a very small piece of charcoal. I was day dreaming still and just let the paper take me where ever it wanted. Shapes appeared in the images, and still in a state of tranquillity I continued with mild direction. It was great, people love them, I feel a bit embarrassed as I am having difficulty accepting they are mine, I know I did them, but who was pushing the charcoal?

Anyway, I did another. While doing this it gave me time to think, I used another piece of charcoal and started a drawing with vertical straight lines, then naturally I put in a horizontal line, a bit of shade and another vertical line, and so on.

Good God! I was drawing edges of buildings, they looked familiar, it was a scene of about anywhere in London, any “alley way”, or terrace house rear.
I was at home. I now had a theme, and caught a feeling. While drawing I realised that from all of London’s billions of chaotically placed bricks, drain pipes, windows, curtains, outside toilet cisterns; like in any established city, there was order.

A tranquillity has come from the variety of chaos, which over the years had found its own order.
I have started putting them up on my website now, you can see the first four at the bottom of my “projects” page on my website www.alecellis.com - these are the first, as I mentioned above, but the ones I have yet to put up are more intense, and more tranquil.
It shows how happy I am with my new discovery, I have already had these four mounted and framed for my wall in the studio. I am off up to Sydney next week to take allot of alley way shots, sketch some close views of bricks and drain pipes. The dirtier, uglier, and seedier the better.

I love the way the front of the house is a face, yet the alley ways, in which people are not expected to venture or observe, nor the rears of terrace housing, are given any real attention. Drain pipes, dirty walls, bins, old fencing, little side windows that still retain the fifties or even thirties original curtains, the curtains that came with the house.

A million pieces of chaos come to order… lovely.

Alec Ellis
Artist
http://www.m6.net
For eighteen years as a Graphic Designer from London College of Printing, UK, I have never had as much fun, freedom and serious focus as I have now. I have spent many years creating solutions for clients but now I start on a journey, from scratch, working out my own theory or theories to solve, for the rest of my life.

My personal website is http://www.alecellis.com and I am a member of http://www.m16artspace.com Art Gallery and studios in Canberra, Australia. Both websites are gratefully sponsored by M6.net my first choice in web hosts.

Tags: art, canvas, chaos, charcoal, city, create, design, draw, graphic, order, paintart, canvas, chaos, charcoal, city, create, design, draw, graphic, order, paint

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Inuit art can be best described as a ritual art. It is practised by the Canadian Eskimo, a minority group of less than thirty thousand people. The artworks of Inuit art can be found almost everywhere around the world: many rich and famous people spend their fortune collecting Inuit artworks. The art as a trend developed in 1948, when the young Canadian artist James A. Houston hitchhiked to the north of his country. He made some sketches of Inuits and gave them to the people who responded by granting him their artworks- small carvings, which they had made themselves. This first meeting with the Eskimo artworks was soon to be followed by many others. Missionaries, traders and whales started travelling to the north. The value of the carvings and the other artworks was soon appreciated and Inuit people began making their living by exchanging their art with precious goods for daily usage. Carved objects such as incised walrus tusks and miniature figures became very popular in Canada and later on in other places of the globe.

What is the main topic of Inuit art and what makes it so adorable to collectors? Perhaps it is the strong relation with nature. Inuit art depicts the physical environment and the severe way of life of the Eskimo people. It is also a representation of their traditions and beliefs, of their religious attitude. Subject matter in their art works is the northern nature, the land and the sea, also the northern animals, the birds, the plants, insects and mammals, which are indigenous to the north. Tradition has played an important role in the development of the Eskimo people, so it is included in the overall impression their art suggests.

