The Making of:The Emerald Tablet of Hermes

This is where I start out in the morning with tea or coffee and a bunch of recorded tv programs.

Breakfast and tv while I catch up on all the magazines around the apartment. We use them for collage...and I like to read the articles or select images I really like. Breakfast? Tofu, squash and cabbage all mixed up. I like oddball foods I guess. It's delicious. Below are some tiny cut outs of words.

The little cut out words ended up on some postcards. Some of the cut out words include: "conducted", "pudding", "element of", "a second", "surveying", "you dust yourself", t"his moment", "distance", "waving", "project", "watch some morally conflicted" and "someone."I make these post cards while I'm painting and then put my blog address on the other side and leave them around places. Like coffee shops, record stores, bars. I'm a nerd.

This is what they look like before, above and after, below.


I watch Regis and Kelly every day. Regis often holds up the morning paper.

It is unusual for me to just sit and watch tv in the day...usually I'll be working on something while following some show. When I get into painting, I usually blast music really loud.

I watched Hugh Laurie on The Actor's Studio. Love this program, I record it when there is a favourite actor featured. Often the actors are asked questions about their techniques and about their childhood and their history of work is explored. These are my favourite celebrity interviews because they are so technical, and not cult of personality style of questions. Laurie stars in tv show House, and was asked how tv was treated when he was growing up. "Television was rather frowned upon. Television was for other people. Catholics."

I took some of these pictures a few days ago while watching a documentary about serial killers in movies. It was called Murder By Numbers and suggested that the viewer is often referenced throughout many of this genres content,even suggesting we are culpable.
1960's-3 films
1970's-10 films
1980's-45 films
1990's-107 films
with serial killers as characters.




Now that the basic background is made I move the new painting next to portrait of Sean in my work space. Perhaps I'll have these finished as a celebration to mark my 300th post? I'm at 298 at this posting.

While working I am listening to this recorded series In Search of Shakespeare. Michael Woods and BBC produced this detective mystery style of telling about Shakespeares secret life. I've watched this once before and I have a book version I received as a gift from a British online bookclub pal. It's really fantastic and the premise is that Shakespeares family were Catholics practicing secretly in Elizabeths religious wartime England. It was a time of terrorism and intolerance and Shakespeares many layers of references and storytelling may be from his secret Catholic lessons and from a provincial education that has not ever been accomplished since for other children. For example, Shakespeares and his peers education included memorizing Ovid and reading Latin versions of Plato, at age nine.