Fine Art and Nature - Developing Your Artist Eye

Cape Conran is in the far North East corner of Victoria, Australia. This place is remarkable for its remoteness (no mobile phone coverage there- great for some people, frustrating for others, particularly teenagers. I found it great and liberating to be away from all the electronic "stuff"). Remarkable also for its rugged natural beauty; coastal flowering trees, gums and tea trees, miles of pristine, untouched ocean beaches, quiet lagoons and unusual rocks jutting vertically out of the sand; some dark, fossilised wood, others: pink, sensuous, monolithic boulders.

What was surprising, and insightful in a creative way, about the seascape, was how much it reminded me of my painting process; there were the large areas of colour and tones of the sea, sand and sky, swept in as in large pastel strokes. The dark tones and highlights in the waves had subtle changes of colour from aqua to ultramarine and deep violet. The sand provided a pleasing, warm, golden complementary to the seas cool blues. And then, the shoreline strewn with millions of pebbles that, at first glance looked the same size, shape and somewhat similar colours, but, on close inspection, were all different.

The Fine Art of Obamacare Obfuscation

Even though it's the best on the planet, an excellent case can be made for the existence of weaknesses in America's health care system. When everyone from potentates to average Joes still travel to the U.S. for state of the art treatment, we must be doing something very right, which is not to say the system is flawless.

It's expensive, overloaded with paperwork and fraught with serious issues but few sick people go out of their way to go to places such as Great Britain to seek treatment in that country's bankrupt, socialistic National Health Service, the Obamacare model.

It was those issues, a cooperative press, and majorities in both houses of congress that enabled Democrats to ramrod a basically dishonest, 2309 page monstrosity which no legislators read and which the majority of Americans opposed through to law.

The fact that federal employees, including those same congresspersons who voted in favor of it, kept their existing and generous medical plan, their Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, and were exempted from Obamacare is perhaps the most telling factor indicative of how farcical the "Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act" truly is. The PPAHCA was deemed good enough for the rabble, the hoi polloi, but the very people who brought us Obamacare wanted no part of it.