The muzzle is for Miss Chrysanthemum, a kissy pitty that is unfortunately discriminated against in our wonderful province because of her looks. Now she has a fancy muzzle that she can wear with Attitude!
Dwyn did the decoration with a device called The Bejeweller, which is used to hot-glue rhinestones. The Bejeweller has a variety of cup shaped tips that you put down over the rhinestone on the front, and it heats up the stone and melts the hot-fix glue on the back. You then position the rhinestone in place, and it sticks there. You take the Bejeweller away and go get the next one.
A lot of Swarovski stones were put to good use in the creation of this pretty accessory.
The Polaroid has, for many, allowed an image to be viewed a minute after it was captured. Polaroids are the basis of the work of photographer, Alex Park, whose altered Polaroid of the Paris metro is the subject here. His technique aims to rearrange and reveal what the original images.
To modify his Polaroid photos, he uses a sharp object to impress and accentuate different aspects of the image. The result is like an image submerged in water or viewed through a kaleidoscope.
In Paris, Park has found an ideal playground to express his vision.
One of the finest pieces of the metro’s art collection, this graceful Art Nouveau portico was donated by the Parisian transit authority, to the Montreal metro in 1967 to commemorate their collaboration in designing the metro. Its instantly recognizable green cast iron form, with its shield-shaped medallions, delicately curved sign holders, and lily-of-the-valley light standards with orange tear drop-shaped lamps are a centrepiece of Place Victoria and the Quartier International.
Montreal’s Guimard is the only authentic example of these world-famous works in use on a metro station outside Paris. Since the entrances are modular, it was composed of pieces of demolished Guimards from Paris metro stations. However, the holders for the Métropolitain sign, the neighbourhood map on the entrance’s rear, and the light globes are reproductions added during the entrance’s complete restoration in 2001-2003.
The Place Victoria metro is the inspiration for my realization of an art nouveau necklace designed by Kathy Domokos.
This is an ancient story told on the Queen Charlotte Islands about how Raven helped to bring the Sun, Moon, Stars, Fresh Water and Fire to the world.
Long ago, near the beginning of the world, Gray Eagle was the
guardian of the Sun, Moon and Stars, of fresh water, and of fire.
Gray Eagle hated people so much that he kept these things hidden.
People lived in darkness, without fire and without fresh water.
Gray Eagle had a beautiful daughter, and Raven fell in love with her.
In the beginning, Raven was a snow-white bird, and as a such, he
pleased Gray Eagle’s daughter. She invited him to her father’s
longhouse.
When Raven saw the Sun, Moon and stars, and fresh water hanging on the sides of Eagle’s lodge, he knew what he should do. He watched for his chance to seize them when no one was looking. He stole all of them, and a brand of fire also, and flew out of the longhouse through the smoke hole. As soon as Raven got outside he hung the Sun up in the sky. It made so much light that he was able to fly far out to an island in the middle of the ocean. When the Sun set, he fastened the Moon up in the sky and hung the stars around in different places. By this new light he kept on flying, carrying with him the fresh water and the brand of fire he had stolen.
He flew back over the land. When he had reached the right place, he
dropped all the water he had stolen. It fell to the ground and there
became the source of all the fresh-water streams and lakes in the
world. Then Raven flew on, holding the brand of fire in his bill. The
smoke from the fire blew back over his white feathers and made them
black. When his bill began to burn, he had to drop the firebrand. It
struck rocks and hid itself within them. That is why, if you strike
two stones together, sparks of fire will drop out.
Raven’s feathers never became white again after they were blackened
by the smoke from the firebrand. That is why Raven is now a black bird.
Ravens symbolize many things in different cultures. Native American tradition honors the raven as a symbol of courage and of magical guidance. The Arab culture calls the raven Abu Zajir which means “Father of Omens.” They are seen as oracular birds, used in divination. They are seen as symbols of death, life, the sun, magic, shapeshifting, and tricksters.
Legend from Ella E. Clark: Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest, University
of California Press, 1953.
Image: Raven Stealing Sun, by Ken Mowatt.
Andrew Thornton, jewellery artist, discusses inspiration at Flight of the Raven King. The necklace shown is The Raven Queen.
Raven Frees the Moon, an argillite pendant by Haida artist P.J. Ellis, from Spirits of the West Coast dot com, soon to be part of a Canuck version of The Raven Queen…
Nelvana, aka secret agent Alana North, is the daughter of a mortal woman and Koliak the Mighty, King of the Northern Lights. Koliak’s marriage to Nelvana’s mother so angered the gods that his spirit was transformed into the Northern Lights.
