Gum Bichromate Experiment

I have had this image sitting on my desk for ages and wanted to share it as an illustration of the (partially finished) art process. So many of my Google+ Artist friends share their drawings and paintings, and I think this fits in that category, although it a photograph.

This is a gum bichromate treatment of a photo of my grandmother. Gum bichromate is an alternative film-based technique that I learned in a workshop at Gallery 44, which thankfully still promotes antiquarian processing.

The image here is in its rough state, and you can see the masking tape that attached the image for exposure, as well as the pigment brush-strokes that given the impression of having been painted by Francis Bacon (of the screaming popes).

From Fox Talbot to Robert Demachy, from the Lumière brothers to Heinrich Kühn, the bichromate process has a long and varied history spanning well over a century. After falling out of common use for an extended period of time, a resurgence in gum printing began again in the 1970′s through the writings and work of a new generation of artists. It is essentially a modified watercolour. This one was done on Arches paper and has a heavy, antique feel to it.

Gum bichromate (or dichromate) printing involves creating a working emulsion made of three components:

Gum arabic
A dichromate (usually ammonium or potassium)
Pigment

The emulsion is spread on a support, such as paper, and allowed to dry. A negative or matrix is then laid over top the emulsion and exposed to a UV light source. Usually a contact printing device or a sheet of heavy glass to ensure even, constant contact is employed. The light source hardens the dichromate in proportion to the densities of the negative. After exposure, the paper is placed in a series of plain water baths and allowed to develop until the unhardened portions of the emulsion have dissipated.

Dream of the Japanese Maple

"It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realize them." (Man Ray)

A photogram is a photographic image made without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a light-sensitive material such as photographic paper and then exposing it to light.

The technique is sometimes called cameraless photography. It was used by Man Ray in his exploration of rayographs. Other artists who have experimented with the technique include László Moholy-Nagy, Christian Schad (who called them "Schadographs"), Imogen Cunningham and Pablo Picasso. Variations of the technique have also been used for scientific purposes.

Some of the first photographic images made were photograms. William Henry Fox Talbot called these photogenic drawings, which he made by placing leaves and pieces of material onto sensitized paper, then left them outdoors on a sunny day to expose. This produced a dark background with a white silhouette of the object used.

From 1843, Anna Atkins produced a book titled _British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions_ ; it was the first book to be illustrated with photographs. The images were all photograms of botanical specimens, which she made using Sir John Herschel's cyanotype process, which yields blue images. 


Photograms were used in the 20th century by a number of photographers, particularly Man Ray, who called them "rayographs". His style capitalised on the stark and unexpected effects of negative imaging, unusual juxtapositions of identifiable objects (such as spoons and pearl necklaces), variations in the exposure time given to different objects within a single image, and moving objects as the sensitive materials were being exposed.

This photo would be a negative of a photogram, had the film image not been taken with my Nikon FE in late October. These are leaves from a Japanese garden that have fallen into a pond.

(Thank you, Wikipedia!)

The Hero With a Thousand Faces

This is one of my first Lensbaby (Xmas present to me) experiments - a pair of wooden angel wings from a Quebec church, and now part of my collection of folk art. They hang on my wall and I suppose one could wear them, literally or figuratively.

I am a huge fan of Joseph Campbell's writing, and love how he weaves the stories and archetypes of religions and mythologies into a pattern. Campbell explores the theory that important myths from around the world which have survived for thousands of years all share a fundamental structure, which Campbell called the monomyth.

"A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man."

His The Hero with a Thousand Faces, first published in 1949, is a non-fiction book, and seminal work of comparative mythology. He discusses his theory of the journey of the archetypal hero found in world mythologies. Since publication, Campbell's theory has been consciously applied by a wide variety of modern writers and artists. The best known is perhaps George Lucas, who has acknowledged a debt to Campbell regarding the stories of the Star Wars films.

Joseph Campbell talks to Bill Moyers about the hero within...

Moyers: Does your study of mythology lead you to conclude that a single human quest, a standard pattern of human aspiration and thought, constitutes for all mankind something that we have in common, whether we lived a million years ago or will live a thousand years from now?

Campbell: There's a certain type of myth which one might call the vision quest, going in quest of a boon, a vision, which has the same form in every mythology. That is the thing that I tried to present in the first book I wrote, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. All these different mythologies give us the same essential quest. You leave the world that you're in and go into a depth or into a distance or up to a height. There you come to what was missing in your consciousness in the world you formerly inhabited. Then comes the problem either of staying with that, and letting the world drop off, or returning with that boon and trying to hold on to it as you move back into your social world again.

