Month: October 2014

You know you’re slowing down when the post office delivers parcels before you are ready! Yesterday, RAM upgrades arrived for Danica’s laptop and iMac. Pushing procrastination aside, I installed the 8GB kit today. The laptop is ready for Mac OSX Yosemite (when Yosemite is ready for the laptop. Still too buggy.)

A word with the artist, who is now safely dead
Alex Colville, you are irritating. Are you an artist of stature or not? Certainly, your output over a long lifetime deserves respect. Your work ethic, commitment and perseverance is unquestionable. Your technique, solid and consistent.
And yet, and yet … you seem so chilly, distant, stiff. Your renderings of human figures are awkward and oddly proportioned. When your subjects show their faces, their gazes are mannequin blank. When you hide their faces, the disturbing, anonymizing effect becomes predictable and a bit tiresome after a few paintings.

Today, Peter and I started a nice walk from the Brickworks at the bottom of the Don Valley and climbed to the Mount Pleasant Cemetery, then back down the hill to Bayview. The pathway edges along the course on Mud Creek, which empties into the Don River. To judge by the way the creek banks are built up and fortified, there are times when the creek is a mighty torrent.
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It was perfect autumn day. We started out by bracing ourselves with coffee and fresh-baked blueberry scones at the Brickworks Café, then walked off the calories and took in the colours.

Four years ago, Toronto made a very stupid mistake choosing a mayor. Gotta go help fix that. Back soon.
[There! Now EVERYBODY is disappointed, unhappy and suspicious. Back to normal. 🙂  ]

I have been clearing an old hard drive and came across this photo from the last year of the last century. Graham and Marguerite were at our place for dinner and the guys were hamming it up for the camera. I’m glad I found it and wish I had been able to give it to Gillian for her memorial slideshow at last week’s gathering.
Here’s another image I didn’t know I had … a painting by my grandfather, W.E. Anderson. He was Helen’s father, a physician by profession, but an ardent amateur painter, too. I believe my brother has the picture.
I see how grandfather probably thought this was how “serious” painting should be done. A serious man, seriously old and sage, reading a seriously thick book with intense concentration. A borrowed “Thinker” fist-to-mouth from Rodin, a full bookshelf, taste in art objects implied by the ceramic vase.
There is a kind of paint-by-numbers naiveté about it, and at the same time, serious ambition. The old man/books theme was probably borrowed from Rembrandt, whom grandfather properly admired greatly. Helen liked to recall that he “owned a Rembrandt” that was lost in a disastrous house fire. I think he probably did own a Rembrandt etching that went up in smoke.
While I’m reminiscing, I may as well recall what my grandmother was reported to have said to her daughter, consoling herself after the fire. “Well, at least your father still has his education, and I have my permanent hairdo”.

Quite a show going on up there.

From what I’ve read, it appears that Apple plans to move away from its glitchy photo manager and into a new app. Apparently the new app wasn’t ready in time for the Yosemite operating system release, so iPhoto had to be tweaked for one last time, to be Yosemite-compatible.
I used the Yosemite version of iPhoto to make the slideshow below … book covers I’ve done with my literary friends, the Colombos. Seems to work properly.

The music bed is sampled from from this outstanding source.

The map below is “Live” but you can view it in a full window here.

Thank you to Beach Hill resident Ashleigh Harris, who did all of the heavy lifting.
Photos by me.

There are so many to choose from! I’ll pick a couple of short ones, the first with a possible happy ending.

And here’s a scary one, as we creep up on Halloween …

These are brief examples. You can find full length lectures, too. His subject matter is wide-ranging.

There are still lots of bugs and performance issues.

I am running MacOS X Yosemite sooner than I thought I would, because I am introducing a friend who is new to Macs to the system. We agreed that he may as well learn on the latest system, so I have installed it to learn what’s new.
Before you take the plunge, it would be worth watching this cautionary tale …

I have ordered RAM upgrades for Danica’s laptop and older iMac. They will have 8 and 6 Gigs respectively. So far, 6 Gigs is running Yosemite on my old iMac and performance seems fine, much of the time. It would still be best to wait for version 10.10.1
So, the free OS upgrade isn’t really free, but that’s life as we all know it, n’est ce pas?