Little Treasures: Small works of art.
To paraphrase Hemingway: Eschew the monumental. Shun the epic. All the artists who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones, too.
I think that art transcends all boundaries. It can represent the sacred and the fashionable; the deepest feelings and the language of commerce. From the first paintings on cave walls to invoke spiritual power and ensure success in hunting to the latest computer graphics, we have always communicated with images. And people all over the world understand, even if they don't speak the same language
Art doesn't depend on, or engender competition and conflict. It's inclusive - everyone is allowed to do it. Relaxing and enriching to the artist, it brings smiles and fellowship to the viewer. We should not forget its power!
You may not be a Saatchi or a Gates (yet!), but you too can start collecting original artworks just as they do!
Thanks to an amazing, trail-blazing art movement called ACEO you can become a serious collector of paintings, collage and fine art photography.
Artists from all over the world have been caught up in this movement and are loving every moment of being able to share their work that much more easily and exhibit to a wider audience.
Let me explain: ACEO is an acronym for "Art Card Editions and Originals" which are tiny works of art in the trading card format ( always 2.5 X 3.5 inches).
These little masterpieces look great when framed (using a wide mount to lend importance and depth) and are a fun, inexpensive way to start your own personal gallery of original art!
There are some truly phenomenal ACEO artists on eBay sites around the world. And they are only a Google click away!
So what are you waiting for - go on, start collecting!
A world less ordinary...
I think that travel comes from some deep urge to see the world, like the urge that brings up a worm in an Irish bog to see the moon when it is full. ~Lord Dunsany
From the very beginning my world has been imbued with art, literature, poetry, music and travel. My amazing parents gave my sister and I a life filled with colour and adventure. As children we 'wild' skied in the Black Mountains of the tiny kingdom of Lesotho, galloped across the thorn tree strewn Athi Plains in Kenya alongside herds of zebra and sailed past the very tip of Africa where the warm waters of the Indian Ocean meet the icy Atlantic. All this while living on the slopes of Table Mountain, nestled amongst the vineyards and oaks of "the Fairest Cape in all the world"And then I met an English boy who had driven to the Cape from London. Down through Spain they rattled and shook in their old Landie. Across the straits to Morocco and then into the desert; through Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, the Sudan, Kenya and Zimbabwe until finally reaching Cape Town. I married him.
Two extraordinarily beautiful daughters later, we left South Africa. The boy in the Land Rover took us to Nigeria, Hong Kong, Australia, the Virgin Islands, Kenya and Uganda. Together we have sailed on a Junk across the South China sea, plunged into the snake invested waters of the crystal clear Inkotapeni River in Nigeria and experienced an awesome, life affirming encounter with the gorillas of the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda. We have danced the 'horse-chip' in a kaleidoscopic swirl of islanders at a Caribbean carnival, dived the crystalline depths of the Great Barrier reef and swayed tipsily under the palms at a Full Moon party at the Bomba Shack on Tortola.
We've eaten grasshoppers and matoke; shared a shark feast with dhow fishermen on Zanzibar and drunk pungent putu beer with a witchdoctor in Swaziland. We've had dinner on a deserted beach with champagne, crisp linen and candelabra to celebrate Mandela's release from the shackles of oppression and tentatively tackled crocodile tail stew on a pontoon while floating up a shimmering path of moonlight on Lake Jakana.
We've swam in emerald crater lakes under the towering peaks of the Mountains of the Moon with a hippo mama and her baby; paddled past snoozing Nile crocodiles in dugout canoes and spent a Christmas under canvas amongst the lions in Kidepo National Park on the border of war-torn Sudan and Uganda. The girls have white-water rafted at the source of the Nile, walked with buffalo and elephant in Semliki and seen the strange orange glow of ...... (continued next module)
A tribute continued.....
People and places.
