Category: Adventure

An Art Adventure

Yesterday I promised to blog more on WordPress, and so here I am, with another blog that I posted on Steemit a couple of months ago.

Steem is a crytpocurrency, and Steemit is the social networking platform that uses Steem as a form of rewards. That’s a nice incentive to blog, but as you can see from the post below, I put far more effort into my blogs on Steemit than the small reward merits. This post was written for one of the many contests that you can find on the Steemit platform. The contest is very special for me, because I’m not an artist and yet I get to play around with art. The name of the contest is Let’s Make a Collage (LMAC). Each week (most weeks, anyway) the contest sponsor, @shaka gives the community an original photo to play with. Out of that photo we are supposed to make a collage, using only copyright-free elements. Most of the people who participate are graphic artists. Not me. I failed art in the eighth grade, but @shaka welcomes my participation anyway.

Without further ado, please enjoy (!) my evident enthusiasm below. If you follow the link, you can see what others did in this edition of LMAC.

Garden of Magic and Wonder

Let’s Make a Collage

shangri la 16 gif.gif

This is the photo @shaka gave us to work with

shaka march8.jpg

When I began to imagine ideas that might work in this picture, I recalled the early sixteenth-century triptych, Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch. Every inch of Bosch’s painting is filled with phantasmagorical details. The three panels that make up the piece tell a story: creation, fall from grace, and damnation.

wizard light.jpg

The Garden of Earthly Delights

Heronimus Bosch

Panel One, Upper Left Portion

heronimus bosch uppper left panel.jpg

Here we see the Garden of Eden. This is only the upper half of Panel One. The lower half shows God introducing Adam to Even. The theme is innocence. Light and beauty prevail.

Panel Two

Once again, only the upper portion of the panel is shown here. This is the largest of the three panels. Bosch does not spare us. He shows humanity depraved, insatiable, consumed by vice. Confusion and corruption prevail.

Panel Three

When I look at this panel (only the upper portion is shown here) I think of Dante’s Inferno. This is hell. It seems the damned are consumed by the appetites that drove them in life. Hell’s residents prey upon each other. Darkness and chaos prevail.

One well-known image from the lower portion of this panel is of a pig wearing a nun’s veil.

bosch pig nun.jpg

Trivia

Source for the following information is My Modern Met

The Painting
  1. 7′ by 13′
  2. Oil on oak
  3. When the panels are closed, there’s a picture of earth.
The Artist
  1. Year of birth is uncertain, although it is known he lived in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.
  2. He was born in the Netherlands
  3. About twenty-five of his pictures remain.
  4. He was well-known in his lifetime.
  5. None of his writings have survived, so art critics can only guess at the meaning of his art.

My collage took shape in these steps:

shangri-la-326126_640.jpg

I downloaded a picture from Pixabay (credit: mariamichelle).

shaka march8 plu shangri-la.jpg

and connected that picture to @shaka‘s.

Then I went to Paint 3d and looked for greenery and magical images.

shangri la small gif.gif

Finally, I took that blended picture and headed over to GIMP, where I added lighting effects, and turned the whole thing into a GIF.

by Categories: A G Moore, Adventure, Art, Blogging, SteemitTags: Leave a comment

To Climb a Mountain: Growing up in the Canadian West Adventure Amid Turmoil: Book Review

By Jean Forbes-King

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“To Climb a Mountain: Growing Up in the Canadian West Adventure Amid Turmoil” is a memorable book. It brings to life circumstances most of us will never personally experience, such as wrangling with a grizzly bear and panning for gold. The book follows the form of a classic Bildungsroman (novel of personal development), though “To Climb a Mountain” is not technically a novel. It falls somewhere between fact and fiction. The story is based on conversations and tapes provided by the subject, Bill Forbes-King, and is fleshed out in a spirited telling by his wife, Jean. In the book, young Bill Forbes-King confronts and survives challenges that mold his character. He struggles, stumbles and, ultimately, prevails.

“To Climb A Mountain” is not a perfect book. There are structural issues that disrupt the narrative flow. This is not a fatal flaw. The virtues of the book outweigh its defects. As I finished reading “To Climb a Mountain”, I thought of an artist I had recently discovered, Clementine Hunter.

Neither Bill Forbes-King nor Clementine Hunter had the benefit of an advanced education. Hunter worked as a manual laborer. Through her days of physical labor she observed her environment. These observations she immortalized in paintings that lacked technical expertise but that revealed, brilliantly, the world in which she lived. From her pictures, we see her world.

Bill Forbes-King, also, gives an unsophisticated, unfiltered view of his world. Though his wife wrote this book, it is his young voice – adventurous, naive and discovering – that comes through.

Forbes-King began life with few advantages. He never knew his father, a WWI vet who died before his son was born. Forbes-King and his mother leave their native England and migrate to Canada. After years of struggling to support her son, the mother dies while the boy is still a teenager. At this point, the orphan is put into the foster care system. Here he has a varied experience, not all of it positive.

At 17, with WWII raging, Bill Forbes-King decides to join the battle. He signs up for service and is shipped out to Europe. For a good part of the book, readers are given eyewitness accounts of this young soldier at war. His war accounts are some of the most dramatic in the narrative.

Upon his return home, at war’s end, Forbes-King transitions to civilian life with nothing but his wits and survival skills to support him. He takes a series of positions, mostly in the Canadian West, where he meets a host of colorful characters.

While “To Climb a Mountain” could use some reorganization and editing, it is a distinctive and original book. Ms. Forbes-King is a good writer. She offers readers a credible and entertaining account of her husband’s life. I enjoyed this book and recommend it to readers.

 

A. G. Moore July 6, 2017

by Categories: A. G. Moore, Adventure, Biography, Canada, War VeteranTags: , , , Leave a comment