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Monday, September 27, 2010

The perfect apron? Design it yourself ...


OK ... What do you think makes the PERFECT apron? Post up your recommendations and photos of your... favourite apron here http://www.facebook.com/pages/Brunswick-Australia/Designed-in-Brunswick/148418831862783 and we will produce an apron based on the best design. The winner will receive one in the post featuring a 'designed in brunswick' print. (oh... and tell your friends to 'like' the designed in brunswick page and add their two cents worth as well)

Just wrap mine in newspaper please.





Birthday presents are fantastic. No question. However - the paper and accompanying cards can be equally as delightful.

My husband gave me a vintage Prada wallet for my birthday this year. Beautiful - great brand - no consumerism guilt - perfect!

He had wrapped it in this beautiful recycled paper. Indian newspaper screen printed with a simple Hindi jewel style design.

Now while India is particularly topical at the moment - will the Games go ahead or not - they are a country with a rather large population of poor. They are also a country filled with beauty, colour and ingenuity. Just look at Chands garden to see what they can do with a bit of trash; http://www.nekchand.info/ - incredible! A truly inspiring piece of work that is definitely on my personal bucket list.

I am going to investigate further and see if the paper I have received is a community project or an artists folly. Either way I want more. It reminds me of when T2 opened in Sydney and we were all so impressed with heir use of mainly Chinese paper as wrapping etc.

This ability to turn the ordinary, mass trash item into a usable upcycled artistic part of our life is exciting. It is a tangible, immediate representation of 'rubbish' as beauty.
A reminder of just how much we take for granted.



My husband bought his piece at 'A Shop Called Clarence', Maroondah H'way, Healesville 3777.

Sunday, September 26, 2010

A conversation with Dan Mathers work

There is much to love in a piece of art. There can be much to look at; a reflection of self, an intellectual link made to a well pondered theory, maybe simply the sense that this is a small part of someone else revealed for you to see. What a huge gift that is.

How would we survive this life without people reminding us of the multitude of ways in which to have conversations broadly but still with depth.

In a society with so much rigor around its' 'politeness' and inclusiveness words have become potential weapons of self destruction. Some of us find it hard to comprehend and struggle with what it actually means to be intimate now with our communities for fear of judgment, misinterpretation and misrepresentation.

Constantly tracking all the social norms and needs can make it feel nearly impossible to remember our own needs. Our own truly personal conversation. What was that? The way we articulate it may actually be heard in words that are not our own. We question our inner voice and sometimes scold it for not sounding 'right'. Personal lies become larger than personal truths in order to survive.

Where to from here?

Back to the beginning. Back to the many ways we have always communicated in order to collect parts of the whole. Stories, dance, music, pictures - art. Art is a conversation. Choose your topic, or let the topic choose you, it's there and it can be tangible.

Looking at Dan Mathers work today at a friends house I felt a shift.

Slight, tortured pieces, delicate and poignantly beautiful and poised. We stared at each other, those pieces and I, asking, quietly waiting for the unfinished question to form so we could both not answer it together.

Did I bond with a canvas? The artist? Myself? I don't know.

I do know I feel richer for the moment having been. I felt instantly calmer for having a 'life' moment on a shiver I felt alive and real. I felt I had a true conversation.

Thank you

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Eating, drinking and being at home ...



Leaving the nest behind.




We are separating. My house and I - my family's home and us - we are leaving each other.

Now, I approached this thinking it was inevitable, we all needed to move on, it would be better for all of us and really we could do better than this place. Now it looks like it is about to really happen I have succumbed to a bit of nostalgia for these four walls.

As a family we have been through so much here. Our son was brought home to this place. Whilst I was pregnant my friend and I painted part of it together while her new baby slept in the lounge room. We have hidden here in times of trouble and we have shared many, many hours with friends laughing, eating and drinking at our table.
We have opened the doors to friends of ours that needed shelter while they rested from their own life.

This house has provided us a space in the world we could always call our own.

So - I have been mean to my little house over the years. Mainly because it didn't transform itself into something from the pages of a glossy magazine I suspect! I am now realising just how fond of it I am. How much I love what it has done for us as a family and would like to thank the four solid walls for protecting us. I am passing it on with gratitude to the next people hoping they will get as much joy from it as we have.

Home is where the heart is .... home is where the art is .... home is safe.


Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Snow on the Black Saturday trees


L JPD


http://www.lewiejpd.com/


Welcome to Lewie JPD's art site. There are some stimulating things to see. It's not sophisticated but neither is a pineapple or a starfish.







Bluesky Bliss


"born in a blood custard maelstrom, surrounded by whispering trees as a child, traversed to a techno megaopolis as a teen, immersed in dreamlike realities folding in on each other like chocolate flakes at a Swiss buffet, painted his way out of an art-induced reverie to locations and sets and complications and sex, wrote of other lives; became a number of them, returned to a half-finished life and wondered what he had missed..."

My old friend Lewis ....

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Shah of Shahs ..... Ferdousi St

When I want to cheer myself up, I head for Ferdousi Street, where Mr. Ferdousi sells Persian carpets. Mr. Ferdousi, who has passed all his life in the familiar intercourse of art and beauty, looks upon the surrounding reality as if it were a B-film in a cheap, unswept cinema. It is all a question of taste, he tells me: The most important thing, sir, is to have taste. The world would look far different if a few more people had a drop of taste. In all horrors (for he does call them horrors), like lying, treachery, theft, and informing, he distinguishes a common denominator - such things are done by people with no taste. He believes that the nation will survive anything and that beauty is indestructible. You must remember, he tells me as he unfolds another carpet (he knows I am not going to buy it, but he would like me to enjoy the sight of it), that what has made it possible for the Persians to remain themselves over two and a half millennia, what has made it possible for us to remain ourselves in spite of so many wars, invasions, and occupations, is our spiritual, not our material, strenght - our poetry, and not our technology; our religion, and not our factories. What have we given the world? We have given poetry, the miniature, and carpets. As you can see, these are useless things from the productive viewpoint. But it is through such things that we have expressed our true selves. We have given the world this miraculous, unique uselessness. What we have given the world has not made life any easier, only adorned it - if such a distinction makes any sense. To us a carpet, for example, is a vital necessity. You spread a carpet on a wretched, parched desert, lie down on it, and feel you are lying in a green meadow. Yes, our carpets remind us of meadows in flower. You see before you flowers, you see a garden, a pool, a fountain. Peacocks are sauntering among the shrubs. And carpets are things that last - a good carpet will retain its color for centuries. In this way, living in a bare, monotonous desert, you seem to be living in an eternal garden from which neither color nor freshness ever fades. Then you can continue imagining the fragrance of the garden, you can listen to the murmur of the stream and the song of the birds. And then you feel whole, you feel eminent, you are near paradise, you are a poet.