Nelvana is able to fly and she can travel at the speed of light on a giant ray of the Aurora Borealis. She can also call upon other powers of the Northern Lights, including Koliak’s powerful ray, which can melt metal and disrupt radio communications. As well, she can make herself invisible.
Nelvana is called upon to assist the Inuit. She discovers that the “evil white ones”, led by Commander Toroff, are destroying fish and other food stocks with time bombs. Koliak assists Nelvana and transforms the Northern Lights into a gigantic magnet which draws the bombs skyward, where they explode harmlessly. Toroff then attacks Nelvana with killer boats armed with Thormite Rays, all the while surveying the battle from his Devil Ship by means of his aeroscope.
Meanwhile, Nelvana discovers that enemy warplanes are amassing for an invasion of the North. The invasion is thwarted by Koliak’s ray, which disrupts communications and leads to the defeat of the enemy force by the Royal Canadian Air Force. As a result, Nelvana’s existence becomes known to southern Canadians and to Hitler, who is so frustrated by “Dis Arctic girl” that he dispatches two agents to the Arctic to foil Nelvana.
Labradorite, also known as the Shaman’s Stone, or the dark side of the moon, is believed to reveal that which is present but which can not be seen by the light of the conscious mind without reflection.
Labradorite is a crystallized stone belonging to the family of Feldspar. The color is mainly blue, green or gold, but it can also be purple, pink or show interplay of the whole rainbow. The color is due to the presence of microscopic plates of different metals such as iron, copper and nickel and their disposition is strict parallel lines. A piece may look like an ordinary stone until you turn it to catch the light and reveal its many colors.
An Inuit legend recalls a time when the Northern Lights became imprisoned in the rocks of Labrador. An Inuit Shaman saw the lights and struck the earth with his spear and freed them. However some of the lights hid in it’s rocks, but they were discovered by the sun and water, hence we have Labradorite.
Image: Adapted from Bill Wise, 2006
Inspiration: The extraordinary gemstones of Bead It, Montreal, Quebec
At the height of the Renaissance, Rabelais cleverly inverted the monastic ideal – a life of labour and prayer – to explore the other Utopian extreme: hedonistic leisure amid inexhaustible abundance. At his fictitious Abbey of Thelème, the inhabitants comport themselves in a regal spendour that was clearly the stuff of fantasy in the early sixteenth century.
But a century later, Francis Bacon decisively transformed the Utopian tradition. He raised the possibility that, given sufficient technological power over nature, the hope of a democratic abundance might not be unrealistic. Bacon’s New Atlantis holds its place as the first scientific Utopia, a bold prediction of good things to come based on unlimited proliferation of material goods. That vision has hovered in the background of the entire industrial process as one justification for the privation, harsh discipline, wrenching dislocation, grime and soot that this great adventure has cost. The concept of plenitude went into eclipse; the foundation of our contemporary ecological crisis was laid.
It was not until the waste, drudgery and filth of industrialism were vividly imprinted on the historical landscape that the plenitude formerly sought became a timely topic once again.
William Morris, the Victorian poet, painter and political philosopher, was among the first to take up the discussion in his Utopian novel, News From Nowhere.
Morris, a bitter critic of both the ugliness and injustice of the industrial system, laid his hopes for a balanced economic order upon a reformation of taste.
In Morris’ land of Nowhere, aesthetics is the context of economic life. The sensibilities of people have been schooled to value the quality, not the quantity of goods. For Morris, this meant a handicraft standard of excellence, as exemplified by his Arts and Crafts Movement, which he took to be of benefit for the soul as well as the body.
One need not endorse Morris’ doctrinaire anti-industrial stance in order to see great practical sense in his proposal. As a matter of environmental sanity, there may be a point at which industrial societies will have to revive the handicraft standard, emphasizing the value of fine design and durability as an alternative to disposability or wasteful turnover.
In her ecological Utopia Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy proposes another approach to plenitude. In the environmentally intelligent future she envisions – a worldwide society of well-kept rural communes – there exists a globe lending library of luxuries, from which jewels, objects d’art, fashionable clothes may be borrowed and examined by the entire population. It is an idea worth pondering.
