RMW Ramblings

  Two Blue Boys Just completed, Two Blue Boys is a pastiche of a famous painting housed in the Huntington Library.    The boy on the right is Thomas Gainsborough's Blue Boy painted c1770 with a boy in 17th century costume. The boy on the left is me, at 16, with my first car, a 1940 Plymouth coupe.  Here's the reference photo...     The jacket in the photo was an olive drab Eisenhower or Ike jacket popular in the post WWII era, but I have converted it in the painting to blue denim.  

  Old Tech Tube Testers In the pre-flatscreen era, and the pre-solid state electronics era, our TVs were full of a lot of vacuum tubes with limited lifetimes.  When the television misbehaved there was an option for a do-it-yourself repair before you called the service company, the a local store with a tube tester.   Our local 7-11, drugstore, and other shops had self-service tube testers and had an inventory of the more common tubes.  Pep Boys provided a helpful guide to take you to the tubes in your set that were the possible cause of your problem.     Unfold the little guide...     ...and find your problem in the little pictures, then find the "tube group" to match your tubes so you know which tubes to pull and cart off to the tube tester.  And here is one: Some retro HiFi enthusiasts still cling lovingly to their vacuum tube amplifiers.  Since the old vacuum tube TVs aren't compatible with modern TV standards, old television sets don'...

  The Wee People of Delaware Avenue When I saw that Catherine Rooney's, an Irish pub on Delaware Avenue, had a wee people's entrance I had to paint the wee people.    The three glyphs on the upper left were on an awning at the pub; the single glyph on the right is our family monogram rendered as a Celtic knot pattern.   Happy St. Patrick's Day!

  My 1950 Photography Three Shots Out of Eight One day in 1950 I borrowed my mother's Kodak Brownie camera and shot the eight pictures that a roll of 616 film accommodated.  Three of them survive in an album I have.   Our backyard was planted heavily with roses, Mom's favorite flower. I encourage my baby brother Michael to sniff one blossom and I snapped this staged event...    Then an action shot of our dog Patches making an escape from the yard...    And my favorite, a picture of my Dad planting a rosebush...   I was proud of my photographic success, but there's a problem here.  Look closely and you will see that the photo of Dad planting has a different aspect ratio, that is, shape,  than the other two pictures.  Is it really from my roll of 616 film?  The ratio of height to width of the other two photos match the standards for the 616 film format that I find online; Dad's picture is too short.  But looking again at Pat...

  The Mystery of Ruth Belew The Dell Mapbacks   As a kid in the 1940’s I was fascinated by the piles of paperback mysteries that sat around my grandmother’s cottage.   I poured over them in the flickering yellow light of the “coal-oil” (kerosene) lamp   while playing Hot Pretzels or The Pennsylvania Polka on the crank-up Victorola.    I studied them carefully, but I wasn’t reading the stories.   Instead I was fascinated with the covers.   Specifically the back covers.   The mysteries   were 25¢ Dell paperbacks, those we know today as “mapbacks.”       Over the years I have accumulated two dozen or so of these graphic design classics.   They were produced from 1943 to 1953.   They had a style all their own.   Dell Books was a venture of George Delacourte, a New York publisher, and Lloyd Smith of Western Printing and Lithography in Racine, Wisconsin.   (Much of this information comes fro...

  The Delaware Bibliophiles Endpapers   Books and ephemera have been an interest of mine for years, so it is natural that I joined the Delaware Bibliophiles.  I have edited, and for several years earlier, contributed, to the DB's semiannual publication  Endpapers.   Here's the cover of the current issue...   You might want to become a member.  While we have ramped back on face-to-face meetings for a while, we still have Zoom meetings with visits to book related collections, and last summer an outdoor picnic.  Membership is $30 a year .  Members get paper copies of Endpapers and on-line access to current and back issues.  The DBs are part of The Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies (FABS) and we get their publications as well.   If you are interested, contact me at RMWramblings@gmail.com and I will get you connected.    

  The Chickens Are Home to Roost Carolino In our January 26 & January 27 postings you met two decorative chicken paintings I did for Mary, Caligula and Chantacleer...     Dwelling in our living room is Carolino, a ceramic chicken crafted for Mary by daughter Betsy Conlan...   He seems to be comfortable on the modern Persian carpet.    Look for Betsy and Brad's ceramics on Facebook... Betsy and Brad Conlan @betsyandbradconlan   · Artist