by Henk ter Heide on Thursday June 4, 2009
I have a day off to kill two birds with one stone.
This afternoon I have to go to the hospital for a check up of my hip and this morning our local recycle shop is coming to get a cupboard.
I could spend the time doing some drawings but I find that I’m rather nervous. So instead I’m watching some video and listening to some songs on youtube.
I came across this old video by Derek and The Dominos and it reminded me how times have changed and how I have changed.
Music has become very important. Nowadays I watch a lot of music videos looking for suitable songs to post on twitter.
In my youth music wasn’t that important. Although my radio played a lot of tunes I never listened to them. I was always reading or doing something else while the radio played.
Only sometimes when there was a really beautiful song on the radio, would I actually listen.
So it took me years to realize that the kind of boring song that runs till 3 min 24 sec and the really beautiful instrumental bit that starts at 3 min 25 sec are actually the same song.
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by Henk ter Heide on Thursday April 2, 2009
A tweet
After posting my last drawing, I got a tweet from @mayavbreemen (dutch) telling me she very much liked my drawing and asking me what my opinion was of my drawing.
At first glance that seemed a very strange question to ask of an artist. Of course do I like my drawing. Otherwise I wouldn’t have made it, right?
Wrong!
My goal in drawing isn’t to create beautiful pictures. My goal is to create interesting pictures.
Let me explain.
Beauty and the beast
Compare this picture of a sunset with this interpretation of a painting by Vincent van Gogh.
You’ll agree that the first picture is beautiful. Maybe it’s not the most beautiful sunset you’ve ever seen, but it’ll come close. Probably you’ve seen thousands of real sunsets in you live. And probably you’ve seen a few hundred in photos like this one.
But tell me. How often to you take your photo album out of the cupboard to look at one specific photo of a sunset?
I found the second picture a few weeks ago while I was looking for pictures to use in my collages and I hated it immediately. It was quite clear that this was not the kind of painting I could use. So I moved on.
But then I found that there was something about this painting that made me go back an look again.
I just did a little research on the picture and turns out that the two figures on the foreground are photoshopped on top of a painting by van Gogh. As horrible as the result might be it has something that draws me in and has me looking at this painting ones in a while.
Growth
So now for two of my drawings. Christening and First step.
Christening is one of my favorite drawings. It’s a quilt like patchwork of colors. Very pleasing to the eye.
But it is also a one off. The only purpose was to test the colors of a new pencil box. But it leads to nothing.
I could of course draw lots more of those kind of quilt like designs but it would soon become very boring for people to visit this site. Knowing that they would, again, see a quilt.
The second drawing is arguably the most horrible drawing I’ve ever done. But it’s also the first in a set.
It’s the drawing I had to get out of the way before I could try something new. Although I didn’t expect it, I did learn something by drawing it. But more important. Even while I was drawing it I got ideas about what to try next.
At the moment I’m drawing the third one in the set.
I’m finding that although I have some ideas about what it should become it’s also kind of a growing experience. As I’m learning how to use my colors I find more ways to keep the drawing interesting. Not only as an idea in my mind but also as a drawing on paper.
For me, and hopefully also for you, my visitors.
So to answer the question. Do I like my work?
Some times, but I’m not trying to.
I am trying to create pictures that are interesting enough to make you want to steal a second look.
If you like the stories I tell. Or like the art and music I show. Feel free to leave a donation.
by Henk ter Heide on Sunday December 7, 2008
One week of silence
My regular readers must have thought I fell of the the face of the earth because I stopped posting after the second edition of the Art Showcase blog carnival.
I didn’t. Actually you could say that I fell on the face of the earth. On Tuesday the 25e of November we had some local patches of ice on bridges and bicycle roads. On route to my work, about ten meters from my home, I hit such a spot. I even though I recognized what was wrong it was too late to react to it. My bike and right leg went one way and my left leg went the other way. A second later I lay on my back on the ground and the pain in my left leg told me that something was very wrong.
I was rushed to the hospital and, after an examination, told that my hip was broken and that I would be operated upon to put some screws in the bone. By 11.00 AM (only 4 hours after the accident) I was brought to the operating theater and the bone of my leg was set.
After that they told me that it was only a question of rehabilitating for a few days. The nurse told me that I would most probable be sent home the next Friday.
When they told me that I thought that would be not nearly enough time to learn to walk again. But in highensite it’s clear that it might have been true if they had taken into account that I’m autistic.
