Painting The Lost Garden (3): Up, Into the Singing Mountain

Excuse me very much, but, yep, I know I might've seemed a little absent of late.

  

I haven't been absent though.  Remote maybe, but that's because I've been totally absorbed with Number Three, helping it streak/limp/crash towards its conclusion.  Oh, and, amongst other stuff, finishing a couple of paintings.

This time last year, I finished a painting called The Lost Garden (1), by way of a creating a different focus to writing, etc (see that post here).  Well, the other day I finished The Lost Garden (3): Up, Into the Singing Mountain.  

The second part of the title is taken from Richard Llewellyn's novel, which I read yonks ago, but which more recently put me in mind of a stunning image I photographed from a hotel room in Los Angeles airport in 2009: the distorted reflections of buildings in the J M Eagle building opposite, with aeroplanes taking off and landing a short distance behind.  I loved the way the borrowed colours and patterns of the urban landscape seemed to sing and dance up the tiers of glass, and how the tinted glass enhanced the tonal variations in the reflected sky.

Makes a change to chasing words round a page.

910 x 610 mm

acrylic on canvas

Snowing and Greening catches fire on Kindle

I haven't got into the habit of checking the Kindle rankings of my books, even though I'll occasionally glance at the print rankings to see whether they're up in the top 100,000 or relaxing at around 1,300,000 in the UK... or 4,000,000 in America! So I was delighted to learn from a friend recently that The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore hit 900 on the Paid Kindle chart (UK) - good to hear it's doing so well.

eBook available from Amazon.co.uk at £4.19, and from Amazon.com at $7.99

While I'm looking at rankings, the print edition of The Grease Monkey's Tale appears to have sold a few copies recently through Amazon.com.  This isn't available as a Kindle edition (don't know why), but can be bought as an ePub edition.

Grammar 'n' all that

I don't take much notice of the smart-arse emails that do the rounds - around and around - but enjoyed the simple message of one I received recently:

Grammar:

the difference between knowing your shit

and knowing you're shit.

Hmm.

Listening to Lanie Lane, watching Prospero's Books

These blog posts have become less frequent of late, but never mind, that's just the way it is at the moment.  Am fully engrossed in finishing Number Three, and beginning to chew through ideas for Number Four and more.

So, briefly, am listening to Lanie Lane at moment and saving up my pennies to buy her album: To The Horses.  A tremendous, bluesy singer.  Here she is performing The Black Keys' Gold on the Ceiling on Triple J for Like a Version.

 

Watched Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books the other night, hard on the heels of recently revisiting The Tempest. I've seen mediocre and tremendous performances of this play, with the best two featuring Derek Jacobi (The Barbican, London, early in the 1980s) and John Bell  (Sydney Opera House, a few years back) both in the role of Prospero, but I now have to add Peter Greenaway's film and John Gielgud's performance to these.  Not only that, but it shot straight into my list of All-Time Favourite Films.  Magical.  Quite stunning.  Made in 1991, I don't know why I haven't got round to watching it until now.  Peter Greenaway is really a painter in live images; a sculptor of sound, colour, lighting, music, dance...