Bicyclistic

The painting below of The Claddagh in Galway sold at the last show. When I delivered it, their very young son asked me if the houses were for animals. Further into the conversation he explained that he had asked that question because he could see [drumroll] what kind of animals in the painting?

The 1st person in the comments below to identify the animals can have for free a painting of their choice from the prizepool. To be clear I’m looking for the type of animals e.g. duck-billed platypuses (not the right answer).

The competition will run for, probably not very long. And I think I’ll leave your answers in moderation for a bit to add to the suspense.

Update: All answers are now released from moderation, and the 1st person with the correct answer was Raul.

I laughed at a lot of the answers, and many of them are not without merit, but the winning answer is the one that little Theo supplied to prompt me asking the question in the first place. If you’re one of those who hasn’t spotted what Theo did, here’s the picture with the animals highlighted.

And I’d like to thank Theo for changing forever the way that I, and probably you, will look at that painting!

Here’s an old painting I thought I’d post to mark the passing of Vincent O’Brien last week.

I’m not certain but I think Racing Conversation may even be the first painting I ever sold. Certainly prior to selling it I wasn’t in the habit of offering my paintings for sale.

Racing Conversation features the famous racehorse trainer in conversation with another trainer. I worked on the Phoenix Park Racecourse in the 1980s and my job included visits to the parade ring where O’Brien would have been a familiar figure.

My grandparents lived on the racecourse (in this house) so the images of horse-racing are a big part of my memories of childhood.

Here’s a drawing I did of Genoa while in Italy last summer. It’s from my moleskine sketchbook.

click to enlarge

If it seems familiar it’s because I subsequently based a painting of Genoa on it. (you can also see the progress of the Genoa Painting in 4 Stages)

See Also:
   • Painting in Progress: Kinsale IV
   • From a Sketch to a Painting: Kinsale I
   • Painting in Progress: Stone Cottage
   • Kansas City Sketchbook

As I’ve written over on Irish KC problems with my arm have affected my painting.

The pains started as I did an excessive amount of painting just before the last show, and they have increased since. Holding a brush hurts.

To help the arm recover I’m cutting back on all activities that exacerbate the condition. The pain itself has already forced a slowdown of painting - which is why the promised online sale hasn’t materialized. The plan was for one set of paintings to go online for a big sale, and another set of paintings to go to shows.

The arm problem is also going to affect those planned shows for the summer. However since painting is how I make my living I can’t afford to stop, and my brain doesn’t want to anyway. I’m trying to learn to use my left hand. But I won’t make the planned shows.

So paintings planned for shows are now also going to appear online first. I won’t talk dates because none of 75 or so paintings in progress are finished, and it may be that I get up to speed using my left hand before my right is back to normal.

I’m also cutting back on using the computer, because stumbling around a keyboard with one hand, the unfavoured one - as I am for this post - is a lot slower than typing properly with 2 hands. I’ll post some photos and sketches though to keep things ticking over, and twitter’s 140 characters are manageable enough even with one bad hand.

Depending on how my rate of painting progresses I may have a big sale like the 2 of last year, or I may drip feed paintings online as they’re ready. Here and twitter are where you’ll find out first.

Here’s some quick sketches of figures I did one sunny day somewhere in Europe. Scanning other sketches I grabbed these and thought I’d post them.

It’s impossible to dislike wagtails. Or to ignore them. I mean, imagine if people moved like this.

Rain leaves puddles in the grass and wagtails aren’t usually far from water. Which is probably why there was one on the roof the day I left the cottage.

This is a photo I took of a pied wagtail in Dublin.

There’s a grey wagtail I see from my studio most days, walking around on the cobblestones doing a tour of the puddles in the yard. Having yellow on him, despite his name, he’s more cheery looking than the pied wagtail but I like all wagtails - my favourite being one I watched on the rocks beside me as I crossed a river in the Himalaya once upon a time back when boots were cheaper.

Other Birds:
   • Rook
   • Blackbird
   • American Robin Vs European Robin

Some of my Bird Paintings
   • Rook, Flight
   • Eagle, Flight
   • Eagle, Perched
   • Owl
   • Rookery

A reader, Mr. The Robber, left a comment over on my Irish KC blog, that he never understood the point of twitter. My response wasn’t to try and explain the point of twitter, but to give a quick list of some of the things I do less because of twitter.

