Christmas In The Park: Fill & Download for Free

My house burned down last year, and I lost almost all my art in the fire. I have a few photos of my past work, though. (And if you’re a professional in the arts, either a creator or critic or curator, I’d welcome your expert opinion on my work. )(Edit: Wow, thanks for all the upvotes and kind remarks! I added a few more paintings at the bottom of this post, that I dug out of my Facebook feed. Also, a big hello to Scarlet and the Squareheads! Thanks for dropping in to check out my stuff! )(Edit 2: To the commenters asking about commissions, or purchasing my work: sorry, I can’t discuss commercial queries in the Quora comments. The admins consider it spamming, and delete my answers. You’re welcome to hit me up on Facebook if you have any questions about my art - Ian Saxby - or contact me via my profile.)(Edit 3: In response to the questions about the big purple portrait from 2014, the lady in the picture is an old friend of mine from Toronto, beer critic Robin LeBlanc. I painted the picture with a 50/50 blend of beer and acrylic paint. Sadly, this painting was one of those destroyed in the fire.)(Edit 4: To those of you asking about the fire, our situation was covered fairly extensively in the news media. I won’t risk a ban by posting links to the story, but you can find the whole thing pretty easily with a quick search online.Edit 4b: I wrote a fairly detailed account of the fire in this Quora post - Ian Saxby's answer to Why couldn't you just run through a fire? Say your house is burning down, why not sprint through it for 10 seconds?)1986: Birthday card that I drew for a friend when she turned 20. I hadn’t taken up painting at this time. I used a technique inspired by the work of Reg Mombassa, drawing a black ink outline and filling it in with a coloured pencil.1987: 21st birthday card for my friend. I was fascinated by the maps in the back of the Lord Of The Rings books as a kid, and made numerous copies in the same style. Again, coloured pencils and ink.1991: My friend Nigel, walking along a raised road in the Kinchega National Park in central Australia. I was inspired by the lush colours of the Australian desert, and mostly avoided the use of black outlines in order to produce a more natural landscape.[lost in the fire]1992: Illustration from a botany assignment. Fine black outlines on the cactus, which I had to portray accurately. I took some liberties with the background, obviously :-D[lost in the fire]2010: I’d moved completely from coloured pencils to painting by 2010. I was still at the stage of building up images from small black outlined areas, and this is the period during which my work most closely resembled that of Reg Mombassa and Colin McCahon. This is also where I began experimenting with pointillism, inspired by the dot paintings of indigenous Australian artists.I painted this as a thank you to my former boss, on the top panel of his office door. If you’re ever at the Matisse Derivan headquarters at Rhodes (Sydney, Australia), it’s probably still there in the upstairs studio.2011: I love painting old houses. They’re my favourite thing in the world. This is an old 4-apartment boarding house in Toronto, Canada, that I painted after moving there with my wife at the end of 2010. It’s the last Second Empire house remaining in that part of the city, tucked in behind the huge Rogers building and surrounded by modern apartment blocks.[lost in the fire]Posing with my model, 2014: This was my first completely pointillist work, painted with a 50/50 blend of acrylic paint and Kilkenny Cream Ale. It took me thousands of hours to paint, over a period of twelve months.[lost in the fire]2015: Probably my first swirly sky painting. This is a plein air piece that I painted from the driveway of my inlaws’ house outside the village of Wolverton, southern Ontario. It was extremely windy most of the time I was out there, and I added the swirls as a nod to the weather.2016: Commission for a client in the UK. He’s a cycling fanatic who asked for a Tour de France painting set in the French countryside, with fields of sunflowers and canola. There are about twenty layers of dots in some parts of the image, and it took me about two thousand hours over six months.2017: Peak swirl. This piece is sixteen square feet, and took a year to complete. I wanted to paint something very, very complex, and built up this image from around three hundred thousand dots, layered one on top of another.2018: Quick, simplified expressionist work, inspired by the bright autumn colours of New Brunswick. This is one of the first things I painted after being released from Moncton hospital.Another quick piece, November 2018, I was still recovering from my burns at this stage, but was mostly healed.2019: Fossil coelacanth. I’d gotten a bit tired of loose expressionist painting, and returned to my black outline style.EDIT: Extra artworks . . .Therapy piece from February 2019. This is the embodiment of the physical and psychological trauma I suffered as a result of the fire. The sharp edged form in the centre is composed of solid blocks of different shades of napthol red, and the background is all soft pointillism. I like the effect I get from mashing up different styles in a single work.This piece is simply called “FIRE!”November 2018. Another, more restful work from after I was released from hospital.December 2018. Way back to my early painting roots. This is a humorous view of the landscape around the farm where I’m now living with my wife, with an expressionist sky thrown in for good measure.2010. Beelzebub. An experiment with a limited palette, using a brain scan image overlaid on a profile of my head sketched by my wife, that I projected onto the canvas with a table lamp.