A new homepage design

Our virtual gallery is now simplified, stylistically and operationally. Please visit our new digs at http://rodneymackay.com/

Coming to Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, October 4

You'd better watch out!



MOXIE mox·ie (mŏk'sē) Derived from Moxie, a carbonated beverage, considered to be the first mass produced soft drink in America . It was invented as a patent medicine at Union, Maine in 1876 and was introduced as the cure for practically every illness. Later, sold as an invigorating drink it was said to ensure "spunk." and virility. Bartenders used to keep Moxie on hand to pass off on incautious drinkers; but the word entered popular language with good connotations. To be "full of Moxie" indicated a person who was particularly skillful or capable, or spirited, or all three, It remains the offical soft drink of the State of Maine.

The Dictionary puts it this way:

1. The ability to face the future with spirit and courage.
2. Aggressive energy; having initiative
3. Skill; know-how.

Maritime Canada

Our new web directory is meant to help painters in this part of Canada. Not shown but included within Atlantic Canada is Newfoundland which lies in the Atlantic to the north east. The provinces shown here constitute Maritime Canada, and include New Brunswick (N.B.) and Prince Edward Island (P.E.I.)

Art Resources, News and A Blog

http://rodneymackay.com/Lunenburg/Art/xpage.html

Or visit us using our web site link at right. Just commencing; your links and input welcomed.

Rod Mackay and Ruth Brown

Styles, Movements and Conceptualism

The view has been expressed that everything has been accomplished in the realm of painting and that movements and mainfestos are no longer valid. 'Style' in painting, nevertheless, persists and can refer to the distinctive visual elements, techniques and methods that typify an individual artist's work or to a movement or school that an artist is associated with. Style can originate with an actual group that the artist was involved with or it can be a category in which art historians have placed the painter. The word used in this last sense has fallen out of favour among scholastics, though it continues to be used in popular contexts.

It used to be considered that art arose from dedication to learning the elements of painting, design, colour theory and the like. So-called "modern art" and "contemporary art" have moved away from the historic value of craft and documentation of nature in favour of concept. Effectively, this places the operation of painting in the hands of workmen rather than the artist. The repeated assertion of conceputalists has not prevented the majority of artists from continuing to practise in a somewhat traditional manner. Arguments over what constitutes art and its realation to craft have been forwarded by the modern and post modern schools.

Here is how Wikipedia sees the divisions of the art world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Painting

The Painter's Directory

...complex systems seem to strike a balance between the need for order and and the imperative to change. Complex systems tend to locate themselves at a place we call "the edge of chaos." We imagine the edge of chaos as a place where there is enough innovation to keep a living system vibrant and enough stability to keep if from collapsing into anarchy. It is a zone of conflict and upheaval, where the old and the new are constantly at war, Finding the balance point must be a delicate matter - if a living system drifts too close, it risks falling over into incoherence and dissolution; but if the system moves too far away from the edge, it becomes rigid, frozen, totalitarian. Both conditions lead to extinction. Too much change is as destructive as too little. Only at the edge of chaos can complex systems flourish,

Michael Crichton

While the above was written with respect to the evolution and pending decline of human societies it works almost as well as a model for the evolution of the so-called "arts" and the "crafts"

Here are the roses.

And that is the village of Lockport (ca 900 citizens) in the background.