Saturday, December 29, 2007

Birds and Books



Watching the birds on the peanuts and fat balls is endlessly delightful. There are a surprisingly large variety of birds in this, my city garden. Robins and wrens, blue tits and great tits, blackbirds and sparrows, starlings and woodpeckers, magpies and jays, wood pigeons and the ordinary London pigeons, being the main ones.
Along with trees, birds are perhaps one of my other main art themes, and this Christmas I was happy to receive some bird themed presents. Some little drawings here of 2 resin birds.

One of the new books I received is Living Water, Viktor Schauberger and the secrets of natural energy, by Olof Alexandersson. It is an amazing account of Viktor Schauberger's life of investigating the living force and power of water. he was an Austrian naturalist and forester born at the end of the nineteenth century, brought up with a love and immersed in the forests of Austria. His observations of nature and especially the way streams functioned, flowed and carried materials, lead to his developing systems of transporting logs, ways to bring water back to life and ways of controlling the flow of water.
He was passionate about working with the earth not destroying it, and unfortunately, perhaps did not understand that some people could be so wilfully disregarding of the work he did and the understanding he came to.

Monday, December 24, 2007

Christmas Greetings



It's that festive time of year, buying and decorating the tree, seeing friends and relatives and shopping.
I have enjoyed being in town a few times this year, I like to see what decorations are around. I was in Covent Garden where they had decorated the market hall well and had some giant baubles outside. I haven't managed to get to the South Bank yet, where apparantly they have decorated a skip and various tools. The Natural History Museum has a snow globe you can stand in, which would be good for photographs as well.


I have an exhibition on in January, in the Oxfam shop window in Walthamstow. So I shall use some of this holiday time to work on that.
Wishing you all a very happy Christmas and a creative and peaceful year ahead

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Fireworks and Chisato Tamabayashi


After a few arts and crafts events, teaching and getting the flu, I haven't had chance to post here for a while. It was good though getting out and seeing if my glittery photo cards would sell for the festive season. It seems there are fellow enthusiasts for stars and glitter fortunately.

I did get chance to go to a firework display this year as well, I shot quite a few videos and took photos, some here. The fireworks did show up the digital cameras problem with burnout however.It did lead to some interesting photographs playing around with sparklers in the garden later.

On Sunday I was down Brick Lane and went into gallery. There were some beautiful pictures and artist's books by Chisato Tamabayashi, The pictures of leaves had layers of finely cut paper or card, showing the veins in the leaves and the artists books had great paper engineering. the little book had pop up christmas trees. If I had the money I would have brought them all, but I settled on a card.