Moyers: How do I slay that dragon in me? What's the journey each of us has to make, what you call "the soul's high adventure"?

Campbell: My general formula for my students is "Follow your bliss." Find where it is, and don't be afraid to follow it.

 http://www.mythsdreamssymbols.com/herojourney.html and Wikipedia

The Burning of the Leaves

Now is the time for the burning of the leaves,
They go to the fire; the nostrils prick with smoke
Wandering slowly into the weeping mist.
Brittle and blotched, ragged and rotten sheaves!
A flame seizes the smouldering ruin, and bites
On stubborn stalks that crackle as they resist.
The last hollyhock’s fallen tower is dust:
All the spices of June are a bitter reek,
All the extravagant riches spent and mean.
All burns! the reddest rose is a ghost.
Spark whirl up, to expire in the mist: the wild
Fingers of fire are making corruption clean.
Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare,
Time for the burning of days ended and done,
Idle solace of things that have gone before,
Rootless hope and fruitless desire are there:
Let them go to the fire with never a look behind.
That world that was ours is a world that is ours no more.
They will come again, the leaf and the flower, to arise
From squalor of rottenness into the old splendour,
And magical scents to a wondering memory bring;
The same glory, to shine upon different eyes.
Earth cares for her own ruins, naught for ours.
Nothing is certain, only the certain spring.

Laurence Binyon, The Burning of the Leaves

Image: Sunflowers, October's End, © Jan McCartney 2011

Mother and Son

Among the many highlights of Marcel Proust's magnum opus In Search of Lost Time is the death of the writer Bergotte. Despite a potentially life-threatening case of uremia, Bergotte goes to a Parisian museum to view a favorite painting (Johannes Vermeer's View of Delft) after a local art critic points out a heretofore unseen detail, a patch of yellow wall "so well painted that it was, if one looked at it in isolation, like a precious work of Chinese art, of an entirely self-sufficient beauty..." As Bergotte, increasingly lightheaded from his illness and mistaking it, rather comically, for indigestion, stares at and contemplates this new discovery he says to himself, "That is how I should have written," then repeats "little patch of yellow wall" several times before being fatally felled by a stroke.

Aleksandr Sokurov's Mother and Son is itself a "little patch of yellow wall," a film to die to. The brilliance of Mother and Son is how it turns perspective and perception against us. Inspired by 19th century German painter, Caspar David Friedrich, this is a film compulsively aware of itself as two-dimensional; through the use of special distorting lenses, Sokurov collapses foreground, middle-ground, and background, erasing the illusion of depth. A static blur hangs, like an immovable fog, around the sides of the frame, effectively eliminating peripheral vision—and perhaps foreshadowing, as an artist's work is wont to do, Sokurov's recently rumored, slowly impending blindness.

This collapse of perspective applies equally to Mother (Gudrun Geyer) and Son (Aleksei Ananishnov), both of whom, as is clear from an opening scene in which they recall having the same dream, are elemental presences playing out an intimate and ritualistic death-rattle pas de deux. And yet there's a strong subversive undercurrent running through Mother and Son, suggesting its protagonists are somehow in collusion, attempting to cheat and ultimately escape divine law. This only becomes explicit in the film's final scene when the Son attends to his Mother's corpse and whispers, "We will meet where we agreed. Wait for me."

Full review at Slant Magazine.

Image: Sunflowers, © Jan McCartney, 2011

Lines

Draw a line. Write a line. There.
Stay in line, hold the line, a glance
between the lines is fine but don't
turn corners, cross, cut in, go over
or out, between two points of no
return's a line of flight, between
two points of view's a line of vision.
But a line of thought is rarely
straight, an open line's no party
line, however fine your point.
A line of fire communicates, but drop
your weapons and drop your line,
consider the shortest distance from x
to y, let x be me, let y be you.

Poem by Martha Collins from Some Things Words Can Do, Sheep Meadow Press, 1998

Image: Parking Lines, © Jan McCartney, 2011

The Monoliths

Zombie faces don't scare me, but the Monolith, with its mindless determination and relentless advance, makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. The stuff of dreams, and there is no escape. The stuff of reality as well.

2011 - A Space Odyssey: In the most literal narrative sense, the Monolith is a tool, an artifact of an alien civilization. It comes in many sizes and appears in many places, always with the purpose of advancing intelligent life. Arthur C. Clarke has referred to it as "the alien Swiss Army Knife"; or as Heywood Floyd speculates, "an emissary for an intelligence beyond ours. A shape of some kind for something that has no shape."