I thought I’d repeat this list here. Almost certainly not complete, it should still emphasize that I get way more from twitter than I put in. Perhaps its greatest strength for me is the role it plays in building up trust, a factor that is crucial for most everything I do on the internet from reading articles to selling paintings, but that’s for another post another day.

Things I Do Less Because of Twitter:

   • Emailing
   • Phoning
   • Texting
   • Blogging
   • Using Google
   • Instant Messaging
   • Reading News Sites
   • Reading Sports Sites
   • Reading Blogs
   • Checking Radio Schedules
   • Checking TV Schedules
   • Using Feed Readers
   • Visiting Aggregators
   • Subscribing to Blogs
   • Signing up for Newletters
   • Visiting Support Forums
   • Creating News Alerts
   • Checking MySpace Calendars
   • Visiting Art Discussion Sites

Another XtraCycle photo. Taken in Dublin, Ireland with the Liffey valley in the background - the valley not the shopping centre.

click to enlarge

There’s 20 canvases in that box, each 14 x 11 inches (they came from the US), so you can see that the bike could actually carry 200 canvases without too much effort. Mind you in this picture I’m also carrying a laptop, spare clothes, other art materials, and a litre of milk.

And yes, this has just reminded me that I need to get back to posting the next stage of my Cycle Across America journal.

Check out the various XtraCycle permutations on their website or talk to me on twitter to ask me anything about the bike.

More of my XtraCycle:
  • XtraCycle in Ireland
  • Buying a Christmas Tree Without a Car
  • My XtraCycle Arrives in Ireland

Final Update With their 4th blog post on the issue Twitter have fully explained how and why the fiasco of #fixreplies happened. In short the post has returned them to the Twitter I love, and renders everything I’ve written below irrelevant. I am fully happy with every aspect of the post, and impressed with their response. Thank you to Biz Stone and the gang.

Original Post No Longer Applicable:
No great surprise that Twitter finally admitted the real reason for the @reply change was an engineering one of scalability rather than the original nonsense of saying it was removed because it was too confusing for the people like myself who had gone to the trouble of selecting the option.

The problem with lying is you lose trust. And loyalty. Never mind the rebuild of this functionality, twitter needs to act fast to rebuild trust with so many people who have loved it for so long.

Before I revisit my views, I’m waiting to see what they do next.

Update #1: A per-user feature that will address what was lost is planned. And before it’s in place an interim solution of allowing again replies, by people you follow to people you don’t follow, to be seen - but only if they enter the name by not clicking the reply swoosh icon, is farcical.

People will continue to hit reply and therefore be unseen, or they’ll type and be seen by everybody - including the 97% of users who previously opted or defaulted not to see them - and who will then have no way of knowing what it was in reply to. And expect an increase in bad spellings.

So? With a plan in place for a sort-of long-term fix, I’ll reluctantly play for now, but twitter has lost over 90% of its effectiveness for me. I’m not being abstract, that’s the reduction in my twitterstream that I used to get value from. Twitter, you’re on probation. [update: and within hours they've passed - impressive]

The value of twitter was always in seeing what others said rather than in saying things yourself, even when they weren’t necessarily talking directly to you.

For some this option was overwhelming, or it would have been had they changed from the default setting to pay attention only to what was being said in a wholly predefined world. Those of us who chose the option to watch that waterfall of conversation however, have now had that option removed.

If you don’t understand this or the fuss it has caused imagine if suddenly mobile/cell phones were rendered ineffective and everybody was told to go back to using landline phones only - with a cord.

I’m aiming for a big online sale of new paintings late next week. I never make my targets so I don’t know when it will really take place. Ordinarily you’d find out first via twitter. But despite the advantage to me in posting about such things on twitter, having now lost the ability to follow what most people I follow are saying, I see little point in using it anymore. So I’ve left twitter (and so has my dog).

Assuming you don’t sit on this blog hitting the refresh button, you’ll now have to use whatever feed reader you use, or wait for the email notification for the earliest notification of the art sale. You might have done that anyway but typically during these big online art sales, people who miss the twitter notifications say they wanted to buy the paintings that sold first.

Meanwhile, I’ll miss you.

Update: All Is Right With The World Again