FIRST SNOW IN WALES FEATURING THE SONG "TRO HATAL" BY MARTIN HERBERT

I decided that I really need to learn how to use Photoshop Premiere. To be fair, I've noticed since we procured it last year that there are many ways of editing videos online, e.g. on Youtube itself. Still, since we have that program and even if it's not complete, it might be possible to be a little more advanced through it. It's not easy to figure things out intuitively, I try as much as I can but when I get stuck my darling husband comes to my rescue. He's able to read help files and has already figured out a great deal while creating the multimedia show of his abstract work. I also plan on creating a multimedia project but for the moment I'm playing around with little video clips I've done with my camera. It doesn't auto focus so it's a real hassle, but it's better than nothing at all... the size is, in the end, reasonable.

Here's a clip I took at midnight when we had the first snow this winter... I wanted to celebrate the quiet poetry of first snow, as seen from our window here in Mid-Wales, with some artistic license... The music is from the haunting "Tro Hatal", a track on my husband Martin Herbert's album "Spirit of the Wood". It refers to the rainy season according to a Native American tradition, but oh well, precipitation as precipitation! I thought the atmosphere quite fitting in any case! Note the lovely London cab in the left hand corner!

Please expand the video to full screen view and please remember to set the quality! ;-)

THE TWO ARTISTIC DISASTERS OF 2012

The portrait of the Duchess of Cambridge by Paul Emsley 
who won the prestigious British Portrait Award in 2007

I think most of us didn't know whether we should laugh or cry when we heard of the old lady who tried to restore a portrait of Jesus in her local Spanish church. Her attempt at doing good was quite heart warming, but it was hard not to find the result very amusing and muppet-like...

Elias Garcia Martinez' artwork "restored" - read more here

The other disaster was released yesterday, it's the portrait of the Duchess Kate Middleton by Paul Elmsley. Not only is it schmaltzy low brow art (that is, if you can call it art at all) that aims to please the masses, but it's also anatomically incorrect. Look at the left cheek - it's blown out of all proportion! Her right iris is also square and the high lights don't seem quite right. Her normally very lovely hair is smudgy... She looks like she's 50, and high on dope or worse (I'll leave that to your imagination)! It actually looks like a photograph of her was sent to an art student in China - that's how bad the result is. Yikes. Read more in the Telegraph, the review is very accurate! How terrible to imagine that this would sit alongside a Holbein or Gainsboroug... or even a less famous portrait painter of the past. This doesn't exactly further the cause of good figurative painting.

Both of these "artistic perpetrators" were elderly. I think when you get older you have to work a bit harder on not falling into habitual and conventional thinking and let your discernment slip...

Hans Holbein: Probably of Lady Elizabeth Ughtred-Cromwell (?1511 - 1563),
younger sister of Queen Jane Seymour.