(thanks, Wikipedia!)

Image: Monoliths, © Jan McCartney, 2011

Acquainted With The Night

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
A luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

Poem by Robert Frost

Image:  Skydome, Toronto, from the Gardiner Expressway, Rainy Night, © Jan McCartney, 2011

Caught: The Paintings of Heiko Muller

I'm inspired by painter Heiko Müller whose work turns over the log of Mother Nature and exposes quite another world. His work is informed by renaissance and flemish art as well as comic culture, and you will find hints of Durer and Ensor.

This one, though, caught my attention today as I look forward to the opening, at the Art Gallery of Ontario, of the paintings of Jack Chambers, a local artist whose art film, The Hart of London, exposed our uneasy relationship with nature as our towns encroach on habitats. This is particularly poignant today as we read about the 50 animals from an exotic zoo in Zanesville, Ohio, most of whom were summarily gunned down by police after their owner set them loose then committed suicide.

Like the doe that was hit by a car then shot four hours later by police a few blocks from my house last month. Like The Hart of London.

Woman on Subway

It wasn't Monday or even a week-day morning. Everyone else in the subway car  was checking their e-mail, watching a video, listening to music or playing an online game. This woman was just deep in thought. The only person in the subway car that I could see that wasn't detached from herself.

Shug: More than anything God love admiration.
Celie: You saying God is vain?
Shug: No, not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off when you walk by the colour purple in a field and don't notice it.

Excerpt from The Colour Purple by Alice Walker

Image: Woman on Subway, © Jan McCartney, 2011

The Dream World of Chris Friel

'the dazed state of chris friel's images provoke uncertainty - a memory that may or may not have happened; dream matter, foggy and interrupted'
- raji kaur

"I am more interested in interpretation than representation".

In an interview on his website, Chris describes the solitary working process of walking long distances along the southeast English coast, usually in the rain, and taking far too many pictures. His images incorporate tilt-shift and blur, He cites the late UK photographer, Fay Godwin, as an inspiration, although his portraits remind me of some of Diane Arbus' images.

Prepare to be amazed at the landscape and portrait photography by Chris Friel

Magic theatre. Not for madmen only.

Chris Friel's website

Canada's First Matinee Idol

Robert Goulet, who marshalled his dark good looks and thundering baritone voice to play a dashing Lancelot in the original “Camelot” in 1960, then went on to a wide-ranging career as a singer and actor, winning a Tony, a Grammy and an Emmy, died today. He was 73.

After the “Camelot” triumph, Mr. Goulet was called the next great matinee idol. Judy Garland described him as a living 8-by-10 glossy. He was swamped with offers to do movies, television shows and nightclub engagements. Few articles failed to mention his bedroom blue eyes, and many female fans tossed him room keys during performances. His hit song from the show, “If Ever I Would Leave You,” remains a romantic standard.

“Something in his voice evokes old times and romance,” Alex Witchel wrote in the New York Times Magazine in 1993. “He makes you remember corsages.”

His more than 60 albums, travels with touring theatrical revivals and many Las Vegas gigs were enough to ensure nearly a half-century of popularity.

Mr. Goulet’s rise after “Camelot” was swift. In 1962, he won a Grammy award as best new artist for his first two albums, “Always You” and “Two of Us,” and his hit single “What Kind of Fool Am I.” Two years later, his album “My Love Forgive Me” went gold; 17 of his albums between 1962 and 1970 made the charts.

He reached the peak of his popularity in the ’60s. In 1966, he starred in a television adaptation of “Brigadoon,” which won an Emmy as outstanding musical production. He won a Tony for his performance in the 1968 Broadway musical “The Happy Time.” And he appeared frequently on popular television programs like “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

A theatrical agent recommended him to Alan Jay Lerner, the librettist, and Frederick Loewe, the composer, for their new musical, “Camelot” which would also star Julie Andrews and Richard Burton.
His audition, in September 1960, went so well that everyone applauded, a rarity, Mr. Goulet recalled in an interview with Music Educators Journal in 1998.

Mr. Loewe asked him, “Parlez-vous francais?”

Mr. Goulet answered, “Oui, certainement.” (Lancelot was French.)

Variety called Mr. Goulet the “perfect Lancelot.” The public loved it. It ran for 873 performances, closing in January 1963. The cast album, featuring “If Ever I Would Leave You,” topped the charts.

"Robert Goulet was a monumental presence on the stage and had one of the great voices of all time, which often overshadowed his many other talents," pianist Roger Williams said in a statement Tuesday. "He really could do it all -- act, dance and was as funny as hell, especially when he was making fun of himself. Robert always took his craft seriously, but never took himself seriously."

