Poirot, Orient Express

Acrylic on 9″x12″ wood panel.

Ambigram – “Hickory Dickory Dock”

A mirror-image ambigram; acrylic on 8″x10″ canvas board. (The paint is still wet, which accounts for the glare! More touch-ups are probably coming, too.)   🙂

“Agatha Christie” ambigram

Hey everyone, I bet you thought I’d disappeared forever. Well, like many people, these past five or so months have been really hard on me, and the isolation that is COVID-19 is only a small part of it. Depression and personal issues have been weighing me down badly… BUT… I do have an ambigram to share with you.  🙂  I have a gallery show of ambigrams coming up next month, so that has more or less forced me to work on a couple of things. This particular ambigram is one I created quite awhile ago, but I decided to make a proper painting out of it (8″x10″, acrylic). So here you go…

New Japp sketch

Here’s last night’s pencil sketch of Japp!

A cool new Poirot gift and… Sherlock Holmes??

It is very bad of me… I haven’t posted here for ages. I skipped the whole month of October! It’s been a hectic time, as Flatlands Theatre Company has just finished up their performances of Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Christmas Carol. I was playing the role of the Second Spirit (the Ghost of Christmas Present), as well as leading some caroling, taking a role in set movements, making cast party favors, and painting like crazy to get some artwork for the foyer together (as per request). I am only starting to recover now.  LOL  But it was a great time! A little more on the artwork below, but first…

I wanted to share with you the awesome thing that my friend Eva made for me with her vinyl-cutting craft machine! (Shown also with English toffee M&Ms!) Isn’t it cool?

If you remember the little wooden shelf with the miniature “books” that I made four years ago, Eva and her husband John were the ones who I gave plans to for the shelf, the pieces of which they cut out for me with their laser cutter.  🙂 She’s one of my Poirot-viewing buddies.

Anyway, about Sherlock Holmes, which might be of interest to some of you detective mystery fans out there… In the interests of our play, I’d finished reading through the Sherlock Holmes canon and was watching some of Jeremy Brett’s interpretation of the character. One of my Facebook friends posted a photo of him in the role and said I should paint it, so I did. (It’s a one-off; I’m not going “fan art crazy” on Holmes like I have on Poirot).  😉   The house manager of our play happened to see it and asked if I’d like to show artwork in the foyer of the concert hall while the play was on. I’d already sketched some ambigrams on the theme of the play (as is my usual wont) so I decided to paint up some finished pieces. I also did portraits of two of the cast members– our own Holmes and Watson– and some of my paper snowflake cutouts. Want to see?

Conor Adrian as Sherlock Holmes. Sorry if some of these photos are a little bit blurry!

Eric Buhr as Dr. Watson.

Here’s the painting of Jeremy Brett’s Holmes.

These are two rotational ambigrams that read “Sherlock Holmes” and “Dr. Watson.” Flip them over and the image is identical. 🙂

Since this play WAS a mashup with the Dickens story… here’s a mirror-image ambigram of “A Christmas Carol.” The painting has bilateral symmetry.

Just to get one more Christmas image in there… a rotational ambigram of “Silent Night.” 🙂

My personal favorite of the snowflake cutouts is this one of a poison bottle, which I designed way back when I was doing Poirot-themed snowflakes. 🙂 The trick to this sort of cutout is using a combination of radial and bilateral symmetry to obtain the whole image.

^^And one of the cast party favors!! 🙂

I’m so behind on blogging here– there’s the new Suchet photo book, and a Poirot Gourmet to rock your socks off. Stay tuned!

A new acrylic sketch

Here’s a new little painting in black and white, on 6″ square canvas board.

Identifying a picture in Miss Lemon’s office

Sometimes it can be difficult to get a clear view of some of the artwork in the series, particularly if your aim is to identify them. But fear not– David Hart has been at it again. 🙂  This time he’s managed to track down an image in Miss Lemon’s office. Here’s a relatively good view of the picture from the episode How Does Your Garden Grow? …

The verdict? It’s a painting called “Sussex Landscape” by English Modernist, Paul Nash.

We couldn’t find much additional info about the picture, but in the interests of finding some sort of Poirot connection, it may be worth mentioning that Nash was best known as a war artist and spent a good deal of his energy and passion into documenting the horrors he saw in Belgium during WWI.

Great job, David, on spotting this!!

New art giveaway

I did promise a giveaway this week, so here we go… winner gets this brand new painting I promised.  🙂

To enter, reply on this blog post or on my related Tweet with one of your favorite random Poirot quotes. The more obscure, the better! Let’s see if we can share and bring out some that aren’t heard as often.   🙂  Winner will be drawn randomly next Friday, the 21. (Also, how in the world is it already June 14???????)

Good luck!

New Poirot sketch

I am very bad– I managed to miss May altogether for the blog! Bad Kelly!

By way of apology, here’s a new little Poirot sketch in acrylics; 5″x7″ on canvas board. Want to win it? I’ll have a new giveaway for it next week here on the blog.  🙂

Poirot sketch

Pencil and pastel on toned paper.