Gluten Free Art, and Carlos Enríquez

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Gluten Free Art, and Carlos Enríquez

Storm at Sea Available from my usual outlets!

You know when you think you have seen everything? You think you have heard everything? Well, take it from me that you really haven’t. This my friends is something even the most creative people I know would never have dreamed up. Welcome to the Gluten Free Museum. http://glutenimage.tumblr.com/

I really couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing, artworks featuring bread products, except the bread in each picture has been expertly removed. I suffer with a rare form of some colitis type condition, it’s ok, I will live, but everyone I have asked who I know has a gluten intolerance has said that this museum doesn’t really help their condition, but that it does do something to raise awareness of what can be a very debilitating condition. I particularly like what has been done with the Paul Cézanne piece.

Believe me when I say that Colitis, Crohn’s disease and intolerance of gluten products are very serious conditions. They are essentially truly hidden disabilities and life is rarely normal when you have a flare up of the condition. I know when I go to social events, very often I feel exhausted, have to time my medication correctly, and always have an almost OCD requirement to know where the toilet is just in case. Despite the exhaustion and the need to take a life-time of strong medications, it is something that you have to learn to live with, and this includes the need to act as normally as possible when you are out with others. Believe me when I say I need to leave early, it's not because I want to, it's usually because I can't be separated from my pillow for too long, else it starts having trust issues.

I am often shocked when reading forums for sufferers on the internet just how debilitated they feel, and because the condition isn’t immediately apparent, everyone presumes that under the surface, everything is ok. Believe me, I know many people who have Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD) that they have battled with for many years, and every single one of them has faced the loud sigh when they need to use a disabled toilet.

The problem is that there is no cure for IBD conditions such as Colitis and Crohn’s disease, it is something that is not generally affected by your choice of food, although I love a Nando’s, I do have to stick with their plainish chicken meals. Not that it affects my condition, but purely because anything hotter burns my mouth and I end up taking in around 3-litres of diet coke to cool it down.

Talking of cooling things down, something I read caught my eye this week. Possibly some of the best news I have read in a while. This year, we will get an extra week of Summer. Popular Science's Katie Peek has reported that thanks to the calendar, the summer season will be a week longer this year. Apparently it's all in a concept called cultural summer, as opposed to anything the Mayans proposed. So this is great news if you live somewhere where the weather obeys the seasons, over here in Blighty, the weather never obeys the seasons. Essentially Summer for the UK will be an extended period of rain.

You can read more about the extended Summer at http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/

Meanwhile over at Christie's in New York later today, 27th May 2015, Carlos Enríquez’s 1951 Carrusel painting is expected be auctioned with an estimated price of between $100,000 to $150,000 U.S.

Carlos Enríquez’s life was filled with drama and fury; his bohemian antics, drinking excesses, marriages, absolute rejection of the conventional and refusal to be part of a bourgeois society all marked him out as a rebel and secured his legend. For this reason alone, I actually think the piece will go for nearer the $150,000 U.S. Price point, added to the fact that he was one of the most complex and gifted artists of the Cuban vanguardia, and an all round interesting character.

The other surprising news is that almost six million UK adults have never used the Internet. The UK's Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported. The report covers the period between January and March, finding that 86% of the UK adult population had used the Internet in that period. However, 11% of adults, roughly equivalent to six million people had never logged on their lives.

I find this a staggering amount of people in this day and age. I reflected just how much I used the Internet in the same period in both my day job, and with my art and design work. I was staggered to find that when I downloaded my usage statistics from my Internet Service Provider, I averaged about 520 Gigabytes per month.

No, I wasn't using a torrent, this was essentially made up from my usual daily Internet usage, and included streaming on Netflix for both myself and my daughter, email, blog updates, and approximately 12-15 hours per day doing my day job for five days each week. Weekends are reserved for uploading and creating new art work, and I was staggered when I looked at the file sizes of each of my artworks, they averaged at between 10Mb, and almost 200Mb in size.

One the artworks are finalised, I remove all of the drafts, layers and anything unneeded so that I am able to upload them within the limits set by the print on demand services. Generally I back up my artwork after each session, and when I counted the revisions and drafts, I had uploaded at least twenty or so versions of each piece of art before I created the master file. All of this of course uses massive amounts of data. Being a geek, I also upload to my personal cloud, and an array of solid state backup drives at home.

I just cannot comprehend how in this day and age how it is that people have not experienced the Internet. Pretty much everything I do with Beechhouse Media is online, my banking is done online, and generally being so busy, a large percentage of my purchases are done online. In fact, I can't remember the last time I went to somewhere like PC World to purchase some new technology. Why would I even consider queuing up, travelling and then finding out that what I want is not in stock, when I can boot up Amazon Prime and have it delivered to me tomorrow, and save a few pounds along the way?

And that's probably why physical retail struggles in this day and age. If you look at the statistics, generally sales in physical locations are way under online sales. This is a real shame for physical retail outlets who will be relying on the 11% of the UK population to bolster up their sales, but to me, the convenience of logging into a site, sitting back and waiting for a parcel to be delivered in under 24-hours beats having to go to a physical store. If physical retail is to survive then they really need to start offering something over and above what I can get at home.

No doubt some will say that physical retail gives you access to specialists who know their products, but again the downside to this is that I can carry out extensive research at home by using Google and visiting forums, and get the opinions of real people who have actually used the products. On the rare occasions when the wife drags me to shops, I'm usually sitting in the chair outside the changing rooms using Google to see if I can get whatever it is she's trying on, cheaper online.

So my question today is "how much do you rely on the Internet"? Feel free to leave a comment below, and in the meantime, I hope you all have a pleasant and successful day.

Remember that my current three promotions all end on the 29th May. All three pieces are available from Fine Art America.

All prints are on museum quality stretched canvas and two of my latest pieces are included, Blue Buildings, and Koi Pond. All three are 20 inches by 24 inches. For the time being and once this promotion is over, there will only be a few more promotions over the Summer. If there is a piece you would like to see on promotion, let me know in the comments.

So my question today is "how much do you rely on the Internet"? Feel free to leave a comment below, and in the meantime, I hope you all have a pleasant and successful day.

Blue Buildings http://fineartamerica.com/weeklypromotion.html?promotionid=169214

Blue Mist Rising http://fineartamerica.com/weeklypromotion.html?promotionid=169215

Koi Pond http://fineartamerica.com/weeklypromotion.html?promotionid=169216

Get in touch with M.A using the contact form below or reach out to him via Social Media:

https://Facebook.com/beechhousemedia

Pinterest @beechhousemedia

Twitter @beechhouseart

Google+ https://Google.com/+MATaylorBeechhousemedia

Buy M.As Work From These Links:

http://10-mark-taylor.artistwebsites.com

http://10-mark-taylor.fineartamerica.com/

http://www.zazzle.co.uk/beechhouse*