"Oh, how we will miss this great guy."

Robert Goulet, 1933 - 2007

Learn to Draw with Jon Gnagy

Ball, cube, cylinder, cone. By using these four shapes, I can draw any picture I want. And so can you! Hello friends, this is Jon Gnagy, to prove to you that you can learn to draw by following my step by step television lesson. So get your papers and pencils ready, and we'll start right away!

In May of 1946 NBC placed a sixty one foot antenna atop the Empire State Building and kept one promise made in the 30's and postponed during the war years — television. At the same time, Jon Gnagy began teaching America how to draw. He was a television star before Lucille Ball, Milton Berle or Arthur Godfrey. In fact, Jon was the first act on the first commercial television show ever, broadcast May 14,1946.

On the first episode, Jon Gnagy, sporting a goatee, wore an artist's smock and beret. He led the viewing audience through his step-by-step method to make a drawing of an old oak tree. His crayon melted under the studio lights, his chalk squeaked, but in seven minutes the lesson and the picture were completed.

That first live program was seen by about 200 viewers living within 80 miles of NBC's 61-ft tower atop the Empire State Building. In 1946, there were 15,000 televisions in the entire United States, by 1949, 3 million. By 1961, there were more televisions than bathtubs in American homes.

By the autumn of 1946, Jon Gnagy had become so popular that NBC gave him a show of his own. This was a plain speaking Midwesterner dressed in a plaid shirt and dark trousers. The format of his show was so simple—one character in a single, shallow set, and a minimum of camera angles—that it became a training ground for all the new directors, camera men, and sound technicians starting out in a burgeoning industry Here was a show that was accessible to everyone and it was called You Are An Artist.

Jon Gnagy was born in 1907 in Varner's Forge, Kansas, where he grew up as a member of a Mennonite Community. In this straight forward, hardworking environment, Jon Gnagy began making pictures. Portraits were tantamount to idolatry according to the Bible, so he made drawings of the farm and the Kansas landscape that were good enough to win prizes at the State Fair art shows.

"I had a great many artistic inspirations... I tried to express these inspirations on canvas but I found I lacked the mechanical know-how. For years after that, I spent my evenings and weekends studying philosophy, psychology, physics, and physiology in an effort to obtain the know-how and to find, if I could, a key to esthetics."

"When I was satisfied that I had achieved both, I decided that what I wanted most was to give this knowledge to others. The desire to express is in everyone, and if people are shown logically how to materialize an idea, then their inspiration grows and gains momentum and they work intuitively and have a swell time of it. There is nothing like the supreme satisfaction that you get from being able to express objectively something that is subjective and nebulous. That's what art is, the expression of unconscious feelings in an objective form."

In 1939 Gnagy decided television was the "ideal teaching medium". Seven years later, Gnagy was on the air, teaching "the world's largest art class".

Jon Gnagy introduced to American families the idea of being an artist, an idea that was not couched in terms of privilege or preciousness. He was sharing some first hand knowledge at a time when television viewing still had a sense of intimacy and concentration.

In 1951, members of the Museum of Modern Art's committee on art education sent an angry letter to the New York Times. "The use of superficial tricks and formulas found in the Jon Gnagy type of program," they wrote, "is destructive to the creative and mental growth of children." Gnagy responded, "My purpose," he always said, "is to get as many people as possible to sketch on their own."

To go along with his television show, Jon Gnagy produced a kit of art supplies and a book of drawing lessons. The writing style is direct, outlining his plan. The chapter titles are terrible puns, the sort of jokes one forgives a favorite uncle for making (While There is Still Life There is Hope, How To Get A Head By Going in Circles). At the end of the book, he wrote "The plan I have outlined in this book will be invaluable to you. It will release the creative drive in you and set you free. . ."

Who taught Jon Gnagy? Jon called it the Art Spirit.

Lesson outlines and broadcasts

Real Life Magazine article, Summer 1985

The Unclean Children of God

 

There is not an animal that lives on the Earth, nor a being that flies on its wings, but forms part of communities like you. Nothing have We omitted from the book, and they all shall be gathered to their Lord in the end. ~~ Al-Qur'an 6:38

A conservative Iranian cleric has denounced the "moral depravity" of owning a dog, and called for the arrest of all dogs and their owners.

Dogs are considered unclean in Islamic law and the spread of dog ownership in Westernised secular circles in Iran is frowned upon by the religious establishment.

