havockblog

I scribbled this sequence in my sketchbook as rough sketches, and seeing as I didn’t feel that making it neater would improve anything I offer it up here pretty much in its original form, with some added rasters.

Why do we feel more inclined to respond to some situations and less to others while both are within our ‘Circle of Concern’? Simon Longstaff explores this question in the current issue of Living Ethics – excellent article, do have a read. Click the thumbnail (or here) for the accompanying illustration.

Accompanying Simon Longstaff’s thoughts on the ethical dimensions of the Wikileaks debate (published online here) is this illustration.

It’s that time of the year again! Australia has a hung parliament and cooperation is a must. Enter a quartered Christmas tree; it only works when all add their individual sections together – and when that does happen there would be a lovely combination of all the colours. Very christmassy!

This owl is part of daughter’s modular birthday present – a picture constructed out of a number of separate elements, which can be reconfigured at each birthday as is deemed fit. Will post the finished product soon.

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” This week’s Bible in an Hour focusses on the Gospel according to John and the Incarnation; for the illustration it felt appropriate to work with light and dark, even more so than usual. I don’t think the talks have been posted online yet, but presume they will in due course appear on the virtual theology website. There’s a good number of recordings of previous Bible in an Hour sessions on there, should you be interested.

There’s a Christmas ‘special’ of the Bible in an Hour series this year; two evenings, the first one of which last night looked at the Birth Narratives in Matthew, Luke and John (focusing on John in particular next week). For this one I wanted to take a sort of kaleidoscope look at those narratives, reflecting in essence the same image three times, but changing it each time in order to bring out that gospel’s particulars. So Matthew gets the magi, Luke the shepherds and John; well, John gets a vague sort of glowing thing going on. More chance to flesh out John and the incarnation (no pun intended) next week!

Hung parliaments (or perpetual negotiations) appear to be in vogue at the moment. What could they be symptomatic of, what new winds do they bring and how to respond to them are some of the angles discussed in the current editorial for the St James Ethics Centre’s magazine, and this is my illustration to accompany it.

It’s nice to be painting again, making quick sketches to develop technique. This is a small quick one on the inside of a cereal box – in acrylic with small touches of conté. I was trying to list influences and feel I have to lift out in particular Cinepak video compression; used to be that if you set it to compress it really hard you got amazing colours out of it, sometimes throwing up completly random colours in the process – the video quality in itself would be awful but it created awesome, almost abstract work (and you can still get the same with JPEG). Not sure how conscious I’ve been of it but I think it’s the kind of colour play that I’ve been aiming for in painted work.

For the previous issue of Living Ethics (the illustration for the current issue has just been finished, and will be up here shortly) I produced an illustration that engaged with a pilot educational programme that the St James Ethics are involved in, offering an ethics-based complement to scripture lessons (taught as ‘Special Religious Eduction’, hence the acronym on the door) in ten NSW primary schools. For further information, please have a look at the Centre’s Frequently Asked Questions on the subject – better than me explaining it!