Jan 27 2023 - The Frog Princess

 

The Frog Princess is a fairy tale that has multiple versions with various origins. It is classified as type 402, the animal bride, in the Aarne–Thompson index.   Another tale of this type is the Norwegian Doll i' the Grass. Russian variants include the Frog Princess or Tsarevna Frog (Царевна Лягушка, Tsarevna Lyagushka) and also Vasilisa the Wise. The Frog Princess is a Slavic folktale focusing on the importance of recognizing someone’s inner beauty, regardless of their outward appearance, as well as the possibility of redemption after failure. The tale has many variants and appears in Czech, Hungarian, Italian, and Russian folk works as well as many others. The Frog Princess, named Vasilisa the Wise, is a beautiful, intelligent, friendly, skilled young woman, who was forced to spend three years in a frog's skin for disobeying Koschei.  The Frog Princess sheds her skin, and the prince then burns it, to her dismay.   She sat down on a bench, sorely grieved, and said to Prince Ivan, "Ah, Prince Ivan, what have you done? Had you but waited three more days I would have been yours forever.   Trekking far and wide to find her, the Prince meets an old man.  "Take this ball of yarn and follow it without fear wherever it rolls."   It rolls on and on with many adventures. And of course, the Prince is reunited with his beautiful Vasilisa the Wise and they live in peace and happiness to a ripe old age. aka HAPPILY EVERY AFTER.

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Dec 30 2022 - Birds vs Windows

 

Birds hit the corner office windows.  Sometimes a light tap and sometimes a thump.  Mostly little sparrows surprised they can't keep flying.   This is the leading cause of death of birds - hitting windows rather than cats. I recently purchased  "strips" that go on my corner office window to stop this.  These are specially designed to make the birds aware of a barrier, so they don't hit the window.  When we looked at the instructions, the temperature outside needs to be 10 degrees for the strips to stick.   Who would guess that today is the day!  The end of December 2022. We used to put pictures of birds on the glass to warn them.  There's a site called WindowAlert and it has a range of decals - from snowflakes to leaves to birds flying.   But that's not the recommendation from the authorities. What I've purchased from Lee Valley is designed based on the recommendations of FLAP Canada (short for Fatal Light Awareness Program) to warn birds away from glass.  Applied to the glass, the 2" grid of small squares convinces fliers that there are no bird-sized gaps; human eyes, meanwhile, can tune out the squares, similar to the way you barely notice a window screen unless you focus on it.  It is a very precise system is get give tay a tape measure and a grid to apply the grid correctly.   Go to the FLAP.org  website and find out a number of techniques to protect the birds from your windows.  You can take the Homeowner Assessment HERE.  This is what the survey looks like.   What a multi-trunk birch this is.   Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Sep 15 2022 - That Happy Little Cloud

 

Wake Up on the Bright Side      This comes from Weird Facts on Bored Panda.  These are compelling one-line stories.  You can page through all 50 of the stories HERE.  I include the link because this is a  Is this one true?  I haven't found out.  The treasure trove of Bob Ross's life is reward enough.   Bob Ross's biography has many more events that are stranger than this one.  For example,  he was never paid for his PBS series show.  Another fact:  his 30,000 paintings and the Bob Ross brand and name went to his partners after his death - Walt and Anne Kowalski, and not to his son and brother.  A Netflix documentary tracks the legal battles over the rights to the Ross name after his death at 52.   The Kowalskis had a painting supplies company in partnership with him and they backed his PBS show.  They won the rights to his likeness and name squeezing out his son - even from painting for a period of time.   And then there are all the plush toys and similar products. "Ross painted an estimated 30,000 paintings during his lifetime. Despite the unusually high supply of original paintings, Bob Ross original paintings are scarce on the art market, with sale prices of the paintings averaging in the thousands of dollars and frequently topping $10,000. The major auction houses have never sold any of Ross's paintings, and Bob Ross Inc. continues to own many of the ones he painted for The Joy of Painting, as Ross himself was opposed to having his work turned into financial instruments. In contrast to more traditionally famous artists, Ross's work, described by an art appraisal service as a cross between "fine art" and "entertainment memorabilia" — is most highly sought after by common fans of The Joy of Painting, as opposed to wealthy collectors. The artwork circulating among collectors is largely from Ross's work from before he launched the television show." And remember Bob Ross's voice?  It had a calm, soothing tone.  "Twitch streams created a new interest in Ross and caused his popularity to grow. His videos subsequently became popular with devotees of ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response). ASMR refers to a pleasant form of paresthesia, or tingling, often brought about by specific visual or auditory stimuli. Many viewers found that listening to Ross triggered an ASMR response. According to Joan Kowalski, the president of Bob Ross Inc.: "He's sort of the godfather of ASMR.  People were into him for ASMR reasons before there even was an ASMR." This is repeated in another article:  "Even today, Ross has become an ASMR star...  A video of Ross painting a mountain has a staggering 7.7 million views, with others regularly surpassing 2 or 3 million views." A few of Bob Ross's words are notable and quotable:    We don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents. “There's nothing wrong with having a tree as a friend. “I guess I'm a little weird.  “Let's get crazy.” “Lets build a happy little cloud. Lets build some happy little trees.”