"I demand the judiciary arrest all dogs with long, medium or short legs - together with their long-legged owners," Hojatolislam Hassani is quoted as saying in the reformist Etemad newspaper.

"In our country there is freedom of speech, but not freedom for corruption," he said.

Religious traditions hold that if a dog - or woman - passes in front of you as you prepare to pray, it pollutes your purity and negates your prayer. Dogs are permissible as watchdogs or for other utilitarian purposes but not simply for companionship.

Tehran journalist Mafiseh Kouhnavand told the BBC that the subject of dog ownership had been brought up many times before.

Hardline judiciary agents and police occasionally clamp down on the practice, fining owners and confiscating their pets from streets and parks. In June, police banned the sale of dogs and penalised anyone walking a dog in public. The practice is seen by conservatives as a corrupting influence of decadent Western culture. But despite the clampdowns, dog ownership has been on the rise, especially among rich Iranians in the north of Tehran.

Hojatolislam Hassani appears to be widening the scope of his anti-canine campaign.

Last year, he publicly thanked police for their policy of exclusively confiscating short-legged dogs in Urumiyeh.

Source: BBC

Image: The fifth century BC seal shows a Persian noblewoman playing a harp for her Maltese dog. The Phoenicians brought this dog from the island of Malta to Asia Minor where it became very popular with wealthy Persians.

Dogs in Islam

Art for the Masses

Ken Danby, recognized as one of the world's foremost realist artists and best-known in Canada for his iconic hockey painting, At The Crease, has died at the age of 67 while canoeing in Algonquin Park.

Born in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., Danby's vast portfolio includes everything from portraits of famous Canadians to athletes in mid-play and landscape paintings so crystalline that at first glance they resemble photographs.

As an artist, Ken Danby's work was loved more by the people than it was revered by the critics. Although his works were bought by museums, he found his best, most rewarding and lasting appeal among private collectors and purveyors of popular culture. A superb draftsman and a prodigious and prolific artist of his own time, he was a realistic painter who reflected quotidian events, natural landscapes and athletic prowess to mass audiences, rather than an abstract expressionist who created troubling, edgy canvasses for an intellectual elite.

The prolific artist was known as the school artist from the time he was very young. At 18, he enrolled in the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, where one of his teachers was Group of Seven member J. E. H. Macdonald. Other students called him Vincent because of his goatee and the fact that he was a loner who seemed to be obsessive about drawing and painting.

"I was intense and almost fanatical about drawing and did hundreds of studies, mostly in pen, during my first year."

OCAD's preference in abstract expressionism was at odds with his interest in precise figurative drawing, and he left to pursue a number of design jobs before finally launching a free-lance career with Gallery Moos.

Danby's first one-man show in 1964 sold out, an occurrence that would become commonplace as his work proved popular with private, corporate and museum collectors.

His 1972 painting of a masked ice-hockey goalie hunched in the crease is considered by many to be a Canadian national symbol. The anonymous player represents every goalie who has ever waited for a shot to test his or her mettle, but it also captures the tension of that moment when the arena goes silent and fans stop breathing as all become one with the solitary figure down on the ice. As an indication of the painting's significance in popular culture, Mr. Danby put the image on a hockey mask as a fundraiser for spinal cord research and it raised $15,100 (U.S.) at a charity auction on NHL.com in November, 2006.

While many Canadians connect Danby with hockey images, he points out they make up only a dozen images in a long painting career. "I still love the game," he said in a 2002 interview. "I respond to it, so there's that appeal. That there has been such a focus on them in Canada shows that I've tapped into something that has to do with Canada's soul and spirit."

He also has done portraits of Canadian icons such as singer Gordon Lightfoot and former prime minister Pierre Trudeau. And he is renowned for his landscapes, including the 1997 painting Niagara. A retrospective at the Joseph Carrier Gallery in 2004 featured 60 paintings, many capturing Canadian scenes such as Lake Louise. He received many honours, including the Order of Ontario and the Order of Canada.

It is tempting to imagine ironies both cruel and poetic in the death of Mr. Danby, the realist, while canoeing in the same wilderness (although at a different lake) where expressionist landscape painter Tom Thomson drowned 90 years ago. The coincidences and the metaphors may not bear serious scrutiny - they interpreted and represented nature in different ways - but both men loved the wilderness and were exploring its richness when they died suddenly and before their time, causing great shock and grief to their families, friends and admirers.

Ken Danby obituary

Ken Danby official site

The Poetry of Silence

Marcel Marceau, whose lithe gestures and pliant facial expressions revived the art of mime and brought poetry to silence, died in Paris last Saturday. He was 84.