....and seen the strange orange glow of a leopard's eyes caught in the spotlight of the game ranger's truck on a night drive.Across the vast, sun bleached savannah of the Serengeti we went, trailing clouds of dust and tsetse flies. We've peered over the lip of the Ngorogoro Crater and stared up at the snow capped peak of Mount Kilimanjaro etched against the startling blue of an African sky. We've listened to the haunting cry of a fish eagle, laughed at the antics of acrobatic colobus monkeys; seen the speed and skill of a cheetah bringing down a buffalo and smelled the heady perfume of night jasmine on the velvety air of the tropics. We've reached up and touched the stars at Lake Turkana and watched the moon make silvery mercury of a waterhole as the shy Bongo came down to drink.
My art is a tribute, I hope, to the people we've met on our travels in Africa. People who have experienced bloody civil war, yet smile with a warmth that reaches the very heart of you. People who have lived under oppressive regimes, yet sing in soaring harmony. Those whose families have been desecrated during onslaughts of horrifying genocide, yet still reach out with love and forgiveness. Children whose eyes light up when given a pencil to take to their little school under the sparse shade of an acacia tree.
That is why I paint. For me, it is a celebration of life and through my art I endeavour in some small way to encapsulate the essence, the spirit and the strength of the exceptional people I have been so very privileged to meet.
Bwindi Impenetrable Forest - The Mountain Gorillas of Uganda
Look into my eyes....
Gorillas are simply outrageous. Nothing prepares you for meeting one on the green-dripping, moss-covered, butterflied equatorial forest floor. They look up at you from their wrinkled, black leather faces and it's...well, it's extremely difficult writing about mountain gorillas. Words seem woefully unable to convey the emotional impact of the experience. When one first locks onto your gaze with its beautiful, wise, hazel-brown eyes your brain explodes. It whacks you in some ancient corner of your animal brain and comes out as tears. When the gorilla looks away you feel instantly lonely.I didn't know that about gorillas until I met one, of course. I'm not sure when it first occurred to me that human beings might be an evolutionary mistake....probably while watching the ten o' clock news. Yes, we've taken over the planet, but judgement about the genetic path we're on really depends on whether you rate success as the ability to loot, burn and pillage or live in harmony with Earth's other life forms. If we are on the wrong track, where and when did we branch off?
There's heated debate in some scientific circles about whether we first stepped onto the savanna and stood up because the forests receded and the grass was tall, or became a semi-aquatic, hairless, dolphin-like creature able to hold our breath because the forests flooded and stranded us on soggy islands. But, either way, we probably began the stooping march to mobile phones and hamburgers in the equatorial forests around the Great Rift Valley.
We left the Valley, conquered space and invented paper clips. But gorillas and chimpanzees stayed put, almost unnoticed by the human world until fairly recently. With logging operations and banana shambas hacking away at their ancient forest homes, however, these distant cousins of ours are now under terrible threat. ...continued
Come with me on safari...to
the pearl of Africa
At one small town we needed to make a pit stop and pulled in at a neat little hotel and went in search of a loo. It was a pit all right, a squat-and-swat which seemed to have been positioned so locals lining the veranda could watch mzungus staggering out with expressions of shock on their faces.
After hours of chassis-punishing lurching and banging southwards towards the northern border of Rwanda the scenery suddenly rose up ahead of us, impossibly green, and we turned down a side road (I use the term loosely) marked by an alluring sign - Bwindi Impenetrable Forest.
At Mantana tented camp we were greeted with iced lemon drinks and cool, rolled face cloths with which to smear off the dust. Birdsong rose from the forest and the smell of cooking drifted across from the kitchen. From the camp we could see the canopy of the brooding forest, threaded through with wraiths of mist. A tropical storm rumbled ominously in the mountains beyond and the damp, warm air felt like the breath of a living creature. It must have taken an awful cataclysm to force our early ancestors out of such a paradise. From somewhere a phrase was downloaded into my primeval memory - here be gorillas.
'Bush meat' is the main source of protein for people in the region. 40,000 tons of it are consumed each year in the Congo alone. 400 gorillas and 3000 chimps a year end up in cooking pots. Given their genetic proximity to humans this amounts to cannibalism. It's like eating your ancestors.
Situated in now-peaceful Uganda, however, Bwindi Impenetrable Forest is a safe haven. There, in relative security, the great, lazy primates wander, rest and sunbathe between bouts of eating and sleeping. Apart from the occasional luxury of an ant hors d'oevre, gorillas are gentle vegetarians, nibbling the leaves and stripping the bark from around 58 plant species, then belching luxuriously as they rest their bloated stomachs in supine majesty.
