Flipflops.org

I recently recieved this email forwarded to me by a friend. I think its important to spread the word. It reminds me a little of my friend Karl’s (inspired) ‘Say it with Chalk’ type things…

From: billmartin
Date: 24 October 2005 22:32:21 BST
To: somebody
Subject: “Hi, I’m Gavin Wade”

Artists: Pay Attention!

I seek your collaboration for the project “Hi, I’m Gavin Wade”.

Participation is simple: beginning with the launch night of Art Sheffield 05, and continuing at subsequent art events, you are requested to to simply introduce yourself at every given opportunity with the statement “Hi, I’m Gavin Wade”.

I shall of course be joining you in this.Please forward to anyone else you think may be interested in taking part (apart from Gavin Wade, for obvious reasons).It is of course permissable to introduce yourself to Gavin Wade with the phrase “Hi, I’m Gavin Wade” if the opportunity arises.

Thank you

Bill

Art Sheffield 05 lauch night is at a variety of venues around Sheffield on the 27th October.

More details: http://www.artsheffield.org

I have populated my address book with email addresses from when someone has failed to use the Bcc option and therefore displayed everyone’s address. This is an exercise in educating people to use Bcc. If you wish to be removed from my address book simply reply with the words “GET OUT OF MY HEAD!”

I shall certainly be introducing myself as Gavin Wade tonight and subsequently.

Cheers.

Gavin.

Does Visual Studio Rot the mind ? Yes.

Reading an article today about how Apache webserver now powers more than 50 million websites I came across a link to a page containing an open letter about about so called Intelligent Design.

http://www.venganza.org/

Awoke this morning feeling bad. Tired and Groggy. Since I’m working from home today I decided to go for a run, having not bothered for a few weeks.

7.20 am in a dark and wet Devon. I was struck by the oddest Deja Vu that richoched between the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia and the city of Valparaiso http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valparaiso in Chile. Why running through the rain I should have such powerfull sense of these places I am not sure.

Some friends of mine http://www.worldgonemad.org are in South America for 6 months or so at the moment and I remember talking to them about Valparaiso and what a fabulous place it was. Lately as autumn draws in the air here is always thick with wood smoke from people fires (a lovely smell for all you city types that tickles your nose gentley) - that definately reminds me of Valparaiso - the difference being they’ve taken the smoke thing a little far and when we were there it swirled about in the evening mixed with ocean fog in a Dickensian miasma…

But Malaysia ? Well it was raining and I think I was running past trees at the time other than that…

I’ve made a kind of resolution to sit down and draw every night, so far it’s going rather well. Perhaps resolution is too strong a word, becase a resolution is too easy to break - infact a resolution is almost asking to be broken.

What people never seem to realise is that drawing is almost entirely down to practice, its about training your eye to see what is actually in front of you rather than what you see and what you think is in front of you. The thing is, when you see things normally you are just making assumptions, half the time your brain is just doing a join the dots routine.

The reason people often think they can’t draw is because they draw according to the dots - they draw according to the processed image their brain produces rather than looking past this to look at the angles and the actual realtionships of the various subject objects in 3D space.

Unfortunately I haven’t drwan in a serious way for years and years - most of the time I can still fool people but frankly my current level of drawing is crap. Hence the practice.

At school we used to have life drawing for I think about 4 or 5 hours per week, and no matter what kind of art you produce I think its a worthwhile thing to do - its a kind of visual meditation, anyway practice makes perfect. Hopefully.