Wearing white face paint, soft shoes and a battered hat topped with a red flower, Marceau, notably through his famed personnage Bip, played the entire range of human emotions onstage for more than 50 years, never uttering a word. Offstage, however, he was famously chatty. "Never get a mime talking. He won't stop," he once said.

A French Jew, Marceau escaped deportation during World War II – unlike his father, who died at Auschwitz – and worked with the French Resistance to protect Jewish children.

He performed tirelessly around the world until late in life, never losing his agility, never going out of style. In one of his most poignant and philosophical acts, "Youth, Maturity, Old Age, Death," he wordlessly showed the passing of an entire life in just minutes.

"Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us without words?" he once said.

Marceau was born Marcel Mangel on March 22, 1923, in Strasbourg, France. His father introduced his son to the world of music and theatre at an early age. The boy adored the silent film stars of the era: Chaplin, Buster Keaton and the Marx brothers.

When the Germans marched into eastern France, he and his family were given just hours to pack their bags. He fled to southwest France and changed his last name to Marceau to hide his Jewish origins. With his brother Alain, Marceau became active in the French Resistance.

In 1944, Marceau's father was sent to Auschwitz, where he died. Later, he reflected on his father's death: "Yes, I cried for him." But he also thought of all the others killed: "Among those kids was maybe an Einstein, a Mozart, somebody who (would have) found a cancer drug," he told reporters in 2000. "That is why we have a great responsibility. Let us love one another.''

When Paris was liberated, Marcel's life as a performer began. He enrolled in Charles Dullin's School of Dramatic Art, studying with the renowned mime Etienne Decroux.

On a tiny stage at the Theatre de Poche, a smoke-filled Left Bank cabaret, he sought to perfect the style of mime that would become his trademark. Bip – Marceau's on-stage persona – was born.

Marceau once said that Bip was his creator's alter ego, a sad-faced double whose eyes lit up with child-like wonder as he discovered the world. Bip was a direct descendant of the 19th century harlequin, but his clownish gestures, Marceau said, were inspired by Chaplin and Keaton.

Marceau likened his character to a modern-day Don Quixote, "alone in a fragile world filled with injustice and beauty."

Dressed in a white sailor suit, a top hat – a red rose perched on top – Bip chased butterflies and flirted at cocktail parties. He went to war and ran a matrimonial service. Single-handedly, Marceau revived the art of mime.

In the past decades, he has taken Bip to from Mexico to China to Australia. He's also made film appearances. The most famous was Mel Brooks' Silent Movie. He had the only speaking line, "Non!''

As he aged, Marceau kept on performing at the same level, never losing the agility that made him famous. On top of his Legion of Honor and his countless honorary degrees, he was invited to be a United Nations goodwill ambassador for a 2002 conference on aging.

"If you stop at all when you are 70 or 80, you cannot go on," he told The AP in an interview in 2003. "You have to keep working.''

October is Fundraise for Farley Month

It's every pet owner's worst nightmare. A beloved pet needs veterinary care, but the owner can't afford treatment. For many seniors and people with disabilities, this scenario is a sad reality.

That's where the Farley Foundation steps in.

The Farley Foundation helps sick and injured pets that belong to low-income seniors and people with disabilities.

The Foundation offers financial assistance to veterinary clinics in Ontario to help cover the cost of providing necessary veterinary care for pets belonging to seniors receiving the Federal Guaranteed Income Supplement or people with disabilities who receive the Ontario Disability Support Payment, and who cannot otherwise afford treatment for their pets.

The Farley Foundation pays tribute to one of Canada's most famous pets. Farley is the Old English sheepdog who appeared in the For Better or For Worse® comic strip. For Better or For Worse® is the charming and poignant chronicle of a Canadian family. Cartoonist Lynn Johnston first introduced the fictional Patterson clan to audiences 21 years ago.

Farley was the first dog I ever owned. As a puppy he was a boundless ball of black and white energy. As an adult, he was a personality, unique unto himself and truly, part of the family.

Owning a dog introduced us to the world of veterinarians, groomers and obedience school - all of which helped us to learn how to care for and understand what owning a pet entails (pun intended). Farley was a wonderful, unforgettable companion, who died but lived on for years in FBorFW.

In 1995, Johnston decided to develop a storyline about the death of Farley, the Patterson's 14-year-old sheepdog. The powerful and moving story received international media coverage. Johnston received more than 2,500 letters from fans. Many were devastated that the beloved dog was written out of the comic strip. Others shared their heartbreaking stories of losing a family pet. After seven years, Farley's loss is still a sentimental subject!

