All the Strange Hours

This site is cur­rently on hia­tus. Please feel free to look around at posts. I’ll also tend to respond to com­ments or emails.

I’ll be back when I have more time. Until then, keep smear­ing col­ored mud on flat surfaces.

The first post here was July 2006. Post­ing has become inter­mit­tent, but I still find it worth­while to keep going. Here’s to another year.

I’ve been away for awhile, because I got very busy with other projects, includ­ing a com­plete redesign of my employer’s web site.

I think I’m back. I should be able to do some post­ing, catch up with responses to com­ments, etc. My apolo­gies to any­one I haven’t responded to in a timely manner.

I’m also con­sid­er­ing some site changes that would involve a switch from Word­Press (blog­ging soft­ware) to Dru­pal (Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem). Sup­port request: if there’s any­one out there who could help fig­ure how to con­fig­ure wp2drupal mod­ule so that con­tent could be migrated, I’d be very grateful.

All the Strange Hours is two years old today. Coin­ci­den­tally, the blog is also approach­ing it’s 100,000^th page view. As inter­net sites go, that’s not an incred­i­bly high num­ber over two years, but I appre­ci­ate the atten­tion. Over the next few weeks I plan to re-post some “best of” items that might be worth look­ing at again.

Thanks to every­one who has come by and stayed awhile. And thank espe­cially to those who have con­tributed to the blog by com­ment­ing or—in Katarzyna’s case—by posting.

I’d like to take this oppor­tu­nity to reit­er­ate my invi­ta­tion to oth­ers who might want to par­tic­i­pate here. If you’d like to blog at ATSH about visual art, send me an email and we can dis­cuss it.

I just made a page for vis­i­tors to post questions—you can see a link to it in the nav­i­ga­tion bar at the top of each page. I get a fair num­ber of ques­tions, some­times attached to a ran­dom post because the vis­i­tor didn’t really know where else to post the ques­tion. So now there’s a place.

If you put a rel­e­vant ques­tion into the com­ments there, I will respond. Of course, my response may be sim­ply to tell you that I don’t know. But feel free to give it a try. It’s not exactly an inter­net forum, but it will serve for now.

Update

21 June 2008: Of course, the first ques­tion (an excel­lent one) stumped me. More, please. I’ll have a good answer to someone’s ques­tion eventually.

My name is Katarzyna Skonieczna (pron: cath­rina sconetchna). I was born in Poland, I live at a lit­tle island of Cobh, South-West Ire­land and study Fine Art at the Craw­ford Col­lege of Art in Cork. I stud­ied lit­er­a­ture, phi­los­o­phy and the­ol­ogy back in Poland. I always wanted to study psy­chol­ogy but just didn’t have the right oppor­tu­nity. I used to express myself ver­bally by writ­ing short sto­ries (and end­lessly writ­ing a book, which remains unfin­ished as for now) and also — visu­ally by draw­ings but it was only a side inter­est. Then, after I made myself com­fort­able in Ire­land I got a strong need to deepen my adven­ture with art; so I applied to the near­est col­lege. My main inter­ests con­cern — above all — human con­di­tion in its purest phe­nom­ena — iden­tity, emo­tions, des­tiny (all art is about that — said my tutor and he’s right); then apects like colour, form, line. I’m pas­sion­ate about draw­ing, oils, pho­tog­ra­phy, print­mak­ing, instal­la­tion and animation/video art. I feel being inspired by Sur­re­al­ism, Cubism, Ger­man Expres­sion­ism and Fanatsy/Illustartion art (eg. Patric Woodroffe). I pro­posed David (whom I really grate­ful to for this pos­si­bil­ity) my con­tri­bu­tion — “Study­ing Art” where I am hop­ing to reflect on some basic aspects of studying/discovering art (which puz­zle and /or worry me) such as “What’s art and what is it for?” “Can art be taught/learnt — if yes which way?”, “Art in the past and today”, “What’s bad/good art?” etc. I would like also to keep a sort of a diary from my stud­ies — notes, study work, work­shops etc. Before I start I have to make you aware of two things — Eng­lish is not my mother-tounge, so I apol­o­gise in advance for any mis­spelling (no mat­ter how stu­pid it will look/sound) and for “rusty” usage of words/phrases; and another thing — I may not to be able to con­tribute on a regural basis — but I will do any­thing to keep my pos­i­tive influ­ence on this site.
P.S.
I kindly invite a lively response to my posts, because I don’t believe in writ­ing only to myself and to the Muse. Impor­tant part of why I’m doing this is a pre­cious oppor­tu­nity to exchange opin­ions and thoughts. Thanks

As those of you who’ve fol­lowed recent posts are aware, I’m open­ing up this site to other con­trib­u­tors for at least the remain­der of this year. The first vol­un­teer is Alien­Girl. I’d like to thank her for par­tic­i­pat­ing here and I look for­ward to read­ing her posts.