Me and Magritte and a cup of tea

from w
There are still seven in the household but oh it's so good to have two young women to take over the kitchen and to tidy up! They cooked a beautiful fish lunch for us all. Our eldest son has flown back to Fiji today to work, and a young relative from Sydney has arrived for a few days. The boys, our grandsons, went to church with me this morning and I played the music. It was a full church with the baptism of a baby from a very large family - our good friends and Peceli had baptised about seven of their kids over the years so figured in their family photo albums! This afternoon the boys swam in the heated pool at Splashdown and I had time to do some image-making based on four pictures I made during my Deakin Uni study days. These pictures were based on a postcard of 'La Grande Famille' by Rene Magritte, an artist I really admire. He was born on November 21st- so today is his birthday. A strange painter, a surrealist but not into fantasy in the way dreams and nightmares are. Magritte was born on November 21, 1898, in the town of Lessines, Belgium. He was a Surrealist who used out of place and out of proportion imagery to provoke thought, used titles that seem to have little to do with the subject matter. Someone wrote this about Magritte:
More often than not, Magritte chose ordinary things from which to construct his works - trees, chairs, tables, doors, windows, shoes, shelves, landscapes, people. He wanted to be understood via these ordinary things. Those who find him obscure should not forget that he had turned his back on the fantastic and on the immediate world of dreams. He did not seek to be obscure. On the contrary, he sought through a therapy of shock and surprise to liberate our conventional vision from its obscurity.