A walk in the Lake District

I haven't been at all good about updating this blog for a long time. I'm still not sure what the long-term future for it is, but for now, I thought I'd add a few pictures that I took on a recent walk in the Lake District. We spent a fortnight in Cumbria and managed to do a number of lovely walks: more pictures soon, hopefully.

On this occasion, we walked from the little village of Braithwaite, just outside Keswick, up to the top of Grisedale Pike, and then across onto Coledale Hawse, and from there, down and along Coledale Beck, and back to Braithwaite. A beautiful walk of perhaps 6 or 7 miles. Although the weather wasn't magnificent, the clouds decided not to encroach on our route, getting trapped just a few hundred yards away from us on Hobcarton Crags. Anyone familiar with that part of the Lake District will recognise it as a very common route.

You can see full size pictures on my Picasa Web site, and you should be able to see a small slideshow below. Follow the link for this post to see the big pictures. And while you're there, take a look at the rest of my pictures on Picasa Web: Google have recently made a lot of improvements to this site, so I'm hoping to use it more.

Grab yourself some free music

Just to move away from the usual topic for a while, you might like to head over to
Thomas Dolby’s Blog, where he has generously made available a track for download. This is a mash-up between a new song of his, and a Peter Gabriel song, and since Thomas Dolby and Peter Gabriel are among my favourite (musical) artists, I couldn't let the opportunity pass by without saying something. I had the pleasure of seeing Thomas Dolby live for the first time just a few weeks ago.

To my regular readers, I apologise for the lack of posting of late. I will try and get back to a more regular schedule, but life has been (and continues to be) hectic, hence the drop down to the more occasional, and sometimes off-topic, post. Bear with me, please, and do please keep reading!

Update 23 Aug: Sadly, Thomas has taken the track down. He didn't feel comfortable putting it up without Peter Gabriel's permission, which sounds fair enough to me.

o2 Wireless Festival

Martin singing
Originally uploaded by Neal Dench.

Slightly off-topic I know, but I've just uploaded a bunch of photographs to both Flickr and Picasa Web Albums that I took on my recent trip to see the o2 Wireless Festival at Hyde Park. If, like me, you're around about the 40 mark, and (despite, or perhaps because of, your excellent and eclectic taste in music) your heart is really in the 80s, you might be interested in taking a look.

On a more artistic note, I'm quite pleased with some of them, having fiddled with several of them to make up for the excessive zoom I had to use for many of them, and the blur caused by not being able to use a flash from a distance.

You can find the Flickr pics here, and you can find the Picasa Web album pics here.

Illustration Friday: Skyline

This week's Illustration Friday theme is "Skyline", so I thought I'd repost this picture that I originally published almost exactly a year ago. Sorry it's not new, but I thought it was a pretty good fit with this week's theme.

A trip to London, the NPG, and the BP Portrait Award

I took a trip to London this weekend to meet up with some old school friends and celebrate our 40th birthdays by going to the last day of the O2 Wireless Festival at Hyde Park.

Before meeting up with them, I had to take some time out to go to the National Portrait Gallery, which I love to do whenever I get the chance. As always, the visit was worthwhile. I think portraiture is one of my favourite "forms" of art. In terms of a painting's emotional impact on me, I think I get more from a portrait than from almost any other subject, much as I love all forms of art. People often mistake portraits as being about the subject, but this is only telling at most half of the story. For me, a portrait is at least as much about the artist as it is about the subject, often more so.

Although it's only about 3 months since my last visit to the NPG, a lot has changed there. In particular, most of the Ondaatje Wing is taken up by the BP Portrait Award 2006, which you can see thumbnails of by clicking the title of this post. I was blown away by this exhibition; the depth of work, the intensity that many of the pieces had, and the quality were quite stunning. Of course, the thumbnails do the exhibition no justice: with exhibits ranging from a few inches square to 6 feet or more in height, the range of pieces on display was enormous. I spent a happy hour looking at this exhibition, basking in the talent that was on display, feeling both inspired and inadequate at the same time.

If you're in London any time before 17th September, do yourself a favour and go and see this exhibition.

And for anyone interested, the Wireless Festival was great too. Treats for the eyes, ears, and heart all in the same day. (Though my feet weren't so happy. I hate my feet.)

Scots Pine

I had intended to post this as an entry for this week's theme at Illustration Friday, which I thought was "Jungle". Well, I must have been going mad, because it's "Dance" -- "Jungle" was some while back. I'd written the post, published it, and everything. It was only when I came to add the link at the website that I discovered my error. Hmm, what went wrong with my brain there, I wonder?

It's actually a tree in Cumbria, right outside the caravan that we stayed in a few weeks ago. A Scots Pine, to be exact. I painted it from inside the caravan on a lovely sunny, but cold, Spring afternoon. I've been looking for the excuse to post it, and here it is.

Flickr resolutions

Well, finally my Flickr account has been un-NIPSA'ed, so my public photos will now show up in searches in Flickr. It works: I've tried it.

I had a nice reply from the support group at Flickr. They still didn't actually tell me I no longer have a NIPSA on my account (what is their problem with that?), but they did at least answer my original points by assuring me that they are looking at a different site model which will allow different types of images, with the aim of eventually doing away with NIPSA altogether. We'll see.

I can't fault the support group in this instance. My query didn't drop into a black hole as I was worried it might. They answered my questions -- albeit with their hands tied due to a restrictive policy, and sorted my account. Was this because I blogged about the experience? Who knows. My site has certainly attracted a lot more traffic recently as a result.

I received my invite for Picasa web albums, by the way, and have been trying it out. Some more details soon.

Picasa web albums

Following Google's announcement that there's a beta version of Picasa that publishes to the web, I've managed to get myself an invite to test it out. My initial impressions are all pretty good. It's very easy to use, especially from Picasa itself, they give you a pretty generous 250MB to use for your photos (with a reasonably priced option to upgrade to a massive 6GB), and photos load very quickly, allowing smooth transitions between different photos when you're viewing. It all looks very pretty, if perhaps not quite as pretty as Flickr.

There are a few things that are missing. You can't add "post-it" type notes to pictures like you can with Flickr. While captions are uploaded from Picasa, tags are not. They have a "favourite users" feature, but it's not easy to find other users unless they share the URLs of their public gallery. Also, most tragically of all given that this is a Google product, you can't yet search across the whole of Picasa web albums for something. This is in stark contrast to Flickr, and I can't believe they're not going to address that.

But, for a beta product, it's already very stable and usable. Which, to be fair, has been my experience with most beta products from Google.

In the meantime, you can view my public gallery here. There's not much there at the moment, but I hope to change that reasonably soon.