22°C,

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Bristol: apparently there is a move in the City of Bristol to apologise for its involvement in the slave trade 200 years ago. >BBC<. The collective guilt is the cause of place-name changes, and a citywide debate. I’m puzzled- who are they going to apologise to? They can’t apologise to black americans because none of them are near relatives of those traded, remember this all happened 200 years ago. They can’t apologise to black Africans because it was their distant ancestors who were selling the slaves that were transported on Bristol merchantmen to be sold in the USA (to be). They can’t go on changing the place-names amd smoothing over history because it becomes a whitewash, deleting history seems a dangerous road for a (democratic) country to go down. they can’t even make policies based on the fear of offending someone because there is no-one left alive who is directly affected by the slave-trade.

 

Drawing: Drawing from photos is fiendishly difficult. Drawing from small pictures is a magnitude harder. Actually drawing is never hard- I really mean "difficult". We get our students to draw from photos- surely a form of madness if they want to make interesting pictures. there is something very unnatural about the picture recording a person’t image over a 1/125th of a second. Drawings made over up to an hour contain study of a person with much more about they way they animate their body language and facial expressions.

 

Of course if you want to make a drawing of a photograph they that’s another matter…