Haven't really done much [read 'anything'] on the painting and drawing front the past couple of days, apart from trying, again, to make a bust of Judy Garland from polymer clay. I think if she didn't have such a weird little face it wouldn't be quite so hard. I imagine Kate Hepburn would be much easier (even though I can't draw her). Website still isn't up, I'm getting a little 'grr' about it because I just want the damn thing up now coz I'm sick of it, and getting a little tetchy when every single person I know keeps asking 'is the website up yet? how's the website going? when are you live and online?' but my techhie guy who is putting it up for me is a very busy dude, and he's doing me a massive favour by hosting my site for me so I really don't want to harass him about it. If he's busy tomorrow I think I'll just switch the dns server over to 1and1 and blimming pay to host it - it's only like £1.99 a month anyway. I just want the thing working now because I've been popping into galleries to have a chat with some of the owners and it makes me feel like a complete idiot/fraud/timewaster when they ask me for my website address when i'm like 'err yeah I do have one, it's just not up yet' - every single time, they look at me as if they don't believe me. Another thing I've noticed is that gallery staff are SERIOUSLY unfriendly - I know it's because they probably work on commission so they're all friendly and hiiiiii because I walk in there with a smile and they see pound signs flashing before their eyes, but as soon as I ask for information on artists submitting work, the smile freezes on their faces and they shove a business card at me saying 'submit your website on there and the buyer will have a look'. I guess a lot of it is probably because they have to put up with a lot of kids trying to get their manga and fairy stuff on sale, but really, if it wasn't for artists, they'd be out of a job. They need to have a think about that.
As far as culture goes, went and saw a production of Martha by Opera South in Hazelmere - a Handel one which is greatly underappreciated I think - the set was a little... well it wasn't to my taste anyway, and Olly at the RCM would have done a much better job of the lighting - it was all a bit bright yellow, or purple for me - like they were aiming for realistic and overshot it by quite a bit. Acting was good, the two lead girls were both RCM and one of them looked exactly like Charlotte Church, which was a little unnerving. Ended up going to The George Hotel for dinner and having a massive plate of ham, egg and chips at about half past ten at night which was extreme eating extremely late - the next morning I still felt full. There's something incredibly british about that. We complain when restaurants give us mountains of food on our plates because there's no way we'd be able to eat it all, but we feel guilty about leaving it on the plate because it's wasteful, so we overstuff ourselves, then feel we really ought to have a pudding to go with it, and then spend the next hour or so moaning and groaning and waddling around rubbing our food-babies and huffing and puffing..... but then if they don't give us an obscene amount of food on the plate we complain that we're not getting our money's worth 'oh, is that it?!', skip dessert because we think well, if main course was so stingy I'm not going to fork out for an equally small and disappointing pudding, and spend the next two hours complaining amongst ourselves and vowing not to go to that place again.
The Brits are absolutely fantastic complainers - we can complain until the cows come home, but we never do it to the people who actually can do something about it - i've never seen a brit send a plate back to the kitchen because it's cold - americans i always see having a gripe at the staff, but the brits would grin and bear it and eat it anyway and then piss and whine for HOURS afterwards about how appalling the service was.
c'est la vie.
here's the Liza Minnelli design I was on about the other day:
that's all folks.
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