Time Spent Making Art: CHANGE IS GOOD?

Wednesday, 28 October 2015

CHANGE IS GOOD?

Several years ago a young Scottish artist, Leo du Feu, contacted the Friends of Killarney Park regarding a pending visit to Canada. The Friends Executive Director, Kris Puhvel, asked me to see what I could do to help. I contacted Leo, and assisted with advice as to where to sketch and suggested possible venues to visit to learn about Canadian art, and the Group of Seven. Following a successful sketching trip Leo returned home and wrote a book about his experience. Since then I’ve followed Leo’s development as an artist through his blog http://www.landscapeartnaturebirds.blogspot.co.uk and recently, through the magic of the internet, enjoyed a more personal experience sharing the artist’s life through a You Tube presentation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x846WYW9ZX0 .

Amazing isn't it? Technology, that is. Email, blogs, IPhones, and film presentations available through You Tube, all common place, is to me, an older person struggling along without a cell phone, quite mind boggling. Oh, what I would have given for the technology of today way back when I was struggling with a several hundred page manual attempting to learn Acrobat 5.0 to produce, the then new thing, PDF files to produce books readable on a desktop computer. Today of course, the desktop computer is about to take a nose dive into the dustbin. Employees now take their own laptops to work, and almost every 14 year old has a cell phone with more memory than I could have envisioned with my brand new Mac IIVI back in 1990s. Yes, things have changed/are changing(rapidly). Yesterday’s technology is no longer relevant, unable to support the needs of the masses. The digital age is coming to an end, and soon, sooner than we think, quantum computing will be the thing. We’ve become consumers of data. Makes one wonder, will the art of yesterday/today remain relevant, or will it like my old Mac IIVI, become but a memory stored in a server complex located in a distant land?

Okay, so coming back to earth forgetting for a few moments the future of all things, and just in case art continues to be relevant, and Google continues to maintain old blogs, I’m going to post a few recent, and not so recent, sketches and drawings. We’ve cut the lawn for the last time this year, and put the garden to sleep for the long winter soon to make an appearance, so it’s time to get back to writing and illustrating new books that I’ve threatened to write and publish. A book, sort of a rewrite of an ebook that I made years ago, is in the works and I need more work related to Superior Provincial Park and Algoma.