In one of the mostly highly developed ecological Utopias, Ernest Callenbach deals with problems of necessity and luxury by imagining an economy that redirects the gratifications of high consumption toward a variety of cheap, non-material pleasures. The citizens of Ecotopia own little, but it is elegantly handmade; beyond that, the prevailing style of housing and dress is dropped-out funky. The workweek has been pared back to twenty hours; leisure becomes a value in its own right, used for the arts and crafts, for play, for recreational sports, espeically in the fiercely defended wilderness, which has come to be respected as Ecotopia’s principal public asset.
An economy of modest means makes possible a simplicity that allows other needs to be gratified. The goal is not cathartic suffering, but pleasure of a superior order.
~ Theodore Roszak, The Voice of the Earth
Image: Dubai Lagoon
A common symbolic element in Japanese imagery and poetry, falling sakura petals have several interconnected meanings, depending on who they are falling on and the context thereof.
Cherry trees bloom en masse in early spring in Japan, but the white-to-coral petals shed and die very quickly and the peak bloom is only a week or two. There is a celebration called hanami associated with the peak bloom, which often entails picnics and drinking with old friends under the cherry trees.
Sakura season is a highly visible sign of spring, the beauty of nature, renewal of life, and first love…but can also represent the transience and fragility of beauty, life, and love.
Japanese mythology often also connects cherry blossoms with death; according to legend, the flowers of the tree were originally white; after a body was buried beneath it, the petals turned pink.
Sakura evokes both the new beginning of spring and the transience of passing from one stage of life to another.
Image: Woodblock print Shidare Sakura 2 by Hajime Namiki, 2005
I know that the world “miraculous” is regarded dubiously in scientific circles because of past quarrels with theologians. The word has been defined, however, as an event transcending the known laws of nature. Since, as we have seen, the laws of nature have a way of being altered from one generation of scientists to the next, a little taste of the miraculous in this broad sense will do us no harm. We forget that nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness. We forget that each one of us in his personal life repeats that miracle.
Whatever may be the power behind those dancing motes to which the physicist has penetrated, it makes the light of the muskrat’s world as it makes the world of the great poet. It makes, in fact, all of the innumerable and private worlds which exist in the heads of men. There is a sense in which we can say that the planet, with its strange freight of life, is always just passing from the unnatural to the natural, from that Unseen which man has always reverenced to the small reality of the day. If all life were to be swept from the world, leaving only its chemical constituents, no visitor from another star would be able to establish the reality of such a phantom. The dust would lie without visible protest, as it does now in the moon’s airless craters, or in the road before our door.
Yet this is the same dust which, dead, quiescent, and unmoving, when taken up in the process known as life, hears music and responds to it, weeps bitterly over time and loss, or is oppressed by the looming future that is, on any materialist terms, the veriest shadow of nothing. How natural was man, we may ask, until he came? What forces dictated that a walking ape should watch the red shift of light beyond the island universes or listen by carefully devised antennae to the pulse of unseen stars? Who, whimsically, conceived that the plot of the world should begin in a mud puddle and end – where, and with whom? Men argue learnedly over whether life is chemical chance or antichance, but they seem to forget that the life in chemicals may be the greatest chance of all, the most mysterious and unexplainable property of matter.
Excerpted from Loren Eiseley, How Natural is “Natural”?
Image, Linda Gordon, Skystones Lapis ex coelis – The Stone from the Stars
About 1860, it was noted that printing quality was suffering in the throes of the Industrial Revolution.
Henry Stevens, a Vermont-born rare-book seller in London and recognized proponent of fine printing wrote, “The disagreeable fact that our books are deteriorating in quality is assumed for the present and taken for granted. The fault exists and is daily becoming more and more manifest…”
“Our printing presses are teeming and steaming with books of all sorts (with some striking exeptions) not up to the mark of the high calling of book-making. It is no excuse to say that the rapidity of production has been largely increased. That amounts merely to confessing that we are now consuming two bad books in the place of one good one…”
“It is not the amiable public that is so hungry for cheap printing and cheap books, but the greedy provider of cheap and cheaper books with which the public is crammed like Strasburg geese, that are in fault. This downward tendency is not so much the fault of the consumers as the manufacturers. The manufacture of a beautiful and durable book costs little if anything more, it is believed, than it does to manufacture a coumsy and unsightly one.”
“Good taste, skill, and severe training are as requisitie and necessary in the proper production of books as in any other of the fine arts.”
Henry Stevens was engaged by the librarian of the British Museum, to collect historical books, documents and journals concerning North and South America; and he was purchasing agent for the Smithsonian Institution and for the Library of Congress, as well as for James Lenox, of New York, for whom he secured much of the valuable Americana in the Lenox library in that city, and for the John Carter Brown library, at Providence, Rhode Island. He became a member of the Society of Antiquaries in 1852, and in 1877 was a member of the committee which organized the Caxton Exhibition, for which he catalogued the collection of Bibles.
