History Weblogs

On returning he discovered that rodents had chewed his prized drawings to bits, destroying the tangible results of years of patient labor. “I relate it,” he said, “merely to show how far enthusiasm—for by no different name can I name my perseverance—could allow the preserver of nature to surmount essentially the most disheartening difficulties.” After his first dismay, he went to work and inside three years had filled his portfolio once more and was back on his highway to fame. In a later interval, when Rex Brasher was but eighteen, his father informed him that some day an artist would paint each chook within the nation, do even a greater work than Audubon’s. The boy thought he may be that man. Another in style seller in this class is the normal Mississauga blinds which are made of 2″ slats. It took Brasher a month to complete the primary painting. He knew that at that rate he had an actual job on his hands. Night time and day he toiled, but when he had completed 300 paintings he destroyed them all, for he felt that they weren’t good enough. In doing them, nonetheless, he had learned the best way to do better.

In another 5 years Rex Brasher completed 400 extra paintings of birds. “They had been punk,” he said, after he deliberately burned them. Then he settled right down to years devoted to-producing 874 paintings exhibiting each species and subspecies of birds in North America. His work wasn’t accomplished with completion of the paintings. No writer would invest the half million dollars wanted to provide his work. So Brasher induced an engraver to make black and white plates for him and he got down to shade the engravings by hand. This required four years— the coloring of 90,000 plates—but these twelve-quantity sets of hand-coloured prints now market for hundreds of dollars and are excellent work. Genius? No. “I’m not a pure artist,” says Rex Brasher. Persistent? Yes. “It was a case of fight with me,” he says.

A case of fight! Tenacity is a matter of fighting. Our horizontal fauxwood Toronto blinds give you the better of both worlds. Winners do not stop and quitters do not win. Gentleman Jim Corbett, who was among the finest, if not the very best boxer ever to dance within the ring, declared that the way to change into a champion is to “fight yet another round.” He won his first fight within the twenty-eighth round. Fridtjof Nansen, a Norwegian explorer, set out in June of 1893 to discover the North Pole. Months later Nansen and his crew in their small vessel had been imprisoned within the arctic icecap. Their solely alternative to remaining there to die was to set out afoot to cross a thousand miles of roaring, shifting ice. All but one man and Nansen elected to stay with the ship. Nansen and his companion got down to cross uncharted sweeps and mountains of ice afoot. They saved on walking. In June of 1896 they had been still strolling, exhausted, starving. They’d eaten their dogs. They’d stewed the canine harness. They’d swallowed the whale oil from their lamps.