Fighting rental agent

This week, our rental agent is upset with us, because they reckon they have made a series of clerical mistakes in our lease on our rented house. I think we only have to pay what we signed for in the lease, not a cent more or less. They wanted more, and the notices they send us for increase in rents were wrong too, or even illegal.

Posted via email from chailim's posterous

I thought I will share my husband, chai's exchange with Joy Tanksley because of her 
excellent article on her post "Four Steps to Finding Your Ideal
Writing Voice". 

http://www.copyblogger.com/writing-voice/

Author: Joy Tanksley
 

chai June 18, 2010 at 10:45 pm                                     85
I wrote my father?s story in Malaysian Chinese Voice and I failed my 
English, but the teacher said the ideas got A+. I am not English, please 
look at my pa?s war memoir on http://chaifamilyhistory.publishpath.com/  and tell 
me what you tell. Do I have voice? thanks

Joy June 19, 2010 at 9:08 am

    @Chai ? It has been my experience with students who are leaning a 
new language that voice and style are some of the last things to 
develop. I read a bit of your writing, and you really have some 
beautiful and powerful phrases in the piece about your pa. I think you 
are well on your way! My guess is that your voice is quite strong when 
you write in your native language, and that it will naturally become a 
part of your English writing in time. Good luck with the process!


June 19, 2010 at 12:37 pm

    Dear Joy, its too late for me, I am in my golden years, never 
written in my native language or spoken it for 40 years. Had only 
English all my life and I think I will never improve because I have not 
mastered English yet. My wife is English and she has also told me she 
has worried about my writing and has seen me write the same way for ever 
it seems. She has tried to help and proof read my English but to no 
avail! So What to do?

June 19, 2010 at 1:10 pm

    @Chai ? Sorry I misunderstood your situation! Honestly, I don?t even 
know what ?mastering English? would mean. You are writing about things 
that matter to you, clearly expressing your ideas, and (hopefully) 
enjoying doing it. I say, keep it up and let go of the concept of 
mastery. I think it gets in the way. Best wishes to you!

 June 19, 2010 at 2:05 pm

    Thanks Joy, Just love your article, I am very passionate about 
family matters, and have a lot of time because we have no children. We 
are semi-retired and I read a lot and blog a great deal and in addition 
to family history, I delved into the art world with my wife who is an 
outsider artist. I like writing best without proof reading, the ideas 
just flow. I have just started to write in my website and have just got 
it running in just a few days. I code in html, and into computers and 
anything internet. I do seo and content management as a biz, but suffers 
from my defiency in my English. I am an old computer nerd, who started 
with a slide rule to log tables and pcs in 1981, and now still keen on 
pcs. Genealogy is my passion, biggest success is finding 42000 
descendants of my wife in Victoria, Australia.
    Thank you.

See the comment here: 
chaifamilyhistory.publishpath.com/i-dont-write-in-english 

Preview of new Painting

Sold
bird in the bush
oil on canvas
0.9 m X 0.9 m


Before I paint, I always ask for the Lord's help to inspire me to enjoy the process, and to tell the truth I really just play. I loved this painting as it came together. I felt it was a good painting, I liked the colours and the little face that appeared to the left of the bird. This painting gradually appeared over a couple of weeks and it was made in exactly the same way I have described before, making marks and going with the flow.

I don't write in English

My husband wrote,

I have been upset a lot of times, because I do not write good English, until I read this post

Four Steps to Finding Your Ideal Writing Voice | Copyblogger http://bit.ly/9jgFAP

I am saved, I will go on writing and blogging.

checkout my example in my blog writing

http://chaifamilyhistory.publishpath.com/

What I am doing

Emma and I are looking at my projects for the next year. Emma is my art mentor.

Projects that are coming up:- a solo show at Arthur Gallery next month, workshops and presentations for the rest of the year, and art awards applications. The workshops will hopefully be held at BRACE and RADMAC.

Another venue is "backspace"- a brand new exciting project organised by the City of Ballarat, to be held behind the Ballarat Fine Arts Gallery.

Noteworthy Art Exhibitions

This is the east wall of the Kelly Brother's art show at Arthur Gallery. The pencil drawings were magnificent and very detailed and beautifully worked. They were well liked by the patrons which you could tell by the number of works sold this week. The strong coloured oil paintings which are also Surreal were beautifully presented. Very well done.




I am still updating this blog because of its popularity.