Long after Farley left us, I had the opportunity to work with my husband's sister, a veterinarian in Manitoba. It was Beth who made me so aware of her role in the community. As an "animal doctor", she tended to family pets as well as large farm animals. Every patient was handled with professionalism and sincere consideration for both the animals and their owners. After all, when a member of the family is sick, it affects everyone!

Seeing a worried family greet their healthy pet after a night in the "hospital" was a rewarding sight. Calming someone who had lost a pet was as heartwrenching as any final passage.

Beth did her work for the love of it. When people couldn't pay, they brought us chickens or fresh pies. Never did a patient go untreated - even in the middle of the night, sick animals were treated and cared for. Calves were born, piglets too and abandoned kittens were nursed by hand until they were big enough for adoption.

It was a hard job, and I was part of it for a season, carrying supplies, cutting sutures, holding flashlight and holding hands.

To be asked to help veterinarians to care for pets who, for lack of finances, might be left to suffer is an honour. By lending Farley's name and image to the Farley Foundation, I feel part of this venerable group, and once again, my very first dog, is remembered in a very special way.

More about the Farley Foundation and how to help out here

For Better or For Worse® official website here

More about For Better or For Worse® here

The Kindness of a Stranger

A puppy that seemed destined for the pound and possible death was reunited with his owner late Tuesday.

On August 26, Josh Gomez, a 22-year old music teacher, brought his puppy, Pilot, to the PetFIRST Veterinary Clinic in Duluth, Georgia. Pilot was suffering from parvo, a deadly virus that can kill young animals very quickly. Treatment, which involves providing fluids to prevent dehydration, and managing related symptoms, can be costly.

Three days later, Gomez went to pick up his dog. He paid the vet $1,152, the amount he said the clinic had quoted him. However, Dr. Garry Innocent, the veterinarian, Innocent, however, said he never quoted that figure to Gomez and that the real amount Gomez owed was $1,640. That amount eventually increased to over $2,200, because of boarding costs.

Gomez felt that his dog had been held "hostage", as the clinic refused to release Pilot until all additional costs were paid.

Georgia law allows veterinarians to "dispose of" a pet 10 days after demanding, in writing, that its owner pay the animal's medical bill in full.

In a letter dated Sept. 8, Innocent informed Gomez that if he didn't pay the bill, he would "report this matter to all authorities including Gwinnett County Animal Control for pet abandonment and disposal" and suggested that the puppy might be euthanized. He called Mr. Gomez a "jerk", commenting that "all the twit has to do is pay his bill". PetFIRST does not offer options like payment plan negotiations or Care Credit, a third-party loan for veterinary expenses.

In response to angry e-mails and phone calls that "were disrupting his business", the vet relented and advised that instead of handing the dog over to Animal Control, he would offer Pilot for adoption to one of his "star" clients.

Tuesday, September 18 was the deadline Innocent set for Gomez to make good on his debt.

That afternoon, Carol Diamantis of Brookhaven paid $972 in cash to free Pilot.

Diamantis, Gomez and his attorney, Ed McCrimmon, paid a surprise visit to PetFIRST Animal Hospital late Tuesday. The cash Diamantis ponied up Tuesday afternoon settles the bill once and for all, according to the vet.
Diamantis said she stepped forward after reading news accounts of the pet's possible demise. "If I was in the position, I would hope somebody would help me out," said Diamantis, who brought her two sons with her.

The surprise visit prompted further theatrics, and the vet demanded that Pilot's bill be paid in cash before the dog would be handed over. McCrimmon, Gomez's lawyer, even called the Duluth police — to make sure the exchange took place, he said. Finally, a vet tech handed Pilot to his owner.

The dog jumped into Gomez's arms, his tail wagging. Gomez beamed. So did everybody else.

"I feel better than ever," said Josh Gomez, as he petted and hugged his puppy, Pilot, in the parking lot outside PetFIRST Animal Hospital in Duluth, Georgia. "I'm just glad it's done."

Credits: Ben Smith at Atlanta Journal - Constitution; Jason Getz, photography

L'enfer c'est les Autres

When French playwright Jean-Paul Sartre's contemporary existential masterpiece for stage, Huis Clos (No Exit) was first produced, theatre audiences and critics alike were disturbed by its unsympathetic characters and unrelentingly bleak thesis—succinctly stated by Garcin, the journalist-coward trapped in a room with two other craven individuals, all fated to act as each other's torturers for eternity—"Hell is other people."

