RMW Ramblings

  Earlier Butterflies In the last posting we saw Alaina's butterfly and its antecedents. Another butterfly is Monarch, a small painting to fit an unusual found frame...    An airborne milkweed seed is floating.  Milkweed is a major source of food for the monarch butterfly.    Here is a insert panel painting for a pegboard shelf at our cottage, since replaced by a painting by Mary...    

  Bugs & Such Butterflies For our great-granddaughter's first birthday four plus years ago, I did a book, Bugs and Such , of insects and like, with rhymes and painting/drawings.  I've been posting some of these critters on Facebook.  I'm now up to butterflies.    Here is Alaina's butterfly...    This image is based on an earlier painting I did, Buckeye and Rudbeckia. ...     This in turn was referenced to photos I took of butterflies and bees on the rudbeckia near our cottage kitchen door.   If you missed them, here is the ant...   And here is the bee...          

  Pink Blossoms On March 24th we posted Two Blue Boys , a painting I did of myself at age 16 twined with Thomas Gainsborough's Blue Boy from about 1770, both of us garbed in blue clothing which I painted in ultramarine blue against a metallic copper ground.   Blue Boy resides in the Huntington Library along with an  unrelated painting,  Pinkie, painted by Thomas Lawrence in 1794. Their long display together has made them permanently associated in popular culture.  The two have been sold as a paint-by-the-numbers kit, paired china figurines, needlepoint and cross-stich displays, and assorted other kitsch.    Here's Lawrence's painting...    You can probably see where this is going.  To join my painting Two Blue Boys I've painted Pink Blossoms pairing Pinkie with Mary at college age.   The ultramarine blue ground connects with the color in Two Blue Boys .  The setting is the Josephine Gardens cherry tree garden with Josephin...

  Stylized Bird Sketches Recently I got reminded of some stylized bird sketches I did decades ago.  All were done with markers and pencil.   Here is a mockingbird...            A bluejay...    A robin...   And an owl...    

  Old Tech The J. C. Whitney Catalog J. C. Whitney was a mail order supplier of automobile parts and supplies.  Their catalogs were full of functional parts, but more, trendy accessories.  They had Packard-style swan hood ornaments, Cadillac-style "V" chrome car emblems, curb scrapers, flip day/night mirrors, "cowboy" steering knobs and such. Here is a page with blue dot tail lights and driver side spotlights.      There was a "competitive" catalog from another Chicago supplier, Warshawsky & Co.  There were emotional partisans of Whitney vs Warshawsky, but they were the same business.  The business was on a wedge-shaped intersection in Chicago,  and the two names used mail addresses on opposite sides of the intersection.   I bought a Bermuda bell ("Ding-dong!) from Whitney  for the Sunbeam Alpine I restored to alert and impress my grandkids and friends when I picked them up at St Ann's school.  I sold the car, but kept the ...

  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'...