The origins of the Eskimo people are one of the reason for Inuit art to arise. The ancient Eskimo people crossed Russia and established their new home in Alaska. The weather conditions there were so severe, that Eskimos needed all their strength to survive. The Arctic Canada was an uninhabited territory so surviving there cost them a great effort. Thus, their beliefs in the supernatural, in northern spirits and animals arose. Their traditions served a supporting role for the surviving. The ancient expressed their worries and hopes by making small amulets and adorning implements. The Inuit art is very sophisticated and attention upon small details is paid: I have seen an ancient polar bear carved on a piece of ivory smaller than a thumbnail. Inuit developed strong senses so that they could survive in the wilderness. To stay alive in the rude conditions an Eskimo needed to hunt as well as a polar bear, to imitate animal sounds in order to catch the animal, to sense a forthcoming danger faster than a raven. Animals became symbols of strength and courage, that’s why they are pictured and carved in Iniut art works. Perhaps tradition and beliefs is what makes Inuit art so popular among Western civilization: the art works were produced with a vivid sense of the surrounding world and in respect for nature.

For more information click Inuit Art
Article by Robbie Darmona - an article writer who writes on a wide variety of subjects.

Tags: art, Inuit Art, modern artart, Inuit Art, modern art

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1. In the Beginning

The U. S. Constitution was ratified before the Industrial Era came into existence. To all intents, the Republic’s overall political structure was implemented in the days of agricultural quasi-feudalism, which goes to show that the economy, though a powerful factor in a country’s makeup, does not have to dictate how we the people should live and be governed, at least not all the time.

Influenced by Karl Marx, historians found they had to classify Capitalism as an epoch unto itself, confusing, as is their ghastly habit, politics with reality, economy with history, and the joy of scientific honesty with the paycheck. Originating in the Age of Industry, Capitalism was merely an economic system requiring many hands to be productively employed by relatively few companies. Once hired, most employees were asked to perform simple, mindless, repetitive tasks. Under Capitalism, large firms rather than individual specialists took it upon themselves to produce and deliver to the so-called consumer anything and everything, from the basic staples to luxuries.

The end of that ponderous era came in sight once the first assembly line was set in motion by Henry Ford in the early years of the Twentieth Century.

Some analysts anticipated gleefully new possibilities and prospects. Others, less tediously optimistic, pointed out that automating production of goods might leave many folks without a job. To offset everyone’s fears, the optimists maintained that mechanized labor was going to create a lot of spare time for everyone which they could use to improve their spiritual standards, take long gratifying vacations in exotic regions, learn to appreciate art more, vote, and so on, and Santa Claus would eventually show up to pick up the tab.

In the end, neither view proved valid. Reality hardly ever lives up to people’s, much less economists’, expectations. Even though scientific fortunetelling differs from the traditional version in that more people pretend to take it seriously, the methods and the end result are similar. The lingo-ridden vagueness of prediction is resorted to in order to safeguard the fortuneteller against exposure as a fraud. Some forecasts come true periodically (albeit hardly ever two in a row from the same source) to prevent the layman’s complete dismissal of the entire field.

World War One created a great, if mostly artificial, demand for many more hands in the workplace. Military supplies had to be produced in large quantities. Even before it was over, though, drastic political changes occurred everywhere, most notably in the Russian Empire. The most radical group of people ever to convene on that country’s territory seized and maintained power against tremendous odds, making a wild, ill-informed, and monstrously misguided attempt to humanize the Age of Industry, already a thing of the past then, by introducing (supposedly) some basic Christian values to it. Greedy as radicals always tend to be, they had no desire to share their power with anyone, and I mean anyone, including God, whom they cheerfully decided to exclude God from the equation. Their mistake (indeed, everyone’s mistake today, almost a century later) was to expect Christian ethics to work without the Ultimate Judge of Such Matters, much as if one were to expect a high-speed train, finely designed and assiduously assembled, to work without electricity. Nevertheless, the Socialist Revolution in Russia forced certain folks elsewhere to examine their own conduct. Unless they wanted more revolutions, they had better mend their ways and start treating the workforce as if it were composed in some degree of sentient human beings. It was already too late. It was no use. Whether oppressed and exploited, or appeased and unionized, most of the workforce had to be laid off. Machines were faster, cheaper, more precise and, having no immortal souls, less cumbersome.

