Round up

Recently I have been to London Zoo.

And thought about Newfoundland some more. This is from a book I found in a charity shop called Eye of the Beholder, full of beautiful old colour photos, you know the old vivid kind of colour.

Newfoundland

Painting of Newfoundland. I would like to go there one day. Theatre of Fish by John Gimlette is an excellent book of his travels round Newfoundland and Labrador , the people he meets and an exploration of the history and the weird status of Newfoundlanders.

One Man Band

Today me and Phoebe my housemate did some gardening. We planted red and yellow wall flowers, and black and white tulip bulbs. In doing so we unearthed

1. The concave bit at the bottom of a wine bottle - really old and thick and green glass
2. a piece of glass with with fragments of letters on that would have once read 'cough mixture'

Plus whilst researching things to animate for my walk cycle I found this amazing one man band
(but I think it's a bit too ambitious maybe)

Good day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXMuWi0dUBc

In the beginning

Now I'm going to use this more.

I've just started my degree in Illustration and Animation at Kingston University, really excited about everything at the moment.

On Fridays I have a self directed drawing project. I'm going to Laban dance institue in Greenwich, drawing dance classes. It's a fantastic building - designed by Herzog and de Meuron who did tate mod - with translucent walls with colour overlays that give the studios inside beautiful green and blue backlighting. It's also a real warren of glass and lime green walls and industrial staircases. Last Friday I sat in a class by Jonathan Stone, who does shows with his brother all around the world based on invented language. Sitting in front of thrity people energetically conversing in made up language whilst walking in step was a bizarre experience but quite amazing. Looking forward to going back this Friday.


drawing of workshop where students had to work in small circles conversing instinctively in gesture

Whats up Propp

Fairy tales are works full of convention and patterns and things that recur. The number three, certain trees, the stepmother, greed, capes and eating.

Been thinking about what makes a narrative a narrative, and reading lots about it. How do you define a story? It's a lot about causality.
The king died and the queen died is not a narrative.
The king died and then the queen died of grief is. Or something. I'm not sure I've completely grasped it, and anyway it's all opinion.

Anyway, there is a fellow called Vladimir Propp who analysed about a hundred Russian folk tales (Morphology of the Folk Tale, 1927). He looked at the common features and broke them up into 31 chunks. Propp said that every folk tale is in the same order, though it may not include every narrateme.

http://www.brown.edu/Courses/FR0133/Fairytale_Generator/gen.html

By the wonders of the internet you handily click on propp's 31 elements and this little machine will spurn out a ready made folk tale.

It's like chewing on centuries of russian peasantry and spitting it out on a screen.