[lost in the fire]Coffee table, about 2010. Not much to say about this. We needed a coffee table after we moved into our Toronto apartment in 2010, so I built one and painted this design on it.[lost in the fire]Wolverton village, Ontario, autumn of 2014. House across the road from my inlaws’ property. This is one of the very few realistic paintings I’ve ever done.Wolverton in the autumn of 2014. Pointillism combined with a somewhat cartoony landscape.From my Sydney exhibition in 2010. Probably inspired by my impending move to Toronto. Five feet by four, and took two years to paint.2014. Night Soccer. Quick expressionist memory of soccer training on Tuesday nights in the mid nineties, at Curtis Oval in Sydney, Australia. The guy in the foreground wasn’t originally going to have red hair, but after I’d done the underpainting in those bright orange shades, I decided I liked the way it balanced out the red jerseys of the defenders.2018: New Canaan United Baptist Church, Route 112 in New Brunswick.[lost in the fire]2010 I found a spectacular photo of a Bird Of Paradise flower online, and used it as a visual reference to paint this heavily textured impasto piece on a three foot by four foot masonite panel. I had it framed and hanging in our living room for years,[lost in the fire]2015: Blandfordia flowers (Christmas Bells), painted with heavy impasto. Made as a thank you gift for my cousin, who helped us with our move from Ontario to New Brunswick. His wife loved the Bird Of Paradise painting, so I made this textured piece for her with a similar style and palette.2013: Toronto With Subway Spiders. Real buildings from around the top of Sherbourne St in Toronto, with a fanciful underground dimension. About 2,000 hours of work over a period of three years.2008: Windfarming. Oils with wax medium. Suburban cross section referencing my childhood in Sydney, where I’d often dig in the back yard and wonder exactly what was down there under the ground.2013: Purely expressionist image of a lovely friend of mine, who does fetish modelling in underwear and corsets. Photo credit: Vanessa von Volkova.2008: A Sunday School Night’s Dream. Oils with wax medium. I went to Sunday school as a kid, and they’d tell us about Hell, and then I’d have nightmares about Hell being under my house. This is the front of the house I lived in, although there wasn’t actually a church across the road :-D(Edit: this was my first experiment with wax medium. I’d bought a bottle just before starting to paint the Hell section, and finished the piece with wax added into the oil paint. I was impressed by the luminous melted-crayon effect, and painted a number of other pieces using the same medium).2008: Reincarnation Of The Grass Spirits. Oils with wax medium. This is one of my earliest attempts at painting, after moving away from coloured pencils. About 1200 hours of work over 18 months. This is the best thing I’ve ever done, and I’m thankful that it was at the gallery instead of in our house when the fire destroyed my other work.2020: Obstruction. I found some interesting diagrams and microscope slides while reading about arterial sclerosis, and used them as reference material for this eight square foot abstract piece.2019: Voice Of The Dreaming. Commission for the same client who purchased the Tour de France painting. This time he asked for a rear view of his parents on a desert road in central Australia, standing by their beloved MG sports car.2019–20: Ammonite. I painted this piece in 2019, and it hung around on my wall until October of 2020, when I built and painted the frame. It’s mostly sourced from a photo of a beautiful cut and polished ammonite fossil that I found online, with some additional elements that I made up as I went along. A custom frame of this type and size would’ve cost me upwards of six hundred bucks from a framing store, but the total cost to do it myself was about sixty bucks for materials and eight hours in the wood shop. (Pro tip - you can buy cheap-ass ceiling moulding from Home Depot instead of using framing materials, and cut it to size using a miter saw).2020: Haunted. Quick monochrome Halloween painting from October of 2020. It looked a bit featureless with an empty foreground, so I painted in a raccoon to give the painting a bit of interest.2020: Untitled. I keep a sketchbook and a box of coloured felt markers on my telephone table, and draw doodles while I’m talking on the phone. I was so pleased with the way this one turned out, that I made it into a painting.2020: Bringing In The Hay. Composite view built from a couple of photos that I took on the farm where I live. I really hate painting farm machinery because of all the fiddly details, but the rural stuff is popular at my gallery.Winter Blues (Nov 2020)Small acrylic piece that I dug out of my procrastination pile this week. It was a massive pain in the butt to paint.Escarpment (Jan 2021). Acrylics on 15″x30″ gallery wrap. Another VW camper van road trip piece to start the new year.As a bit of a bonus, here are some pages from my sketchbook. Every artist should keep a sketchbook - it’s where you jot down ideas, practice details, compose future artworks, and generally keep your drawing skills honed.“Fishing Bear”. I don’t usually paint wildlife or nature scenes, but they sell well in the local market. Figured I might as well bite the bullet and start producing stuff with more commercial appeal :-D

The Zone of DeathLocated in the south east of Idaho, this controversial 50 square mile area is a part of Yellowstone National Park wherein you could, in theory, get away with murder.According to the sixth amendment of the U.S. constitution, if you are to be put on trial, it’s required that you be judged by a jury of your peers from the same state AND federal district in which the crime is believed to have been committed.The amendment reads…“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed....”Now, geographically, the majority of Yellowstone National Park is inside the state of Wyoming. This little piece, however, is actually in Idaho state. But the park as a whole is under the federal jurisdiction of Wyoming, including this small zone in Idaho. And here’s where things get messy.In case a crime is committed in this area, the defendant has the right to a bias jury that includes people who both live in Idaho AND are under the federal jurisdiction of Wyoming. In other words, people who live in the zone of death.But here’s the thing, this portion of the park is entirely uninhabited. Which means that the assembly of a jury in this case is practically impossible. You’re constitutionally protected from prosecution.Zone of Death (geography) - WikipediaStrange LawsDuring a recent research I’ve been conducting for travel purposes, I came across a few bizarre laws from different countries around the world. Some of these laws are downright crazy.In Thailand, for example, It’s illegal to leave your house without underwear! The question that begs to mind here, how would the police tell if someone is going commando? And if a person is suspected to be walking outside with no underpants, how would the cops, you know,…..investigate the situation?It’s also illegal in Thailand to drive your car shirtless. It seems that the country takes underwear quite seriously.Another thing they take seriously is their currency. You are not to step over Thai money as this is considered an offense too. Most likely because the picture of the king is printed on their banknotes.In Germany, on the other hand, escaping prison is completely 100% legal, and you can’t be punished for it. Yes, you’ll be brought back behind bars if they capture you, but no extra time will be added to your sentence.The reason behind this law is that the country believes that while criminals don’t have the right to live freely among the rest of the population, every person, criminals included, has the right to seek freedom as it is a human nature to do so. Therefore, breaking out of a prison is not considered a crime. Just a human being succumbing to their survival instincts.https://www.workandvolunteer.com/10-things-you-should-know-before-travelling-to-thailandThese are the countries where prison breaking (escape) is legal and not punishable……The Eiffel Tower at NightSpeaking of what’s legal and what’s not. If you’ve ever taken a picture of the Eiffel Tower at night and posted it on social media, then congratulations, you might’ve committed a felony.Taking a picture like this one for the Eiffel Tower is completely legal,This one however -if without blurring it out- not so much.Blur to focus from the eiffel tower at night with sparkling lights Stock Video Footage - Storyblocks VideoCopyright laws in The European Union state that any work of art, buildings included, is protected for as long as its creater is alive, plus 70 years. Gustave Eiffel, The copyright owner of the Eiffel Tower, died in 1923. So, in 1993, the copyright of the Eiffel Tower expired. And all pictures and replicas of it became fully legal.The lights, however, weren’t installed until 1985. Which means that until now, they’re still protected by copyright laws. As a result, pictures taken for the lit Eiffel Tower without permission from Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel are illegal.Hawaii Overprint Note, The Second World War.Following the attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II, the U.S. federal reserve issued a series of special banknotes to be used in the state of Hawaii as a replacement for the regular U.S. dollar bill. This measurement was taken out of fear that a Japanese invasion of Hawaii would lead to the seizure of tens of millions of dollars by the Japanese army.As a result, the use of standard U.S. dollar bills was prohibited in Hawaii between the years of 1942 and 1944. In an event of a Japanese invasion of the state, these overprint banknotes were to be deemed worthless by the United States’ government to protect the U.S. dollar, and consequently, the nation’s economy.On a side note, I love how the United States is always prepared for the worst. Always.Hawaii overprint note - WikipediaChristmas Truce of 1914, The First World War.On Christmas eve of 1914, six months into the deadliest conflict in history until that time, British and German soldiers put their guns down and raised their glasses up high. For a few hours, men who’d been exchanging bullets on the battlefield, stopped the gunfire and celebrated together all night.It all started with a few German soldiers singing in the spirit of Christmas on the evening of December 25th, 1914. As their singing reached beyond enemy lines, their British counterparts joined them and started singing along.Shortly after, a voice emerged from the German front calling, “Come over here”.Worried that this might be some kind of a trap, a British sergeant replied,“You come half way. We come half way”.It was then when German troops stepped out of their trenches and headed towards no man’s land (that little space between the opposing armies).Yearning desperately for a few moments of peace, these men moved slowly toward each other, unarmed, cautious, but hopeful. This time, in their hands, they carried things other than the deadly weapons they’d been holding on to for months.They shook hands, exchanged bottles of wine, cigarettes, and even letters they’d written to their loved ones. In the most unexpected place, thousands of men came together and spent Christmas singing, drinking and celebrating.Suddenly, though, a round object was thrown in the air. It wasn’t a grenade as one would expect to see in such place, but a football. The two teams are now competing, not by occupying lands or taking each others’ lives, but by scoring goals.Those were some of the strangest hours in the history of warfare. Earlier that day, these men had been shooting at each other. But once they put their rifles down, something extraordinary happened. Peace rised from the muddy trenches, and cut through the dark clouds of war.Christmas Truce of 1914 was a monumental event. A testimony that even in our darkest days, we strive to live.This memorial was built to commemorate these ceasefires and the soldiers who made the impossible possible.File:Christmas Truce 1914 Memorial.jpgWhat Happened When WWI Paused for ChristmasEvery time, I start off an answer with the intention of writing a paragraph or two. But then I keep adding more and more lines, and end up with a really long answer. Frankly, I don’t see this changing anytime soon, for I love writing. Seriously, I need it to get through this part of my life.Not all of you, however, have the time to read these lengthy answers. For that, I’ve decided to include a visual summary for some of my answers from now on. Just in case you only have a minute or two to spare, and would like to spend it reading on the go.For a visual summary of this answer, please check the infographic below.Cheers.

I never went, as a kid, so I have nothing to compare it to, but as an adult, Disney is a blast. You don’t have the same priorities as the younger people (unless forced to, I do not spend time waiting in line for a “Character Encounter,” for example,) but there’s a lot of things that appeal mostly to adults.Of the four parks, EPCOT is the most “adult friendly.” About half the year, they have festivals with special food, attractions, concerts and vendors — during winter, the Festival of the Arts takes place; in the spring, it’s the Flower and Garden Festival; in the fall, the Food and Wine Festival. In addition, EPCOT has great restaurants and wonderful adult beverages.Each of the parks has its own appeal, and we get to all of them throughout the year, but EPCOT draws us back more than the others.When my nieces and nephews come here from up north, it’s a treat to take them to the parks. Last December, during the week between Christmas and New Years, my nephew, his wife and two daughters came down and wanted to go to Disney. I told them it was the worst time imaginable to go there, but we did it anyway, and I was able to guide them through the Magic Kingdom, on one of the busiest days of the year, never spending too much time in line, and, while we missed a couple big attractions, they were none the wiser and all agreed that they’d had a great day at the park.That’s one of the nicest things about being local to Disney, with annual passes — there is absolutely no pressure to do anything, any time that you go there. We got together at EPCOT a couple of weeks ago with a friend of ours, who also lives here and has an annual pass. We had FastPasses for Soarin’, and wanted to see “Starship Featuring Mickey Thomas” in concert, but otherwise had no plans. When we got to the park, we saw that it was packed, huge lines for everything (“Spring Break” crowds,) so we just wandered around, people watched, had some beers and wine in World Showcase, caught the concert and used our Soarin’ FastPasses on the way out of the park.If it was ten years ago, and I was down from North Dakota for the week, I’d have been pretty aggravated with that. But, because we can just go back tomorrow, if we wanted to, doing one attraction and seeing one live show was good enough.To answer your question, you’re never too old to go to Disney. I’ve seen ancient people at the parks, enjoying their time, enjoying seeing the fun that their grandchildren or great-grandchildren are having. Everyone gets something different out of Disney, and, as someone who has been visiting the parks for over twenty years and now goes frequently, it never gets old.