As we entered the forest a red-tailed monkey dropped from a boscia branch in the canopy, its tail streaming out behind like the cord of a bungi jumper. A chimp - dissecting nuts along another branch amid a flap of great blue turacos - took no notice.
Encounters of the life-affirming kind.
Bwindi continued...
As we climbed a squelch of earth in a rare shaft of sunlight had attracted a crazy whirlwind of butterflies. Gaudy swallowtails, blue mother of pearls and chocolate browns dominated a melee of smaller white, orange, red and speckled flutterers, all competing for places to slurp the ooze with their outrageously long tongues.When we arrived at the place the gorillas had rested the previous day the tracking began in earnest and I soon discovered the benefits of walking on your knuckles. Where gorillas had passed with ease we humans slashed and cursed, got caught by vines and were smacked by overhanging boughs.
"Shh!" whispered our ranger suddenly and everyone froze. I detected the movement of a dark shape ahead and stared fixedly at it. Then glancing to my left I found myself in the gentle gaze of the most thoughtful brown eyes I'd ever seen. The female gorilla was sitting like a silent furry Buddha only a few paces from me exuding a peacefulness which offset any possible fear I might have had in the presence of such a powerful, near-mythical creature. Then she tipped onto her knuckles and loped to the base of a giant ebony tree, lay on her side and began fishing for termites, grimacing comically when they bit her.
We moved a few paces and were halted by the presence of an enormous silverback. Beneath his huge crown were two penetrating eyes, a shiny black leather face, enormous air-scoop nostrils and a mouth you'd have to describe as quizzical. His muscular arms reminded me of Popeye and his torso would be the envy of a Sumo wrestler, his fingers the size of huge, tropical bananas. He rumbled deep in his throat, causing me to fear the worst, but then ambled off, with us skulking in his magisterial wake.
After trying to tiptoe through underbush that had the consistency of newly boiled spaghetti we peered round a bush and there the great creature was, comfortably scratching his broad bottom with an expression of complete and utter contentment. Beyond him were 3 females, another young male and 5 babies.
A baby bounded up to the scratching patriarch, sat down beside him and pounded his little chest, then looked up at Papa for approval. Having secured that he leapt for a branch, hung by his feet and gave us an upside down grin. The silverback glanced at his gawking audience with not a trace of interest - we could have been forest butterflies for all he cared - then rolled onto his giant knuckles and was gone.
The Aerial Armadillo
My Website
Paintings and Fine Art Photography
Fetching RSS feed... please stand byGreat Stuff on Amazon
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends:
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood
Amazon Price: $10.20 (as of 12/03/2008) 
Brazzaville Beach
Amazon Price: $11.16 (as of 12/03/2008)
The Poisonwood Bible
Amazon Price: (as of 12/03/2008)
My Traitor's Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience
Amazon Price: $10.20 (as of 12/03/2008)
Masai Dreaming
Amazon Price: (as of 12/03/2008)
An Artist's Tribute.
Reader Feedback
sarastone
I am currently going through a divorce, and the one piece of art I want more than anything from the "ex" is his Gorilla--complete w/snake skin, poetic quote about the raping of the rain forest and Hog Ranch, and of course the beautiful women. I am ready to cut off a toe for this picture--any ideas?
Posted June 29, 2007
Cheerfulart4U wrote...
Fantastic lens. I love gorillas! Your artwork is beautiful. I love vibrant colours! Its a pleasure reading your posts in ACEO enthusiasts group too.
:o) -Georgina
Posted June 10, 2007
ArtfullyYours
The vibrant colors in your work are just gorgeous!
Posted May 23, 2007
nekoneko wrote...
wow..your art..is very very vibrant!! thanks for visiting my lens .. :)..lensrolling you and 5 stars!
Posted May 21, 2007
nekoneko wrote...
wow..your art..is very very vibrant!! thanks for visiting my lens .. :)..lensrolling you and 5 stars!
Posted May 21, 2007
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