The downfall, known in the U.S. as the Great Depression, came on top of many panicky decisions and annoying results. Resurrected by World War One, the Age of Industry was still grotesquely alive but could not go on unless products were purchased, consumed, and purchased again: hard to accomplish with half the consumers out of work and half the newspapers suggesting, with irritating consistency, that Socialism might be a healthy alternative after all.

(The onslaught of ideological nuances so befuddled the period’s thinkers, it never occurred to any of them that Socialism, and even Communism, however Utopian, were Capitalism’s siblings rather than antipodes, since they, too, were thoroughly industrial, required employment of many, discouraged individual thinking, and were just as eager to sacrifice fuzzy numbers at the altar of the Gross National Product. It does not make much difference in the long run whether a few dozen corporations are running the show, or just one (i.e. the Federal Government), and how many of them are state-owned. As for the peculiar treatment by the Soviets of their own population, why, you wouldn’t expect folks who have openly renounced God to behave charitably. One can govern with promises, handouts, and some guns, or promises, no handouts, and a lot of guns. It is strictly a matter of preference and has little to do with the economy.

2. Once the Dust Had Settled

The period immediately following World War I was anything but rosy. The machines were taking over. France, in her own salacious way, alleviated some of her economic problems by bleeding Germany (World War One reparations, etc.), but Germany and England were hit very hard indeed. Unemployment rates skyrocketed everywhere. As oftentimes is the case, governments around the globe proposed tough measures and took none. The debates went on until the famous market crash put and end to them.

Some politicians and businessmen spent the following couple of years trying to pick up the pieces of an era long gone by, the one Henry Ford had sent packing, to no avail. There was no way for the average consumer to obtain an income other than by hiring himself out to someone who could use a pair of hands and, in some special cases, a brain. It was an impasse. Only a portion of the workforce could be employed, but the entire country had to have an income to be able to purchase the results of employment.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Teddy’s distant relative and, some years later, Stalin’s good friend and drinking buddy, was the one who decided the situation was, well, unacceptable. A man of wit and considerable political courage, he deviated from his immediate predecessors’ laissez-faire approach by actively seeking, and eventually finding, a sensible solution.

Redistribution of wealth was out of the question. It generally is. Folks will not part voluntarily with anything that might conceivablybenefit others.

Roosevelt looked at the tax revenue and decided to make good use of that. He could not simply give the money away: governments, if they wish to be taken seriously, must never indulge in direct charity. Instead, he explained that the country was in dire need of railroads, highways, bridges and such (which was true), and that his administration was quite eager to compensate those willing to construct same.

This new approach soon became an integral part of the economic picture. Those who produced the basic staples and so on were taxed; the resulting funds were transferred to those who produced the improvements. Simply put, it was a well-organized attempt to find a meaningful occupation for everyone. The New Deal (as the new approach was dubbed) was, in fact, a noble idea. Little by little, the outdated conventions of the Industrial Age would fall away, 20% or so of the workforce would easily provide the food, clothes, and shelter for everyone, whether employed or not, allowing the rest of the country to work on various improvements and innovations. Sooner or later, anyone would be able to take as much time as they wished to find and realize themselves in any of the numerous available fields. Those still uncertain about their true vocation would be given enough public assistance to be able to afford passable living conditions.

Thus the Republic was going to show the world a healthy alternative to humanity’s unrealized and seemingly unattainable dream (i.e. Communism, Star Trek style). A superior alternative, too, since there was seemingly no need for gory social experiments, radical leaders, or incongruous ideologies.

But there was Germany, and there was France, and there was Japan, and there was World War Two.

The capture of Czechoslovakia by German troops was pointedly ignored. The division of Eastern Europe between Hitler and Stalin, who reckoned they had their own economic experiments to conduct, was also ignored, although there was less flippancy this time around. German planes rained bombs on London. The English started paying attention. France was, of course, occupied, but since the caf

Tags: art, economy, industry, look, opinion, phantom, politics, scandalous, society, storyteller, todayart, economy, industry, look, opinion, phantom, politics, scandalous, society, storyteller, today

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