Supporting Friends Friday: Andrea the Illustrator’s Children’s Book

I should probably not trumpet so triumphantly and assuredly the death or hiatus of any given thing, especially as it pertains to this blog.  I’d decided to give Support Friends Friday a rest for a bit—and I did, for two weeks!—because I was running out of friends to support.  At least, I was running low on new friend-generated content to champion.

Then good old Andrea the Illustrator went and published a book with a bunch of contributors.  It’s called Creative Gems, Volume I, and it’s out in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle editions now.

Read More »

TBT: Modern Art and Influence

It’s that dead time of the year, news-wise, when nothing much exciting is happening—unless, of course, rising food, gas, and home prices are your idea of excitement.  Everyone’s in a summertime mood, and no one wants to worry about the troubles and strife in the world when we can be out swimming and eating ice cream.

Of course, as we’re out there on the beaches, we’re going to see a lot of people, beautiful or otherwise.  We’re all beautifully and wonderfully made in God’s Image, and He Cares about each of us.  There is Beauty and dignity to be found in every human life.

Naturally, some humans are blessed with more Beauty than others.  Nevertheless, I’d like to think that, as a species made in God’s Image, we all instinctively appreciate True Beauty when we see it.  That our ruling class actively supports “art” that is anti-Beauty is another sign that they are illegitimate and, quite frankly, Satanic.

Most modern “art” is not worthy of the moniker.  We all understand that a great deal of its support comes from wealthy doofuses who want to look cool.  Unfortunately, these hipster doofuses—whether intentionally or not—are destroying culture in the process of celebrating “art.”  The destruction of Beauty is a crime against God and civilization; the celebration of ugliness is a sure sign of moral and artistic decay.

Fortunately, there’s still a great deal of Beauty in the world.  We just have to seek it out—prayerfully and intentionally.

With that, here is 28 July 2021’s “Modern Art and Influence“:

Read More »

Painting Update

Last week was our big Fine Arts Festival at school, and part of the festival included an art showcase.  The Fine Arts Department Head invited me to submit my little paintings for sale, which I happily did—all nineteen of them!

On the last night of the festival, I slashed the prices of all of my paintings, and ended up selling four that evening (“Ghostopus“; “Springtime“; “Feelin’ Froggy“; and “The Elixir of Life“).  As such. I’ve lowered all of the paintings on Bandamp to $15 accordingly (“Valenween/Franketine” is at $20, but just because I like that one so much).

I haven’t had time to work on too many paintings since the festival, but I do have a few newer ones that might be of interest to readers.

Read More »

Lazy Sunday CLX: Fine Arts Festival

It’s been a lazy weekend here at Portly Manor, as I’ve been recovering from a very long week of Fine Arts Festival-related activities.  It’s been pretty glorious being in bed by 9:30 PM and sleeping in until approximately whenever Murphy barks me awake to the use the bathroom, which is roughly around 6:30 AM.  I still need to file my taxes, so I’ll be working on that annual ritual of tedium later today.

For this week’s Lazy Sunday, however, it made sense to look back at this past week’s Fine Arts Festival, and to celebrate the achievements of the students involved.  I’ve also worked in a post about Son of Sonnet’s new Locals page:

Now to break the fast with my chubby dog, drink some coffee, and lazily get ready for church… and taxes.

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Even More Little Paintings

I took a bit of a break from painting last week to finish up Péchés d’âge moyen, my short collection of twelve original piano miniatures, but by the time “More Little Paintings: Hearts and an Octopus” posted last week, I’d already churned out a total of fifteen of these little guys.

Rather than subject you to week after week of bizarre paintings, I figured I’d dump them all into one post:

Read More »

More Little Paintings: Hearts and an Octopus

I’ve kept plugging away at my little paintings, and have a slate of new paintings.  This post does not feature all of them, but some of the highlights from my recent forays into primitivist doodle-painting.

I really do paint the way that I draw—poorly.  But my distinctly grotesque style seems to hold a certain charm, as I’ve already sold and/or committed to gift two of the three paintings in this little post.

Like last week’s paintings, these are done on small, 5″x7″ canvasses.  They’re very thin canvasses, but of a good quality, and they hold the acrylic paints I’m using well.  All of the materials are very basic, including the cheap brushes and paints (which are leftover from the TJC Spring Jam), but they work perfectly for what I am doing.

Read More »

Little Paintings

As last Tuesday’s post suggests, I’ve really been getting into small forms of art:  miniatures.  Short musical pieces are fun to compose, and can be dashed off (and, hopefully, recorded) in mere minutes.

I’ve also always been a lover of bric-a-brac—little tiny figurines and collectibles and the like—and am drawn to them in part because of their tiny size.  I have a random assortment of such bric-a-brac on my desk at this very moment—an R2-D2 figurine; a little pumpkin finger puppet; a LEGO Han Solo; a little ghost—and have other little figurines in various places in my home.

Not surprisingly, I’ve also come to really enjoy small paintings.

Read More »

Supporting Friends Friday: The Birds of Mariella Hunt

As I’ve noted many times before, one of the joys of blogging is discovering other writers’ work.  As I’ve steered this blog in an increasingly arts-and-culture-focused direction, I’ve stumbled upon some excellent creators of all stripes—writers, musicians, illustrators, poets, etc.  What I’m beginning to realize is that we’re all part of a wider network (I mean, besides the Internet), and the connections were just there waiting to be made.

At least, it feels like that sometime.  That’s certainly how it feels with the subject of this week’s Support Friends Friday, the talented artist Mariella Hunt.

Read More »

Supporting Friends Friday: Andrea the Illustrator

As I’ve surely mentioned elsewhere, one of the joys of blogging is the opportunity to discover the work of other bloggers.  There are a lot of blogs out there, and in the few years I’ve been writing daily, I’ve been fortunate to stumble upon some real gems.

One particularly adorable gem is children’s book illustrator and writer Andrea Benko‘s blog, Andrea, Children’s Book Illustrator.  She very smartly obtained the URL “edoodless.wordpress.com” (yes, there is a second “S” in the URL; some scoundrel took “edoodles.wordpress.com” and is doing nothing with it), and that’s what she does:  doodles.

Read More »

Modern Art and Influence

Most readers of this blog will likely agree with the following sentiment:  “modern art is terrible.”  In my more intellectually generous moments, I’d add “most” as a qualifier to start that phrase, but with age comes orneriness, and orneriness does not lend itself to intellectual generosity.

Perhaps the best treatment of this sentiment in a scholarly—dare I say “intellectually generous”—way is Roger Kimball‘s The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art.  The book is a quick read, but even in 200 pages, it’s depressing seeing the increasingly bizarre, flat-out wrong interpretations politically-motivated Leftists bring to classic works of art.  The unfortunate trend of comparing everything that ever happened to Harry Potter is no-doubt the watered-down, pop cultural version of this academic shoehorning of the ideology du jour into artistic interpretation.

Of course, there is a corollary to the maxim that “modern art is terrible.”  It’s that “modern art is only successful because wealthy dupes want to look cool.”  That’s a bit of a mouthful, we all know it’s true.

So it is that two close relatives to the current Pretender’s regime—scandal-ridden, sister-in-law-loving drug addict Hunter Biden, and not-pretty-enough-to-be-a-model model Ella Emhoff (Vice President Kamala Harris‘s stepdaughter) have made good money peddling “art.”

Read More »