The three damned souls - Garcin the army deserter and philanderer, Inez the lesbian who turned a wife against her husband, and Estelle the gold-digger and cheat - are ushered into a Second Empire style drawing room. They realize that they are in hell, and they fully expect to meet with the wrath of Satan and his minions.

Instead, they are politely shepherded into the single room together, one by one, after which the door is locked behind them. Quickly, they realize the hideous truth of their collective situation - each individual is to act as the torturer of the other two.
Resisting this fate, they decide they must fully understand and forgive each others' sins in order to find salvation. As each character's personal web of deceit unravels, they are all forced to face their own true nature.

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ESTELLE: Ah yes, in your mind. But everything that goes on in one's head is so vague, isn't it? It makes one want to sleep. I've six big mirrors in my bedroom. There they are. I can see them. But they don't see me. They're reflecting the carpet, the settee, the window-- but how empty it is, a glass in which I'm absent! When I talked to people I always made sure there was one near by in which I could see myself. I watched myself talking. And somehow it kept me alert, seeing myself as the others saw me...Oh dear! My lipstick! I'm sure I've put it on all crooked. No, I can't do without a looking-glass for ever and ever. I simply can't.

INEZ:Suppose I try to be your glass? Come and pay me a visit, dear. Here's a place for you on my sofa.

---

The barriers come down, the denials fade, all attempts to self-justify are shot down, and the ugly truth of each sinner is revealed.

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GARCIN: Will night never come?

INEZ: Never.

GARCIN: You will always see me?

INEZ: Always.

GARCIN: This bronze. Yes, now's the moment; I'm looking at this thing on the mantelpiece, and I understand that I'm in hell. I tell you, everything's been thought out beforehand. They knew I'd stand at the fireplace stroking this thing of bronze, with all those eyes intent on me. Devouring me. What? Only two of you? I thought there were more; many more. So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the "burning marl." Old wives' tales!There's no need for red-hot pokers. HELL IS--OTHER PEOPLE!

ESTELLE: My darling! Please-

GARCIN: No, let me be. She is between us. I cannot love you when she's watching.

ESTELLE: Right! In that case, I'll stop her watching. (She picks up the PAPER knife and stabs Inez several times.)

INEZ: But, you crazy creature, what do you think you're doing? You know quite well I'm dead.

ESTELLE: Dead?

INEZ: Dead! Dead! Dead! Knives, poison, ropes--useless. It has happened already, do you understand? Once and for all. SO here we are, forever.

ESTELLE: Forever. My God, how funny! Forever.

GARCIN: For ever, and ever, and ever.

(A long silence.)

GARCIN: Well, well, let's get on with it...

---

First produced in Paris, 1944, Jean Paul Sartre's famous one-act play Huis Clos is his clearest dramatic metaphor for his philosophy: We all hold the power of choice, and with that power comes the responsibility of consequence. It is in the judgement of our peers that the truth lies about who we really are.

Updating animal legislation from 1892

In recent months, a number of high-profile animal abuse cases across the country has made many Canadians aware of how woefully inadequate and outdated Canada’s laws against animal cruelty are.

These well-publicized incidents have prompted thousands of Canadians to sign petitions and write letters to Members of Parliament demanding reform of our animal cruelty laws, which have changed very little since 1892.

There are currently two private members’ bills before Parliament to reform the Criminal Code sections on animal cruelty.

Bill C-373, introduced by Mark Holland, M.P. for Ajax-Pickering, is a comprehensive bill that not only increases penalties, but also closes off the many loopholes that allow animal abusers to walk away scot-free. Currently only one quarter of 1 % of animal cruelty complaints actually result in conviction.

Bill C-373 has the support of such major animal welfare organizations as the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies (CFHS), the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association (CVMA).

However, hunting and animal industry groups are supporting rival Bill S-213, which substantially keeps in place laws from 1892. This bill, introduced by Senator John Bryden, is opposed by the major animal welfare organizations.

What can you do?

To learn about the differences between Bill C-373 and Bill S-213, read Mark Holland's article which was published in the September 2007 issue of Canadian Pets & Animals Magazine.

Inform yourself about animal cruelty issues and why Canadian law needs to change.

Share your views with your MP, and tell him or her that you want to see an effective bill passed.

Write to newspapers and discuss the issue with friends and on online forums.

Write to Justice Minister Rob Nicholson and tell him that you are not satisfied with Bill S-213.

Write to the Senators and urge them not to pass S-213 in its present form when it is reintroduced under a new number in the new session of Parliament.

Visit Mark Holland's website for their contact information.