The Weekend Hobby Thread

Your humble Cob is starting to get into woodworking. Quit yer chucklin', this isn't trying to teach an old dog a new trick. Or is it?

My father wasn't a wood worker. We didn't have "Shop" class where I went to high school. Over the years I've accumulated a couple of drills, circular saws and jig saws. And I've been learning on the go.

The advent of YouTube certainly has helped.

This past week I purchased a Drill Press. My main goal is to bore some good size holes into circular pieces of wood. The drill press is assembled. I now have to secure it to it's work bench. That's the simple part, I now have to come up with a table/vise to hold these pieces of wood while I drill 1.5" holes into 3" diameter birch rounds.

Wish me well. As I wrote this morning, the weekend ER docs don't want to be there either.

The following isn't for experienced wood workers. But, I'm sure there are a few beginners out there like me who might find this useful.

Although I usually do not have an opportunity to comment on the Mid-Morning Art Thread hosted by CBD and Kris, I do check it out every day or evening. As many of you know I'm more of the woods and water kind of guy rather than what is posted. But I still enjoy it and am so impressed by the work display.

The following link features a couple of guys who don't seem to enjoy art. These inhabitants of the faculty lounge say painters have been painting wrong for centuries.

The Art of the Shadow: How Painters Have Gotten It Wrong for Centuries
The goal is not to expose the “slipups” of the masters but to understand the human brain.

The Art of the Shadow: How Painters Have Gotten It Wrong for Centuries
The goal is not to expose the “slipups” of the masters but to understand the human brain.

Shadows do not continue from the floor up the wall on the right. Piero della Francesca, Polittico di Sant’Antonio (detail), 1460–1470. Perugia, Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria. Image credit: © Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria.
By: Roberto Casati & Patrick Cavanagh
Shadows can do some adventurous, sometimes malignant, poetic things: They move, rebel, hide, refuse to be identified, vanish. All these visual aspects provide fertile ground for complex metaphors and narrations. Shadows are so visually telling that it takes little to move into emotionally tinged narratives. But it is the visual aspects that we primarily deal with here, with a special focus on several types of misrepresentations of shadows — shadows doing impossible things — that nevertheless reap a payoff for scene layout and do not look particularly shocking.

Painters have long struggled with the difficulties of depicting shadows, so much so that shadows — after a brief, spectacular showcase in ancient Roman paintings and mosaics — are almost absent from pictorial art up to the Renaissance and then are hardly present outside traditional Western art.

This seems like a fun hobby with a good ride.

Hobby tips, ideas, Jenkins Green acrylic paint, 20/0 fan brushes to petmorons at gmail dot com.

Have a nice week.

posted by Misanthropic Humanitarian at 05:30 PM

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