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Aug 4 2021 - Australia's Light Show

 

Do you remember the welcoming of the Twenty-first century with Sydney's grand light show on the harbour? Australia has another massive show - this time it is the "Field of Light Uluru" display.  It is at Ayers Rock (the English settlers name) or Uluru (it's original name from the Anangu Aboriginals). It is the huge red rock in the desert.  The artist is Bruce Munro and its debut was March 2016.  It is still on display today - although many of its events are awaiting reopening after COVID. "As darkness falls and Uluru is thrown into silhouette, Field of Light illuminates. As far as the eye can see gentle rhythms of colour light up the desert. The exhibition, aptly named Tili Wiru Tjuta Nyakutjaku or ‘looking at lots of beautiful lights’ in local Pitjantjatjara is Munro’s largest work to date. Overwhelming in size, covering more than seven football fields, it invites immersion in its fantasy garden of 50,000 spindles of light, the stems breathing and swaying through a sympathetic desert spectrum of ochre, deep violet, blue and gentle white." Knowing how beautiful Niagara Falls is when illuminated at night, I think this would be distinctly different experience as it is in the desert.  Niagara has the Falls to provide the movement.  The Munro display has movement through the lights.  There are numerous packages - including a fly-over in private helicopter.  That would explain the beautiful photos from the air in the LA Times article HERE.   The Ayers Rock Resort appears to be the host organization with more pictures and information HERE.  Do you remember the Seasky international's Light Show that was to arrive December 9 2020 in Niagara Falls?  I am still checking it out to find out if it may start up when the reopening is complete.  That information is HERE.  It remains closed with last winter's information. I found some motion blur images from past Christmas displays and gave them some transformations.

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She Sees We See

It seems interesting that luck is both good luck and bad luck.  Yesterday's luckiest man had both bad luck and in the last instalment of his story had good luck in winning the lottery.  I might bet he has more instalments of luck on the way. Amongst the luckiest people from yesterday's search is one person who is called a tetrachromat.  She's Concetta Antico and she sees 100 times more colours than the rest of us. Her story was included with the lucky people.  Here's the story. "The human eye is stacked with millions of cone-shaped cells that help us recognise colours. For the normal kind like us, there are three types of cones which allow vision for about one million distinctive colours. Birds, insects, fishes and reptiles have a fourth type of cone cell that extends their colour perception, making them see the UV range as well. Although evolution has mostly scrubbed that fourth cone from the mammalian lineage, there is evidence that a small group of humans may have a genetic variant that allows for tetrachromacy.  A tetrachromat will be able to see, roughly 100 times more colours than an average human being. Concetta Antico is a tetrachromat. “It’s shocking how little colour people see in their lives.” Says Antico. The fact that she’s the only one (one of the handful) in the entire world who sees the world a lot more vividly than the others, makes her a really lucky person. When she looks at a leaf, she sees much more than just green. “Around the edge I’ll see orange or red or purple in the shadow; you might see dark green, but I’ll see violet, turquoise, blue,” she said. “It’s like a mosaic of color.” Deciding to show how she sees the world, Concetta became a painter. She conjures masterpieces in one sitting. All her paintings are insanely colorful, and feature shades you wouldn't generally expect to see." Here's her website:  https://concettaantico.com Our images today showcase the wonderful colours and lines of Canna leaves.

The Ocean's Roar

Every day is a different day We have arrived at our holiday rental house on the coast in St. Augustine.  Compared to the aquarium pattern of the waves from a few days ago, the ocean roars thunderously all the time. Here's an image that I created as I tested all the filters in Topaz, to make sure the license keys were working.

Our Marshmallow Year

Welcome to the New Year. We celebrate endings and beginnings and things fresh and new.  We make resolutions for new beginnings. So it is time to consider our resolve, according to PBS last night.  They pointed to the landmark study  - the Stanford marshmallow experiment.  It was a series of studies on delayed gratification in the late 1960s and early 1970s led by psychologist Walter Mischel, then a professor at Stanford University. In these studies, a child was offered a choice between one small reward provided immediately or two small rewards if they waited for a short period, approximately 15 minutes, during which the tester left the room and then returned. In follow-up studies, the researchers found that children who were able to wait longer for the preferred rewards tended to have better life outcomes, as measured by SAT scores, educational attainment body mass index, and other life measures. It has been repeated over and over again as the decades passed.  Here's a video of that 15 minutes for a number of the tiny participants. So our ability to make and not break our New Year's Resolutions is symbolized in a marshmallow.  It would be wonderful to have a marshmallow at the New Year's table each year:  but there is no association of marshmallows with New Year's. However, National Toasted Marshmallow Day is August 30th - so maybe that's when the resolutions that failed can become 'toast'.

Reflections Catch Fire

Reflections on Fire

Florida has so much water.  One looks out and sees the ocean, inland waterways, and small rivers and ponds beside the highway.  This water was inside at the Marine Aquarium with a little bit of reflecting light from the overhead neon signs.  I used the Topaz Glow filter to amplify it and electrify it.  

Light Painting

Painting with light - these two works were created at the Toronto Convention Centre with time lapse motion blur.  The original works are neon light sculptures.