I told every doctor and every nurse I talked to but they seem to think that it was not very important.
So at first they had my practice walking with crutches. Which was less then successful. I nearly fell flat on my back. Then they had my practicing with a walker. Which worked a little better.
I could have learned to use the walker and I can learn to walk again. But not simultaneous.
It was only by Monday morning that I realized what was going wrong and suggested that I would be given a rollator. After that walking became a lot easier. Or rather less difficult.
I’ve been told that it will take only 2 or 3 months to learn to walk again.
The regulars will have noticed that I started posting pictures and pictures of paintings without any text.
Early November I thought it might be a good idea. So I tried it for a few days on a blogger blog and then moved it to this blog. Only I never stopped posting pictures to the blogger blog.
The thing is that I find hundreds of pictures and paintings a day. Of course most aren’t beautiful or interesting enough to post. But I’m still left with far more pictures then I could post here.
Thinking about my readers it dawned on me that it wouldn’t be much use to subscribe to the RSS feed of both blogs if I post the same kind of pictures to both of them.
I’ve been thinking about the difference between the two blogs.
Henk’s art showcase is going to be kind of cosy. I’ll be selection pictures and paintings for there beauty and for the feeling of normality and cosiness. Most paintings and pictures will be of landscapes and buildings. Maybe some people.
See me draw on the other hand will stay the main outlet of my thoughts and feelings.
The pictures and paintings I’ll be posting here will be selected more on what I find interesting then on beauty. Although they can be beautiful. They will be different. Different in the way they are painted or the kind of subject the artists choose.
For a while I thought that I would stop drawing. I even put my drawing box away and was thinking about changing the name of this blog. But I’m getting some new ideas I want to try.
This afternoon I got my drawing box back out and tomorrow I’m going to draw again.
Let’s see where this takes me.
This afternoon I found out that I’m on the 11the place of Twitters with most followers for the Netherlands. That’s nice.
Of course it would be much nicer if I were to reach the first place for the Netherlands. So I would very much appreciate it if you would be willing to follow me on twitter.
If you do you’ll get several things. First you’ll get a listing of all the articles I post on this site. Second you’ll get at least one post a day from Henk’s art showcase. Usually the last post of the day so you can find the others by clicking throught to the older posts.
There’s also a bonus you’ll will only get to see it you subscribe to Twitter. Ones in a while I find a site or a Flickr set with so many beautiful or interesting pictures or paintings that it would be a waste to post only one or two on See me draw or Henk’s art showcase.
I’ll post those sites or Flickr sets only to Twitter.
If you like the stories I tell. Or like the art and music I show. Feel free to leave a donation.
by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday January 29, 2008
Going from “Beautiful art sites” to Twitter and back again.
I don’t know whether there is any one around from the time I started this blog. But those who are will know that when I started with this blog I daily featured an art site.
There were two reasons to feature other sites. For one thing I liked it. Showing sites I like and sending them some traffic. The other reason was to promote my own site.
But after a while I run into a little problem. There are a lot of art sites and as my methods of finding them improved I found I had to make ever more painful decisions: Which sites to include in my feature and which ones to leave out.
It took me a while but in the end I decided that it would work better if I where to use my Stumble account to show art sites. Which at first worked perfectly.
But after using it for a few months I’ve found that StumbleUpon isn’t a very good fit for what I want. Stumble is a perfect place to show off the nice pictures you have found on the web. But it’s powers to promote my site are slowly dwindling.
The other problem is that there doesn’t seem to be an easy method of including my stumbles on my blog.
Last week I’ve found Twitter. Twitter seems to be the answer to all my prayers.
- It’s very easy to feature sites on Twitter. Even describing a site on Twitter seems easier then on Stumble. Only being able to use 140 characters means that you have to condense your description.
- It’s very easy to find people to follow your ramblings. Instead of just sitting and waiting whether anybody will come by, you can actively scout for followers. I like that a lot better.
- Twitter does seem to influence the amount of traffic I receive. The more people follow me, the more traffic I receive.
- And last but not least. With a little help from the Twitter tools plugin I can again post my art site feature on my blog.
The only strange thing I’ve found up till now is that all that traffic isn’t coming from Twitter but from Google. I’m sure there is a very logical explanation for that phenomenon but I have no idea what it might be.
If you like the stories I tell. Or like the art and music I show. Feel free to leave a donation.