Hello

Welcome!
This is a place for Art-lovers, art-buyers and art-makers looking for inspiration, new links, new ideas. I hope you find here what you are looking for. If you have travelled long and far, take some time to relax. The pictures that you see on this site are mostly South African original oil paintings for sale and /or for hire, and been created in studios after many years of study and hard work. Some are also posters which have been digitally created but are nevertheles art in the post-modern sense.The links mentioned will lead you to a wide range of pictures and styles.

Thought for the month…………..

-To be an artist takes courage, committment, a never say die approach to life. Putting your art on the web is a risky business but you will never know until you try. -To quote from one of my favourite guru’s Julia Cameron -…-the moment we open ourselves to making art, we simultaneously open ourselves to …….-We are automatically partnered. We encounter….:a thousand unseen helping hands… I think of these hands as an invisible web ungirding any creative endeavour. It is like throwing a switch or toppling the first domino – there is a spiritual chain reaction that occurs the moment we act ……….Something or somebody acts back.-

To Blog or not to Blog – with apologies to Shakespeare

Does anyone remember Hamlet, the guy from Shakespeare, who asked the question, “to be or not to be?”
Well how about an update on that speech. when I started blogging I found myself asking the same question!
Here it is – with apologies to old Will, of course!

Sea music series

To Blog or not to Blog
That is the question.
Whether it is nobler in the mind
To suffer the ignominy of obscurity
or to fight for space amid a sea of websites
And by logging in, join them?

To log off, to sleep,
No more: and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural hits our site is heir to.
Tis a situation devoutly to be wished!
To switch off, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to scheme,
Ah, there’s the bug!
For in that switched -off state what bugs may come
When we have shutted off our portals coil
makes us pause….
There’s respect
that causes damage from so long a log-in.
For who would bear the hits and scorns on-line
the scammers wrongs, the hackers nerve
The pangs of an ignored blog
The server’s delay,
The wickedness of “Office”
and the spurns the newbie takes
when he himself his website makes
and bares his soul with a bare log pin?
Who would tools use
to grunt and sweat under weary webpage
But that the dread of something after death, the
undiscovered webzone
from whose search no surfer returns
boggles the mind
and makes us rather bear those hosts we know
than fly to others we know not of.
Thus conscience makes cowards of us all……..
And artists of great myth and message
with this mind their images cease to post
and lose the domain of action.

…………………..with apologies to Shakespeare…………………………………………..from Hamlet’s Speech, “To be or not to be”

Are you a struggling artist? Do you battle every day trying to keep your feet on the ground. Does your mind constantly tell you “not good enough”, etc. etc. Hopefully these few words of wisdom will help put you back on the path.
They are not my own – I wish they were, but like a good student I always acknowledge my sources. They are from that great book by Scott Peck, the “Road less travelled” whenever I am in a stuck place, a “fix” or whatever I just take a dip and I always get what I need – amazing!
Today I did that and I shall share these thoughts with you.
……To deal with the pain of problem solving …….. we must dedicate ourselves to the truth. For truth is reality. That which is false is unreal. The more clearly we see the reality of the world, the better equipped we are to deal with the world…”
To artists, this is such great advise when you are mired in your own self-deceptions – take a look outside your window – look at the sunlight on a tree, on a rock, on a building – what a gift we have to be able to see these things! then…… GO PAINT IT! Yes, paint what you see not what you know. It is amazing how that simple act of focus, concentration brings you back to what is real. Who cares how many or how few pictures you sold this month! is the joyous act of painting which feeds the soul. Enjoy, take heart, keep trying.