Some time ago, we blogged about the environmental art of Andy Goldsworthy (and some other earth artists well worth visiting).
Over at Museumgeeks, Suzanne, another Goldsworthy fan, challenged some Facebook friends to theorize (including faux artistic rationale) what Andy might do with “natural” office resources:
A silver screen of paper clips across the elevator door which forces office staff to fight their way through to their cubicles. Perhaps an email that automatically replies to itself, creating an endless looping message that gets longer and longer until it eats up all the bandwidth in the universe. Pillars of post-its with phone messages.
Another maven of office art is Larissa Brown. Here is Spew, an ominous fabrication of stapler and wire that will haunt this blogger’s dreams before the inevitable alarm to haul oneself off to the veal fattening pen.
And, speaking of spew, this frightening piece, entitled Continuum Incident Report, is reminiscent of cell phone hell on public transit, where we are forced to endure the banal babbling of our Kafkaesque fellow travellers who need to assure everyone that they’re on the bus.
Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which celebrated its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. The film is an exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them, and a fluid discussion with renowned designers about their work, the creative process, and the choices and aesthetics behind their use of type. The film had its world premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March 2007.
Helvetica encompasses the worlds of design, advertising, psychology, and communication, and invites us to take a second look at the thousands of words we see every day.
Helvetica was developed by Max Miedinger with Edüard Hoffmann in 1957 for the Haas Type Foundry in Münchenstein, Switzerland. In the late 1950s, the European design world saw a revival of older sans-serif typefaces such as the German face Akzidenz Grotesk. Haas’ director Hoffmann commissioned Miedinger, a former employee and freelance designer, to draw an updated sans-serif typeface to add to their line. The result was called Neue Haas Grotesk, but its name was later changed to Helvetica, derived from Helvetia, the Latin name for Switzerland, when Haas’ German parent companies Stempel and Linotype began marketing the font internationally in 1961.
Introduced amidst a wave of popularity of Swiss design, and fueled by advertising agencies selling this new design style to their clients, Helvetica quickly appeared in corporate logos, signage for transportation systems, fine art prints, and myriad other uses worldwide. Inclusion of the font in home computer systems such as the Apple Macintosh in 1984 only further cemented its ubiquity.
Dwyn Tomlinson is one of the jewellery artists over at BeadFX that posts her usually over-the-top inspirations on their website.
Dwyn did the decoration with a device called The Bejeweller, which is used to hot-glue rhinestones. The Bejeweller has a variety of cup shaped tips that you put down over the rhinestone on the front, and it heats up the stone and melts the hot-fix glue on the back. You then position the rhinestone in place, and it sticks there. You take the Bejeweller away and go get the next one.
This is an ancient story told on the Queen Charlotte Islands about how Raven helped to bring the Sun, Moon, Stars, Fresh Water and Fire to the world.
Nelvana, aka secret agent Alana North, is the daughter of a mortal woman and Koliak the Mighty, King of the Northern Lights. Koliak’s marriage to Nelvana’s mother so angered the gods that his spirit was transformed into the Northern Lights.
At the height of the Renaissance, Rabelais cleverly inverted the monastic ideal – a life of labour and prayer – to explore the other Utopian extreme: hedonistic leisure amid inexhaustible abundance. At his fictitious Abbey of Thelème, the inhabitants comport themselves in a regal spendour that was clearly the stuff of fantasy in the early sixteenth century.
Some time ago, we blogged about the environmental art of 
Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which celebrated its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. The film is an exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them, and a fluid discussion with renowned designers about their work, the creative process, and the choices and aesthetics behind their use of type. The film had its world premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March 2007.
Helvetica was developed by Max Miedinger with Edüard Hoffmann in 1957 for the Haas Type Foundry in Münchenstein, Switzerland. In the late 1950s, the European design world saw a revival of older sans-serif typefaces such as the German face Akzidenz Grotesk. Haas’ director Hoffmann commissioned Miedinger, a former employee and freelance designer, to draw an updated sans-serif typeface to add to their line. The result was called Neue Haas Grotesk, but its name was later changed to Helvetica, derived from Helvetia, the Latin name for Switzerland, when Haas’ German parent companies Stempel and Linotype began marketing the font internationally in 1961.
