animation — ART JOURNAL

It has been very warm and sunny all this week, with a heatwave forecast for next week. I am finding this quite odd, when contrasted with the knowledge of a volcanic dust plume from an Icelandic volcano drifting grey ash clouds at high altitude above most of Northern Europe. With no incoming or outbound flights in the UK for the last few days the skies have been unusually quiet - just as nature intended. We are grounded, but the weather has been quite lovely... wish you were here...Wanting to take a slightly philosophical stance on nature's subtle intervention (the best kind of art), I was delighted to read Alain de Botton's musings on a world without planes... Heathrow, he writes, would become a museum, [and of planes] we would stroke their steel dolphin-like bodies in museums and honour them as symbols of a daunting technical intelligence and a prodigious wealth. Modern air travel has destroyed any sense of geographical distance, the physical experience of moving through a landscape, or even the metaphysical space and sense of the passage of time that our travelling predecessors would have gained from crossing land and sea... perhaps the exception would be the hot-air balloon...I was amused by the notion that Botton was the writer-in-residence at London's Heathrow airport - how could he possibly think clearly with the constant noise of take-offs and landings? Of course, he actually resided elsewhere, it's just a creative job description..Clear blue skies or grey clouds ahead... (some animated cloud drawings)[the art of idleness, part one....]read more about the art of idleness...