Sunday Evening Art Gallery — Anna Berezovskaya

January 8, 2023 ~ humoringthegoddess ~ 7 Comments

Anna Berezovskaya was born in the town of Yakhroma in Russia, and became a student of Abramtsevsky Art and Industrial College in 2001.

Her paintings are easily recognizable by their unique signature style, which Berezovskaya refers to as “Poetic Realism.”Berezovksya brings together techniques unique to realism, abstraction and surrealism to create imaginative and creative worlds and subjects.Her pieces are riddled with symbolisms which the viewer must tease out in order to find the multiple meanings and layers to them.Berezovksya’s use of universal themes, inspired by the artist’s own life and imagination, resonate and reflect the viewers’ own emotions and the values.She uses symbolism to create timeless works on canvas and paper, carefully selecting subjects that convey her ideas and emotions about the Russian world around her.Berezovskaya’s works are built on a world which she has created — a visual world — where she tells her stories through childhood memories of books read and images embedded in her dream-space.“I still draw on stories that I love from my childhood but in terms of development I realize I have developed and grown and my ideas are becoming more interesting, sharper, more developed,” the artist shares.“I mainly use ideas from my normal regular everyday life but these can still be serious things that I try to convey in my paintings in a humorous way.”More of Anna Berezovskaya‘s whimsical art can be found at http://www.annaberezovskaya.com/.

Faerie Paths — Garden

December 30, 2021December 30, 2021 ~ humoringthegoddess ~ 8 Comments

Let yourself unwind and get lost in the garden of your mind.

― Anonymous

I Want to Be a Dark Fae Again

July 19, 2021July 19, 2021 ~ humoringthegoddess ~ 4 Comments

I found some “ambient” music on YouTube a few weeks ago — background music, really. (You should really check it out … instrumental music for all tastes). Great for crafting or reading. I came across this one long track, Relaxing Fairy Music – Dark Fae/Soothing, Sleep, Peaceful. It’s kind of slow and mysterious, nebulous and a touch enchanting.

It makes me want to role play a dark faerie again.

As I talked about in a blog from 2012, What Is Role Playing and Can I Do It By Myself,

Through the initial excitement of wandering through Internet worlds, I stumbled upon chat rooms where people typed to each other as if they were face-to-face. Interesting. I didn’t have to fess up that I was a 40-ish year old housewife/innkeeper … all I needed to do was make up a name and race and I belonged. Can you imagine the doors that opened for a writing goddess like me? Role-playing was like a video game with instant feedback. I could write my own dialogue, fight with swordsmen, disappear or have flames shoot from my fingertips, all with a sentence or two.

For those of us on every level of creativity (and I know that’s almost all of you!) there is something exciting of creating something with its own charms and purpose.

That’s the biggest reward of writing. But I digress.

I was a dark faerie named Dream Regret — half human, half fae. I was beautiful and clever and sexy. I could flirt as well as discuss strategy, chat with unicorns and trolls, or learn to hold a sword or javelin. I could get into philosophical discussions about the cosmos or the maturation of the Fae race or how to metamorphose into a dragon for a few hours.

It was all nonsense and it was all escapism.

The really good players fed you dialogue as well as you could dish it out. Enemies fought with swords and laser beams. They lied, cheated, and proclaimed their love.

I miss being that clever. That alluring. That magical.

There’s something about reality that sometimes takes the shine off of your crystal dome. Nothing could be as intricate as what is in your head. Nothing as full of unlimited possibilities.

Nothing can be as complicated — or as simple.

The older I get, the more I crave simplicity. Simplicity in real life, complexity in creativity. I love the challenge of a hard-to-design pattern, a harmonious color scheme, or a biting slice of dialogue while in the Creative mode. But I also like to be able to drop the pattern and the color scheme and dialogue when I’m done for the day.

I don’t like to deal with the complexities reality often brings along with it. Those challenges don’t fade with the sunset.

The days of creative chat rooms are over. I’ve put away my wings and my long dark blue hair and headed down a different street, searching for creative people and minds and hobbies.

But I’ll always have a bit of Dream Regret in me.

I’ll never let her fire go out.

Sunday Evening Art Gallery (midweek) — Brian Froud

February 24, 2021February 24, 2021 ~ humoringthegoddess ~ 12 Comments

Brian Froud (born 1947) is an English fantasy illustrator.

Froud graduated with Honors from Maidstone College of Art in 1971 with a degree in Graphic Design.

Soon afterwards, he began working in London on various projects ranging from book jackets, magazine covers to advertising as well as illustrating several children books.

