Marilyn's Photos - Jan 18 2026 - What Colour is that Note?

 

When did colour get associated with music? We think of colour as relating to eye sight.  The origins say it started out meaning skin colour, hue or appearance.   It has a few meanings that developed from Middle English on.  There’s the heraldry meaning, a figurative meaning - “to use words to a certain effect; to make something appear different from reality or better than it is.”  And there’s that influence or affect meaning,as in - coloured her whole experience. The Greeks had a chromatic scale - chroma, meaning colour. Our modern usage came into common use in the late 1800s. It is used to describe timbre with adjectives like bright, dark, warm, reedy, brassy, nasal, mellow, airy, or piercing. This comes from the arabesqueconservatory.com website.  The website is full of information on this subject HERE.  What about the condition of synesthesia - where the brain experiences colours in response to visual cues like letters or auditory cues like sounds? This occurs for a small percentage of the population.  The sound to colour version is chromesthesia - where a sound involuntarily evokes an experience of colour, shape and movement.  Franz Liszt  spoke in colour terms to his orchestra:  “O please, gentlemen, a little bluer, if you please! This tone type requires it!”  I wonder what they did to satisfy that request!  Or what about:  “That is a deep violet, please, depend on it! Not so rose!”  You can imagine how they at first responded to such commands - I’d be shaking my head. Duke Ellington’s chromesthesia was documented in his 1981 biography.  “I hear a note by one of the fellows in the band and it’s one colour.  I hear the same note played by someone else and it’s a different colour.” Billy Joel has spoken of his chromesthesia.  Quite a few musician and composers have this condition.  I wonder if today’s topic can fulfill a challenge to have a joke every day.  What Chromesthesia jokes might there be?  Here they are: Why was the note C so angry?  It was seeing red. Why do bass players prefer the colour blue?  Because they are always feeling a little flat. And what about this non-Chromesthesia joke: A drummer walks into a music store and says, "I'd like the red trumpet and the white accordion." The owner answers: "You can have the fire extinguisher, but the radiator stays where it is!" This picture is the result of a watercolour technique of putting salt - table salt, sea salt, etc on the wet paint and textures will result. Sometimes they look like flowers and other times like frost.

Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Marilyn's Photos - Nov 12 2025 - Cute Acorn Ornaments

 

t is Fantasy of Trees time, with next week being the set-up week. I will be decorating a tree this year. I have set up the tree to do a pre-test at home to ensure whether there are enough ornaments on the tree and then to decide the styling of the garland and make it. The ornaments were donated last year and are brown coloured glass with some of them in very stylish acorn shapes.  I wondered if I could get more acorn ornaments to make that the tree theme.  I went online to do a search and was deluged with AI content of cute little chipmunks, mice, squirrels, foxes and so on - each cuddled asleep in little acorn.  Don’t forget the little birdies, too.  And then they have a video-effect of moving in some of the ads - but these aren’t accessible to give you the link here.  Too bad as it is all very cute.    I am cynical.  This looks like the same company that has the women’s wear cotton/linen one-of-a-kind dresses for $25 and the cloud sofas.  Remember them? They are gone - you won’t find them on the internet now - they were $45 (ha ha).   Add lazy to being cynical - I can’t bother to prove the point.  The company selling these ornaments is Shein and I expect the dress company,Light in the Box, is a close relative- too bad as the pictures are always wonderful. Here is a screen shot of those acorn ornaments.   I continue along the Painters’ Palette series, with some wonderful colour combinations today thanks to the watercolour artist group.

Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Marilyn's Photos - Nov 5 2025 - Supercontinents Below

 

It says there are supercontinents - large low-seismic-velocity provinces (LLSVPs) and they are “lurking” below the surface of the Earth.  Way below - 1,200 miles below.  They are hidden islands inside Earth and reach heights of 620 miles.  Can you imagine peaks like that on the surface?  No, because they would collapse under gravity.  But continuing on the idea, the base would have to be a significant portion of a continent and would be visible from any point on Earth’s surface.  I asked this question of AI and got a pleasant answer.  By that I mean it gave a sense of appearance and scale, environmental conditions, and geological implications.  But, alas.  Can I trust AI to tell me fact?  I did enjoy the fantasy sense of it all.  These two “mountains” are below the Earth and are located beneath Africa and the Pacific Ocean.  How to study them?  Seismologists look at oscillations caused by massive earthquakes. These LLSVPs are instrumental in shaping the Earth’s surface processes.  I still can’t grasp that the inside of the Earth is a molten core.  And to find out there are supercontinents down in the mantle.   The Earth’s mantle has 1,800 miles of mostly solid rock.  It was thought to be a consistency of thickened caramel that is uniformly blended.  Now scientists find out there are unmixed regions and it isn’t uniform down there.  Won’t they have to redo all those cross-section drawings?   The article refers to  “sunken worlds.”  Isn’t that so mysterious!  Sometimes it is hard to know the purpose of scientific research.  This seems to me to be about understanding the surface plate tectonics, those things that give us the grief of earthquakes.  In all, this is definitely the stuff of imaginative science fiction ideas. Full scientific description and details HERE.  This is another version of the Echinacea watercolour yesterday.  Today’s version has the Echinaceas in a vase.

Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Feb 15 2025 - Sofas So Cute

 

Look at these cute seats/chairs or whatever we'll call them.  Aren't they creative!  These are showing up in the Pinterest feed.  My Pinterest pictures have wreaths, gardens, and water colour prints.  But weird ads show up regularly now.  I call these weird because of the ludicrously low prices. There are all kinds of pictures like this - a bed that is a grand piano with the keyboard at the foot of the bed.  A bed shaped with lotus petals, a bed shaped like a violin, even a pizza bed.   Alvanila - the site where  sofa seats like this are for sale says it is a grocery site.  And then the prices - they missing at least one zero, and possibly two zeros at the end?  Could these turn out to beminiature seats for a doll's house? There are more and more of these selling sites appearing in Pinterest  The one that got my attention previously was women's clothing with a pretty Chinese flower print.  It got my attention sufficiently that I have painted some Chinese branch watercolours.   You can find the sofa/seat images on stock photo websites and they have the heading royalty-free AI generated. How interesting things have turned out:  It used to be that I would look at gorgeous pictures of sofas and chairs in British House and Gardens or Architectural Digest, knowing they were priced far beyond my means.  Now I see gorgeous sofas and chairs priced below my means, but alas, they exist in pictures only.  I could never have guessed this would happen.

Here's one of the Chinese flower branch water colours   Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Oct 3 2024 - Work Rules

 

If I had been a business owner, I could have made the work rules.  What kind of work rules would you have insisted on?  Or did you insist on?  For example, one of mine would be no visible tattoos, another no sweat pants or leotard pants. I seem to be in the majority.  There are dozens of entries of the worst company rules on the internet.   So here are some of the common rules: Banning water breaks and cooling measures. Banning high heels for women at work. Bearded ban.  No long looks or unwanted advances. Banning headphones to avoid distractions. The following rules make me think they are jokes and fabrications:  Do not mop up the floor of the walk-in freezer. Do not climb into the rubbish compactor. If you have sex in the parking lot, please take off your vest and name tag first. ... And there were more like the last one. Then the specific companies named: At Walt Disneyworld, there is rule against pointing with one finger.  Its is considered offensive in a number of cultures. There is also a rule that employees are not allowed to say "I don't know".  And some anecdotes from the complaint type articles: "I had a restaurant manager make a rule that servers were not allowed to wear makeup unless they wore makeup every day. If you rarely wore or never wore makeup, you were not allowed to wear it because it would 'disturb' the regulars.  No employees could use a red pen because the deceased company founder had forbidden it. He was the only one who could wield a red pen. Even after his death, this rule persisted." Here's one of the watercolours from our Monday morning class.  A splish splash sort of style.

Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Apr 22 2024 - Priscilla Queen of the Desert Rides Again

 

The bus in the 1994 movie "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" has begun a journey to being restored into a museum artifact.  This story hit the news in the last week - $2.2 million Australian is being raised to restore the bus and its interior for display at the National Motor Museum. Priscilla started out as a 1976 Japanese model Hino RC320. It was owned by Sydney company Boronia Tours before it was sold to a couple who leased the bus to Latent Images, the film’s production company, for the duration of the shoot in September and October 1993. Afterwards, the couple hired it out occasionally, including to the Australian band the Whitlams, who used it as a tour bus for six months in 1994. Its location was lost for all these decades, although there have been "pretenders to the throne" - for example the bus that was driven around the 2000 Olympics closing ceremony in Sydney.   "Michael Mahon said he bought the property, and unbeknownst to him the bus in the paddock, in 2016. He said the property belonged to musician Ian Ross East, whose friend brought the bus to Ewingar when she moved there. After the community told him about the bus, Mr Mahon did some research on the provenance of the bus and started making calls." Then it got complicated as it was abandoned on a deceased estate.  They had to wait a year for someone to come forward to claim it.  That completed, they got started on moving the bus to the museum and starting the restoration.  There's talk of putting the giant high heel back on the top again. I've used all the filters on this version of the Spring Magnolia around the corner.

Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

April 19 2024 -The Speed of Smell

 

What is the speed of smell?  How far can smell spread? This is prompted by a bizarre dream I had.  There we were when an alien space ship landed nearby, and then there was an overpowering acrid smell.  The smell spread around the world extremely quickly.  How could it spread so fast?  Was it a weapon or instrument of the aliens? Were we going to die from whatever made the smell?  The speed of light is 186,282 miles per second. The speed of sound is 761.2 miles per hour. If it was going the speed of light it would only take 0.13 seconds to go around the earth.  We wouldn't have time to ask the question if smell travelled as fast as light. In  comparison to light and sound there isn't a set speed to smell - the speed of smell is dependent on the odorous compounds that make up the air - we would ask how fast does air travel in the air?  Here is the article on the science behind the speed of smell. Let's jump to the fun comparison: "So then, let's use Graham's Law to compare the effusion rates of two odorous molecules, geraniol and skatole. Gerianol has a rose-like fragrance that is commonly used in perfumes, and it's naturally found in geraniums and lemons. Skatole is a somewhat toxic compound that occurs naturally in feces, and it's thought to be one of the main causes of odor in flatulence. Yes, in one of the most high-brow and intellectual thought experiments ever devised, I'm basically asking which odor, under ideal conditions, you would smell first: a rose or a fart? Gerianol is composed of ten carbon atoms, eighteen hydrogen atoms, and a single oxygen atom, which gives it a molar mass of 154.25 grams per mole. (A mole is a unit equivalent to about 6*10^23 individual molecules). Skatole, one the other hand, has nine carbon atoms, nine hydrogen atoms, and one nitrogen atom, which adds up to a molar mass of 131.17 grams per mole. Graham's Law says that the rate of gerianol effusion divided by the rate of skatole effusion will equal the square root of the molar mass of skatole divided by the molar mass of gerianol. In other words... This means that the rate of effusion of gerianol is about 92% that of the rate of effusion of skatole. In other words, the speed of smell of a fart is faster than the speed of smell of a rose. Admittedly, that's all one hell of a massive approximation, but that still seems like the sort of information that's just worth knowing" Let's ask the question:  how fast does a fart travel?  And the answer is 10 feet per second, or 6.8 miles per hour.  That's going to take a long time to get around the earth. Maybe that dream came about from this picture I took a few years ago. I was putting images through that Watercolour Filter the other day, and this delightful abstract came out. Starry sky sort of theme.

Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca