In May this year I ran into the former curator of the Elders / Elders-GM / Elders IXL / Foster’s collection of Australian paintings, which Foster’s sold in 2005.

This chance meeting is a spur to begin work later this year on developing a DVD to show most of the paintings and information about the collection - started in the 1950’s by Sir Norman Giles when he was Managing Director of Elder, Smith & Co., Limited.

He continued buying more paintings during his term as Managing Director and then as Chairman of Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort Limited (incorporated on 19 April 1962 to merge the businesses of Elders and its rival Goldsbrough Mort).

As a start on my work to create a DVD about the art collection, I've created a slideshow.

The slideshow runs for about 8 minutes or so after it has loaded.

Art Collection Slideshow

This is a scene which I created in 2008 on my PC in Carrara, a 3D modelling program. The main use of the 3D program for me is to create titles (both animated and still) and backgrounds for videos.

The above was my previous Home Page for many years. The layout was controlled by Dreamweaver AP tags (Absolute Positioning) which are now frowned upon as old fashioned. At least they worked

Initially I used an AP tag on this page to position the Welcome section on the left of this sidebar, but it's now positioned correctly using CSS.

If you click on the images on this page (except the Streeton painting in the left sidebar) it will link to a larger image.

WHAT'S NEW

Weds, 6 Jan 2010

The Christmas New Year season is over and the website messages have been taken down.

I wonder if I'll be around to post a new message at the end of 2010.

Or whether I'll bothered or be interested by then.

Who knows. I might do a Charlie Chaplin and take on a really lovely young wife, and have kids.

Welcome

Welcome to my website which has been around for years, but in April 2009 I scapped the old site and created a new one using Dreamweaver CS4, except for the WordPress Blog page.

To put it another way, my whole web site was created on my PC computer in Adobe Dreamweaver CS4, which is an application on my computer, just like Word or Excel or Photoshop etc. But my blog page was created in WordPress which is an application on my website's hosting server.

As I result I can add to and change my blog site using any web browser on any computer - even yours

In December 2009 my single blog page bloomed into a blog site with lots of pages and more to come, thanks to a new theme I'm now using, developed by RichWP.com.

Self portrait - taken with a Panasonic LX2
and then adjusted with Nik Color Efex in
Photoshop CS4.

31 October 2009

This video will show you why induction cooking impresses me.

6 January 2010

The Christmas and New Year video message was taken down at 11.45pm on the Twelfth Night of Christmas.

I wonder what the new year will bring. Hopefully it will be good for all of us. Last year had three very sad events for me, and in recent years some close friends have suffered very sad losses.

Cole But we soldier on, as Muriel played by Stephanie Cole in the monologue play "Soldiering On" written by Alan Bennett for BBC Television in the series "Talking Heads", would say.

My next door neighbour Cliff, lent me his book of the first series, as part of his Christmas present. I returned it on Monday, after reading the six monologues played by Alan Bennett himself, and Maggie Smith, Patricia Routledge, Julie Walters, Thora Hird and of course, Stephanie Cole pictured above.