Pills for the First Night

By John A B Lansdown

‘Pills for the First Night’ is the second of the hospital series by the author. While distracting patients is a theme throughout the series, each book may be read independently and in any order. A defining feature of this anthology is restless verse primed to divert sluggish thoughts away from pending medical appointments to refocus on the fabric of society. Illustrated plays are punctuated with sycophantic images of politicians and other despots who are eager to listen to advice from the public.
Various office holders suffer sleepless nights thinking about how best they can serve the public during their tenure in public office. Hospital inmates may discover solace by offering these brave public representatives some advice to ease their tremendous burden of social responsibility. Resolving the illness in society can be a cathartic process simultaneously recovering both the patient and society.
Pills for the First Night can be distinguished from the other books in the hospital series by aesthetic considerations to compliment political contemplation. Modesty forbids the author grabbing this opportunity to ‘blow his own trumpet’ by displaying his paintings yet suffice to say, pleasant doggerel waits to float your mind from the summits of the remote Rhodope Mountains of Bulgaria to be whisked across seas and ocean to picturesque river scenes of the British Isles before terminating in the intrusive recesses of the author’s mind where stark views upon art and aesthetics lurk.
Also in the hospital series:
Book One - Pills for the First Consultation
Book Two - Pills for the First Night
Book Three - Pills for the First Day
Book Four - Pills for Visiting Hours
Book Five - Pills for the Homeward Bound
Due to popular demand, the series has been compiled into one book called Sweet Pills for the Hospital Ward.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John A B Lansdown
• Release date: Jun 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463200117

John A B Lansdown

Formative years in the scenic Lakelands of North West England shaped John A B Lansdown into an outside landscape painter. Making violins at the prestigious Newark School in Nottinghamshire garnered a discipline that rubbed off onto his fine art. Watercolours, sketches and oil paintings interweave his poems and plays. Selling paintings internationally, he exhibits in Bulgaria, Austria, France and England. His prime displacement activity is playing a hand-made cigar box guitar accompanied by a voice allegedly resembling a tormented alley cat.

Book preview

Like book one of the hospital series, Pills for the First Night presents restless verses aimed at diverting sluggish thoughts away from pending medical appointments to refocus on the fabric of society. Rather than lamely slate prominent hard working politicians for general amusement, this book offers some reprieve for bed ridden patients by focusing also upon aesthetic considerations. Modesty forbids the author grabbing this opportunity to ‘blow his own trumpet’ by displaying his paintings.

Pleasant doggerel waits to float your mind from the summits of the Orpheus region in the remote Rhodope Mountains of Bulgaria to be whisked across seas and ocean to picturesque river scenes of the British Isles. There is little time to recover before terminating in the intrusive recesses of the author’s mind where stark views upon art and aesthetics lurk.

Book Cover: ‘Corbyn on the Rostrum’ 2018 JPEG (1182 x 1600 / 3604KB)

Encrypted Lee

Before reaching the sea at Cork, the mumbling river Lee ponders an Irish interior from where the painting ‘Encrypted Lee’ is derived. Using a construction of overlapping rectangles of translucent paint, intersections of paint glazes bestow a subliminal chimera of abstraction combining to conjure up a riverside image.

The painting method entails many glazes of pigment laid upon the previous strata. No white pigment is used other than the canvas ground that allows light to reflect back from beneath semi-transparent layers of paint to give a harmonious glow. Individual rectangles that are the building blocks of the composition do not represent anything in isolation. Rather, it is the chiaroscuro effect from combined overlapping translucent pigmented layers that suggests a comprehensible landscape image resolved in the mind’s eye of the viewer.

Metaphysical philosophers from Gottfried Leibniz to Max Plank sought to explain material existence as being derived from minute indivisible perceptions interrelating with other perceptions to create the phenomenon of a corporeal world. The painting emulates such a model of physical existence with overlaps of colour that collectively reveal the phenomenon of a riverside. Miniscule fragments of grinded pigment suspended in a see-through medium are a concrete metaphor of the perceptions referred to in Leibniz’s treaties. Shamelessly pompous, it is thus that the author calls this method of depiction; ‘Perceptionalism’.

Though the author was unaware of any parallel with computers when this work commenced far back in 1990, the daubs compare with the square pixels of computer-generated images. While computers are capable of producing images of mosaic intricacy, an important contrast is that they are less amenable of generating overlapping three-dimensional shapes that the medium of paint lends itself to so well.

Visual interpretation is stimulated by miniscule energetic fields of electro-magnetic resonance whether one is watching a film, analysing a painting or gazing at nature directly. Overlapping fields increase impulse enough to enter our conscious mind so that correlating patterns and shapes are created to represent the stimuli. A stroke on the left side of the brain is known to impede the efficacy of visual interpretation - indicating the left hemisphere is responsible for decoding visual impulses.

Neither a single pixel floating on a screen nor a solitary particle of light is strong enough to create a perceptible resonance field. Insufficient overlapping frequencies give feeble visual stimulation. Reality under intense magnification becomes an incomprehensive grainy unit akin to looking at a single daub of translucent paint. The ephemeral building blocks of reality are demonstrable as rectangles of paint in the painting.

Human cognition boasts an interface trinary code system allowing for self-determination which is superior to computers relying on a binary code system. However, enormous advances in the quality of computer generated images as holograms have been made between making the painting and writing this book. So successful are these breakthroughs that digital holograms may soon adopt the trinary code as well as the three dimensional principles used in this painting. Even now, digital holograms used for impressive displays at exhibitions and sales shows, emit projections convincing enough to intimidate people. Artificially projected images so closely emulate the reality of the world that it is feasible for people to lose touch with tangible life. People could soon embrace a phantom idealism where mediated realities make abstractions sufficiently convincing for a nihilistic world to consume them.

Celebrating advances of applied science is premature since it may be that upon entering such a hallucinogenic fairground of intra-projection, one cannot ‘step off the carnival ride’ so easily. Unguarded thrill seekers could become ensnared into a nightmare that, in turn, is ambushed within a dream to be maintained by yet more strata of sub-reality. Ancient culture possibly knew the risk; taking precautions not to chisel all around a statue lest the work is freed from the bedrock with enough self autonomy to replace us.

Big Broz:

Switching off this hypnotic reality show will prompt a visit from the team to your place - double pronto

Degenerate Gallery

Herr Hitler earned a meagre income by faithfully copying scenes from postcards of Vienna to sell to tourists. Though his work was