nineveh_uk: Illustration that looks like Harriet Vane (Default)
nineveh_uk ([personal profile] nineveh_uk) wrote2021-05-23 06:53 pm
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Blast from the past

About 10 days ago a university friend with a shared interest in opera sent me a link on Facebook consisting of the words "Looks relevant to your interests" and a link to a friend of hers tweet that Amazon had a special offer on a Frederica von Stade CD compilation for £4.75. Reader, I bought it and now I finally have a CD recording of her singing Non so piu and not simply a VHS.

It's nice to think that my teenage self may have been terribly wrong on some subjects*, but was thoroughly right on others, and fun sometimes to think of new things that I've found since as something that I would have loved had I known they existed (or they actually existed) when I was fifteen. Which is why I spent a bit of time this weekend listening to my new CD and doing watercolour exercises** from a recently-acquired book, Painting Landscapes from Your Imagination, to learn some proper techniques for all those Tolkien-esque mountains I used to spend hours on. It's a terrific book that I only wish I'd known about in 1996. My purple sky about Minas Tirith/Rivendell/with dragons in it will be a higher quality purple sky!

*Especially every single time my mother had a different opinion on clothes to me. In my defence, it was the early 90s.

**The great thing about art is that much of it can be done sitting down. Even better, watercolour needs to dry so what would normally be a slightly frustrating wait becomes a useful break.

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