Froud soon realized that fairy tales and legends were something which would never get old.In collaboration with his friend and fellow artist Alan Lee, Froud created the 1978 book Faeries, an illustrated compendium of faerie folklore.Upon discovering Froud’s lavish and mysterious drawings in his books, and recognizing his complex and singular artistic vision of the faerie world, Jim Henson chose him to help him create a unique otherworld feature-film which became known as The Dark Crystal. Soon Froud developed his own magical distinctive style and experimented with three dimensional designs complete with gnomes, goblins, warlocks and dragons.Through Froud’s unique style utilizing acrylics, colored pencil, pastels and ink, he has created some of the most well known fantasy images of the Twenty-first Century.More of Brian Froud‘s amazing workmanship can be found at https://www.ferniebrae.com/brian-froud.

Sunday Evening Art Gallery on Friday — Amy Casey

August 2, 2019August 12, 2019 ~ humoringthegoddess ~ 5 Comments

Amy Casey is fascinated by cityscapes.

Her paintings of growing cities reflect her love of the urban landscape and with the ongoing resilience and growth of civilization.

Her cityscapes hum and sing with ribbons of roads and highways energetically wrapped around growing heaps of buildings.

Her artwork showcases her curiosity of how much time and work it takes for a society to function and grow in spite of all the problems of natural and man made disasters.

Casey has exhibited her work regionally and nationally with solo shows in Cleveland, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, Provincetown and Los Angeles.

More of Amy Casey‘s creative cityscapes can be found at https://www.amycaseypainting.com/

It’s Not Always What You Think

November 27, 2018November 28, 2018 ~ humoringthegoddess ~ 9 Comments

As you may (or may not) know, I have a runaway mind. I have to be careful when I’m driving not to let the story take me away from paying attention to the road. For I sometimes get an idea and just run away with it until I’ve lost a minute or two.

I had one of those ideas this evening on my way home from work.

What if, for some unknown reason, you woke up one morning and were able to heal anybody by just touching them? By squeezing their arm?

The first emotion would be shock. Then reasoning. Research. How did you get that power? Would the person stay cured? Grasped from the hands of death at the last minute?

So you’d start healing people. First some you know. Colds, heart problems, bad eyesight. You are amazed!

Word gets out. Doctors and universities and private companies want to research you. See how you do it. They may want to dissect you or put you in a tank and take tests.

But you’re not interested. You want to cure people.

According to some quick research, there are 7.7 billion people in the world, and 95% of them/us are sick with one thing or another. My little calculator turns that into 810,526,315 people are sick around the world at any one time. From cancer to colds, you’d be their cure.

if you were to see 30 patients an hour, 24 hours a day, that’s curing 720 patients a day. That doesn’t factor in sleep, meals, and rest time. So if you could cure 720 people per day, it would still take you 1,125,730 days to cure every single person in the world. And that would be only the people that are sick at this moment in time. Not the millions that will get sick tomorrow.

Saving the world is an overwhelming thing, isn’t it?

Before you know it the press would be all over you and Hollywood would want to make a movie out of your life. You would have thousands of doctors calling you every hour just to see if you could take a look at their patients first.

Then you would have to choose who you would cure first….a grandmother with lung failure, a child with pneumonia, a mother with three kids who has cancer. Not only in your city but in millions of cities around the world.

You would want to cure as many people as you possibly could. But who is first? You would have to make criteria. A hundred spreadsheets at a time of who is to be saved and/or healed first.

Everyone’s mothers and fathers would call you and come to your door begging you to save their child. Their husband. Thousands would be outside your home every day.

Curing them would prevent you from going to hospitals and hospices around your neighborhood, your town, your state. Not to mention the other 49 United States and people overseas.

See how my mind wandered?

I don’t want the power to heal sick people. I don’t want the responsibility of choosing between people I love and people I don’t know. Or deciding which illness is worse. They are all worse. Some will die because you couldn’t get to them in time to cure them, and the guilt would eventually be overwhelming.

The rest of life will go on as it should, whether you cure their cancer or their sinuses. People will still die, people will still be on waiting lists for livers or kidneys. And people will still be sad and cry.

It’s the way of the world. And no amount of instant healing will change the ending of the story.

So be careful what you wish for….

Let’s Cosplay

March 23, 2017 ~ humoringthegoddess ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes I feel like a fish out of water. A bluejay in a subway. A…you get it.

For the longest time I’ve heard the word “cosplay” bantered around in various articles and circles.

I always thought cosplay was the name of a band.

Last night I watched a TV show on the SyFy channel called Cosplay Melee. And I finally realized what it was all about. Dress Up. Tech style.

According to iFanboy (https://goo.gl/fAIbSC), “Cosplay is a shortened form of two words – costume and play. It is the practice of portraying a fictional character – at times completely identifying as that character while in costume (and thus acting as if the individual was that character to add to the authenticity of the experience).”

