Tag: art

Life in Colour

To find out more about this year’s photo challenge here on Travel Words, please read this post.

The world is a kaleidoscope¹ of colour so this month let’s celebrate that with the brightest / most colourful images you can find.

¹(Something that is made up of a lot of different and frequently changing colours or elements)

“Colour!
What a deep and mysterious language,
is the language of dreams.”
~ Paul Gaugin

“Gundabooka” by Peter Williams and “Spirit in the Land” by Wayne Krause

Taronga Wild! Rhinos was a Wild in Art event running in Sydney, Australia from February to April 2014. A spectacular world-class sculpture trail was created, rhinos could be found in the Sydney Harbour foreshore through the Blue Mountains to Dubbo and the Central West region of NSW. These were seen in the Blue Mountains during December 2014.

October Squares

one of a kind

My mother sadly died 25 years ago this month – had she lived she would have just turned 101. This photo of her was probably taken when she was in her mid twenties and looking very happy, smiling for the photographer.  It was probably sent to her then fiancé, my father, who was serving in the RAF as an Air-Sea Rescue medical officer. Of course the original photo was not given the pop art treatment – this is very much one of a kind.

KindaSquare is the theme this month as Becky is hoping we might, in the final squares of 2020, encourage and promote kindness.  A year I don’t think any of us will forget in a hurry. If you would like to join in then visit the link – you can always post 31 squares tomorrow!

And thanks once again to our wonderful host, the gorgeous Becky, who must have square eyes by now!

Playing with Swirls

I was interested to play with some photo effects after reading a blog post on one of my favourite sites – The World According to Dina – about swirls and twirls.

I don’t have Photoshop, but I do have a version of Photoshop Elements so I thought I’d give it a go. I selected two photos that aren’t the best compositions.

(1) Tulip – I was interested to see how these colours would transform

I followed the video linked to in Dina’s blog, but I made some changes and stopped when I got this result because I rather like it.

Changing the colour hues makes a very different image

(2) Dusk – this was a fairly poor shot of a sunset and I dislike the trees at the bottom of the photo, but thought the streaks might work well.

And this is the result. I kept it very soft and pastel.

While we can’t go out to create new photos, or at least photos of different scenes, then using photo editing software to be creative is one way of enjoying photography at this time.

Thanks Hanne for the idea.

Paris Focus: Art and French Lessons

When I saw this painting (well actually NOT the painting as that had been loaned elsewhere) but a copy of it in the Musée de l’Orangerie I was immediately taken back to 1968 when I was a young teenager in a Grammar School near Leeds.

There we had an amazing French teacher who earned himself the nickname of ‘Lurch’ as he was a big, tall chap with short cropped blonde hair and for some reason reminded us of Lurch, the butler,  in the Addams Family programme on TV at the time.

He was a wonderful teacher, making our French lessons fun and interesting, with great humour. One of his comments in my end of year report has stayed with me all my life: “Jude is an excellent conversationalist, just a pity it is not in French“. Saying that I loved languages and especially French, so much so I even went to work as an au pair in Geneva several years later. He unfortunately for us, left to teach in Chad at the end of this school year, leaving us to do our French O level with a rather disappointing replacement.

But back to the painting. One of the ways he taught us the language was by studying scenes or paintings and this was one of them. The teeny  dog, or was it a cat? The family in the cart – where were they going? Who were they? Is that a child or a pet monkey? Such a painting could stimulate many a conversation. In French. Of course 🙂