I will run the same post as in http://ballaratoutsiderart.publishpath.com/dawns-outsider-art-noteworthy-exhibitions

Ongoing dialogue between Dan (foliotwist) and Chai

http://chailim.publishpath.com/new-artist-website

Chai wrote:
thanks Dan,
I don't think I will take up the offer, I had a very heavy workload doing that site.
I find this website is the simplest to do and more suitable for SEO then any that I have done, except for my first website for Dawn www.dawnlim.com
This one was in the best vein, that Moshe Mikanovsky, Hugh MacLeod and Peter Wolsely blogged on their sites about artists online advertising and SEO.
Since Google's new priority in SEO directions, I have taken to blogging a lot more than I usually do.
regards chai

June 17, 2010 @ 7:44 AM (Delete this comment)

Online Newsletter

Just found Hugh MacLeod's website, wonderful blogs. http://gapingvoid.com/n2/

So many artists so hard workers for their online presence, my other hero is Moshe.

One of the best blogs I have read is http://fineartviews.com//blog/17411/artists-online-presence-how-one-artist-does-it

Thanks guys.

website seo comparisions

New comment from Chai (chail1@optusnet.com.au):

follow the updates to this blog on my website
http://chailim.publishpath.com/
The CEO of foliotwist is helping us to find out why this site is performing better?
both websites were started at the same time and coded with similar keywords down to the names of the sites.
The first was not as flexible for seo than this one. Maybe that is why.

See the comment here: ballaratoutsiderart.publishpath.com/reply-to-foliotwist

Dawn's Outsider Art Website

Hi everyone,

I have updated my Outsider Art Website.

Please visit and tell me what you think.

http://ballaratoutsiderart.publishpath.com

thanks

dawn

Giclee Prints

For Aussie artists, I hope the following post that I wrote on the foliotwist forum is interesting and can spark a discussion of this procedure.


Don't know much about the US, but in Oz, we have a lot of print shops even in small regional towns that have 2mX2m giclee prints machines.
However, I feel that the first part of this process, ie that the digital image of your artwork is so critical. The common method is to use a professional photographer, but the Sydney giclee shop recommends that you use a large scale flat bed scanner and they are the only ones with the biggest in the southern hemisphere. Then comes the giclee prints and any of the 2mX2m large format giclee printer will do a good job of printing it on canvas usually on a good quality 100% cotton rag.
Good info, I hope?

New website for artist

hello fellow artists, I have come across a website created just for artists,
it might not be as easy to create as I found out but it had a lot of desirable features and once you set it up, you should be able to easily configure the contents yourself.
However my husband who runs a web design consulting and tutoring biz, finds it quite demanding to set it up.
The site is still under construction but he enjoyed the heavy workload and found it quite challenging.
I loved it, its at http://www.ballaratoutsiderart.com
thanks to Doc Pixel whose blog my husband follows.

Galleries on Great Ocean Road

We drove down to Lorne on the Great Ocean Road today and we visited a couple of galleries along the way.

QDos art gallery, we liked the most because of the paintings in it from Dawn's University of Ballarat lecturer, Ian Reed and a friend's, Ashley Harkness. The gallery was nested in woodlands and has surrounding gardens and was on a forest road. It had a cafe, and Japanese-style accomodation. It was peaceful and beautiful.

We decided to visit Geelong after trying to play golf with Martin at Curlewis and could not because of the rain and the large number of players.
First we stumbled onto Robyn Redman's studio at Pandora's cafe who had a very successful art show in Ballarat' Galley and had coffee and cake there, then we came across Art Worx after buying art supplies at Cavalier's.
At Art Worx, we met Steve and Jess Baker, father and youngest daughter who were running the new art supplies at Geelong. Steve himself is a painter and so is Jess who has been learning under Robyn.
Next stop was the Metropolis Gallery which was showing a remarkable artist David Newbury who sold a lot of art because he was dead. It is really sad that he did not reap the rewards when he was alive.
We also saw Aalto Gallery which is now defunct and finally we visited Robert Dowling, a National Gallery of Australia show. Robert was an 19th century Aussie painter who was quite accomplished but died early in the peak of his career at age 59. The front entrance of the Geelong Gallery did not do justice for the appearance of the gallery because inside it was a beautiful heritage building with lovely back gardens.

This month's notable art exhibition

Very beautiful photographs of trees in the landscape, printed on 100% cotton rag, showing at the University's Post Office Gallery.

Very bright colours that I liked. They were very good quality prints.

Art Competition

I am preparing my portfolio to apply for a couple of exhibitions by next monday.

Life is busy ... painting and writing and surfing the net.

Chai has been busy with the blogs and updating, trying to get rid of those pesky spam comments.

And preparing my paintings for the exhibition next month and life is busy!!!!

And Chai is sick, have to take care of him and life is busy!!!!!!!!