It seems to me I have been surrounded by cosplayers for like ever and never knew they had a title.

My trips through the years to the Renaissance Faire was full of cosplayers…myself included. Although I didn’t quite lose myself in the lady-in-waiting corset way, I did find myself speaking with a British accent while I dined on turkey legs and watched the joust. I have also lost myself at Halloween now and then, everything from a wicked witch (not to be confused with THE wicked witch), a hooker, and a blueberry. I don’t remember if the acting went to my head — after all, what would a blueberry have to share with the world — but I did go all out on the costumes.

I have been in love with SiFi’s Face Off for years. I love the imagination and the talent of the competitors. It’s fascinating. Cosplay Melee is just about the same thing, except they build extensions of themselves in fantasy mode, where Face Off is somebody else’s face.

My feelings of inadequacy seem to dissipate, though, when I realize — isn’t a writer a cosplayer?

Okay, we don’t design costumes and makeup and physically turn into our favorite creature. But we know them just as intimately. We know how they look, how they smell, how they walk. We know what they think, why they hurt, why they’re insane. We know more about our fictional characters than we know (or more likely will admit) to ourselves. They’re in our head more than on the page, and there’s often no reasoning with them.

That means we make up dialects, languages, and points-of-view. We become them. And if that isn’t cosplay, I don’t know what is.

I suppose it isn’t such a bad thing to dress up and act like your favorite fantasy character. People have been doing that at Comic Con forever. Beam me up Scotty and all that. As long as you know that Neytiri exists only in the movie Avatar and Captain Kirk is only a TV hero, you’re alright. Start thinking you can jump off buildings or fisticuffs with bad guys in the alley late at night, and, well, it doesn’t take much to get back to reality.

Still, I think there’s a little cosplay in all of us. Whether we paint, write, sculpt, make jewelry, or play music. The basics are always there. It’s what we do with them that makes cosplay.

But I still thing there’s a band around with a name like that….

Went Gif Shopping Today!

April 5, 2016June 17, 2020 ~ humoringthegoddess ~ 5 Comments

I went gif shopping last night.

I feel like a weirdo…or a geek. What in the world I’m going to do with this ever-growing collection only heaven knows. Gifs are all over the Internet — they are free, they are cool — and I haven’t a clue what I’m going to do with them all.

I suppose I like the simple movements a small bit of animation holds. I’m sure they are fairly simple to make, but like a magical act, I don’t want to know how it’s done. I am content watching water flow or objects spinning. They don’t take up much room — not like a salt and pepper shaker collection — and when you bore of them there’s not a lot of guilt disposing of them with a “click”.

I suppose when you are creative (as opposed to logical), the how isn’t as important as the happening. I once had a friend who told me why pretend, when Science was so much more fascinating. This came from a very logical person, an electrical engineer, who also happened to dabble in astronomy and physics. And this opinion twisted my own when it came to letting my imagination fly.

There is truth in what my friend told me. Science, physics, astronomy, engineering, all are fascinating truths that continue to evolve into more fantastical truths. This is the foundation of all we hold dear. The physics of balance and weight built us shelter. The simple mathematics of 0’s and 1’s is what powers computers, Iphones, and automobiles. I can’t imagine a world without these fascinating sciences, these powerful tools.

Yet I am simple in a lot of ways. Mathematics, Pi, integers, all that stuff means nothing to me because I don’t have any idea how it works. It’s like part of my brain refuses to function. I am fascinated by quantum physics, by quarks and black holes, but I haven’t a fig what they really are or how they are really formed. Like watching computer graphics. If technology can create dragons and Transformers and hobbits, all from what started as binary code, who am I to judge the validity of such?

But as I’ve gotten older I’ve realized that it’s okay to be imaginative as well as factual. Being a writer, an artist, and a grandmother, it’s important to always have a storytale ready. Whether created by me or J.K. Rowling, there is a need to dazzle an audience. To make eyes widen with just a sentence. To paint a landscape that doesn’t exist on this plane of existence. To call fireflies faeries and coyote howls werewolf songs.

There is a need for both fantasy and reality in this life. Most linear folks have little to do with the imagination side, unless it’s computers or cars or airplanes. And truthfully, many imaginations don’t care how something works. In their world, it just does. The crazier the better.

Which brings me back to my being a gif hog. I try and use them on blogs now and then. But more often I sit with my little grandbaby and show them the magic that someone else made. Like believing in unicorns and astrology and thanking God for the free throw you made to win the game. Just because you can’t prove it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

So for you giffys out there, here are a few that have caught my fancy….