Bicyclistic

A Dublin photo of a shortcut in the city centre.

I actually quite like this wall though the photograph is all about the signs. Apply your own caption.

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More Photos of Dublin and Elsewhere
   • That Door
   • Genoa Graffiti
   • Snowy Sunset, Dublin
   • Loads of Photos

Once upon a time somebody asked me to write some words to persuade people to draw things on a board they were putting in their bathroom. I was to talk about drawing using x amount of words. It was a time when I said yes too often:

The most human of actions, making marks unites us across the generations. Before we learn to write we can draw. What child hasn’t enhanced the wallpaper, usually the good one, with lipstick or a permanent marker? Or even before that, finger-paint with food in their high chair? And when we learn to write, is it not just an extension of drawing – the ordered patterns and forms just more delightful marks on a surface?

Who hasn’t burnt a line on paper or a street surface with a magnifying glass? What person has not dragged a stick in the sand, leaving an image to be gently removed by the sea or the wind? Or dragged that stick along some railings leaving little marks behind? So many people doodle while on the telephone one wonders what people did when they doodled before the telephone was invented.

Everybody makes marks. Everybody draws and everybody writes – even those who claim not to. Have you ever played hangman? Tic-Tac-Toe is so universal it’s known as noughts and crosses and as ‘x’s and ‘o’s, among other names. Battleships, the Name game, Hopscotch, Join-the-Dots, Mazes – they’re all drawing and writing.

Are you animated when you talk? Does it extend to your hands? Is that not drawing – symbols that disappear literally as they appear? If a grown man and a small boy are standing beside a pile of stones and a body of water, it’s a certainty what will happen. The throwing of the stones is drawing, arcs short, long, high and low. And then the increasing concentric circles in the water that start from where the thrown missile connects.

Perhaps when that little boy returns home the grown man will line a pencil with the top of his head and mark his height on an unpainted wall as of that moment. And maybe the boy’s mother is holding a spirit level higher up against the same wall and making marks where she’ll hang her next project.

Outline your hand and turn it into a turkey. Fall when snow falls – make a Snow Angel. Carve a heart on a tree trunk, or your name on a bar in a pub. Mark your garden where you’re going to put your fence posts. Use your finger to make a smiley face on a fogged up window. Making such marks is a part of the human condition.

Perhaps you’ve forgotten or no longer acknowledge that you draw, but essentially you’re still that little child, and in one form or another you’ll always draw. So take a moment now to leave your mark – whatever it may be.

Some Drawings by me:
   • Outside a Dublin Pub
   • Opposite Hand Drawing: Ken Armstrong
   • Genoa, A Sketch
   • Sketchbook Figures
   • Neil Gaiman: Left-Handed Drawing

An excerpt from the journal of my 1996 cycle across America.

A serious roly-poly road. Fabulous scenery.

It was at times white gravel, pure white. Other times it was red, other times it was orange, other times it was brown sand. There were lots of yuccas, lots of other plants. I finally got to see my first saguaro, the big cactus, the big huge one.

I saw one this morning, then I saw 2 of them together, and finally I saw not far off a forest of them up the slope of this mountain which was squared off like a table - the top, like a perfect ridge around the top of it and then it was flat. You get a lot of those kind of shaped mountains around here, mesas. But as well as seeing a mountain like that, beside it you’ll see 3 mountains which are all pure rock, grey, whereas that mesa might’ve been deep red, and they’ll be pyramid shaped coming right up to a peak. And also in the same range you’ve got perfectly rounded ones.

But to see those cacti, loads of them, on the slope of a barren mountain, there’s quite a presence about them, it’s almost like they’re crosses or something, like a graveyard. To me, the first day seeing them, it’s an event, it’s like crossing the Mississippi. Even though I’ve been in desert for hundreds of miles and I’ve seen tens of thousands of other cacti, this is a definite event.

This excerpt is from Part 72 - Reservation which I posted today on IrishKC where I’ve posted all the parts of the journal of my cycle across America.

There’s been a huge delay in continuing the series of posts because I stalled when I discovered a taped section of the journal yet to be transcribed. Future excerpts are all now typed up ready to post and should be a lot easier to read than this taped entry as they were originally handwritten.

Sometimes I want to take 100 photos of the same scene with a different person in it. But I never do. This pedestrian was walking too fast for me but then she probably didn’t know she was walking for me.

The better photo was the one I didn’t take, of the guy in the bright green t-shirt walking an alsatian. But because he saw my camera he didn’t walk past the wall. He did however remain in focus.

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More Photos
   • Great Drying Weather
   • Bedford Tower
   • No Parking
   • Loads of Photos

In my teens I used to count 31 horses that were regularly kept in the fields near my home. In what was often an apprenticeship to joyriding, some people I knew used to try and catch them with a view to getting a free ride. Chasing somebody else’s horse would get you an awful hiding if you were found out so I settled for climbing trees to watch.

The fields are now a network of parks and the horses are all but gone with just visits from a handful of horses like this little pony and his rider.

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More Photos
   • No Parking
   • Sunbathing Swallows
   • Dublin, A Horse
   • Loads of Photos

There are some new co-tenants at my studio. 12 of these little fellas, and a rather beautiful rooster, are now wandering around the yard freely. And by freely I mean that the gates are all open so they could happily pop out to Lucan village for a batter sausage or catch the 25 bus if they fancied a more formal night out.

They haven’t, as yet, come up the steps into my studio, but it’s impossible not to like their presence and the rooster now means my overnight painting spells have something to definitively decide when a new day has started. Shame I’m spending time worrying about foxes now though.

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More Photos
   • Dublin, A Horse
   • Stag, Jackdaw
   • Blue Paint, Blue Sky
   • Loads of Photos

Took this photo today in town on Dublin’s St Augustine Street. I didn’t have my proper camera with me so this was taken using the phone, but with Pac Man and a bicycle wheel it’s too good not to post regardless of quality.

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More Photos
   • Little Yellow Flowery Things
   • Graffiti Doors of Dublin Lanes
   • Dublin, A Horse
   • Bedford Tower

Walking down Talbot Street in Dublin I took this photo from a safe distance. Going by the price tags, good value you’ll agree.

It’s also more close to the scene I visualise when I hear the phrase “head shop”.

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The edges of this photo were trimmed to match them to the edge of the window.

More Photos
   • Weir Descent By Kayak
   • Runners, Rook
   • Angkor Wat, Cambodia
   • Blue And White

My recent appearance on the marketing radio programme The Persuaders, in a special for the Irish radio show on Blogging For Business, is now available as a podcast (mp3 23mins).

The show, originally broadcast on Dublin City FM, features Amy Dillon of MakeUpAndBeauty.ie and myself discussing how we use our blogs for business.

If you’ve listened to the show you may be interested in a complementary post about the specifics of marketing I employ, called How I Sell Paintings Online

Show Note 1: On twitter I am eolai and Amy is Dazzledust25
Show Note 2: The 1st painting I sold via blogging was Galway Street

It was the mother’s birthday recently, so I did a small painting of a tiger lily from the garden and called it a card. It was painted using just a knife (well, 2 knives).

Like a lot of the small paintings I’ve done in the last couple of years, it’s about 22cm x 17cm (which is just under 9 x 7 inches).

See Also
   • Drawing of Ken Armstrong
   • Dog-Dog’s Birthday Beach Trip
   • Pilsner Urquell
   • Card: Stripey Donkey