Thrifty happy

Last week was a good one, in terms of delightful things found in charity shops. For a while I hadn't been allowing myself to visit charity shops - too much came home with me each time - and that fairly lengthy period of denial seems to have ramped up my discernment, or else I've just become more stingey. I can walk out of several in a row, empty-handed. (Or, the money available has already been spent - this morning I took a deep breath and booked a "drawing with mixed media" course at the West Dean summer school, and residential courses cost £££.)

How we each choose to spend our money, and what we consider luxuries and/or "unaffordable", interests me greatly. What makes people reckless with money? what makes them generous - and is this generosity, financial or social, a luxury of some sort, or a reckless personality trait? It could be that sometimes we don't allow ourselves to be generous with our thoughts and opinions, or our time, never mind just money.

But I digress. Here are my life-enhancing, new-to-me acquisitions.

An assortment of dogs ...

... that stack up, like the Musicians of Bremen

Hand-made shoes, cared for and recently re-heeled ... no matter
 that they're men's, they fit so comfortably ...

... getting some TLC until I find the right sox etc
(nothing in my wardrobe is brown)

Irresistible - 100% wool, made in Scotland, sold at the RA ....

... and perfect with a purple hiking-jacket

Stroud Green Farmers' Market

It happens on Sundays, 10-2.30, at "the school where we go to vote", opposite the flower-bedecked pub called the Faltering Fullback. It's been going several months and this is only the second time I've gone. I stuffed my purse with banknotes and hoped to find exciting things.

But I didn't expect "artisan" nut butters -

 Those gift packs of the interesting varieties look promising and useful, this time of year...

Nice variety of veg, and bags of apples and pears of different sorts -

 It's a big playground to fill with stalls, and hopefully the market will get good support and more stalls will come.

 At the stall where I bought eggs, their roasting chickens are usually sold out within the first hour.

My two-bags-full of culinary excitement -

The slab of cake is "Danish dream cake" - very sweet, with a coconut and caramel topping - and the jar of peanut butter is the plain-peanuts sort. The conference pears are huge, as is the cabbage, and the potatoes are of the variety Mozart (never could resist a musician!). The celeriac is for winter salads and/or mash, the fennel for fennel-orange-blackolive salad, and the bread is multigrain sourdough.

The wooden dogs are another story ... stay tuned...

Illusion confusion

Have a look at this before you read on - do you "get it" immediately?

It's a fabric sample from the Balenciaga exhibition at the V&A, and it struck me as the weirdest textile design. For the longest time I couldn't figure out what it might be! 

Suddenly I saw that the coloured areas were not objects but the background - duh. The interesting part, or what's usually the interesting part, has become the usually unnoticed "negative space". How confusiong! 

I had been enjoying looking at the coloured shapes, seeing (=imagining) battles between strange dragons or other monsters, or perhaps an unknown geography with short rivers draining into large, lobed lakes.  

But it's "merely" white flower-shapes, on a coloured ground, and that view has taken over - my imaginings have disappeared into the background. It's become difficult to shift to seeing the coloured areas as foreground, as the subject. 

Now that I can give the pattern words, a name, a description, I can see the flower shapes - but until I could, what I saw was the dark, fractured shapes, and they eluded description and naming, because I  couldn't figure out what they were intended to be. 

The dark shapes fit in rather well with my "monster" theme ... something evil or undesirable could, or even must, be lurking among those shapes. Though the sinister element is likely to be that veryvery frightening thing, loss of language, not being able to find the right words. It's easier, and more comforting, to focus on the flowers, even though they're not actually there.

Monsters of the mind

Trying to figure out what makes a shape into a "monster" - something repulsive and frightening), I went through my photos taken since hitting on the idea of using monster-like shapes for the japanese woodblock course. There do seem to be a lot of them - I started looking for accidental monster-shapes - and even though lots have been weeded out, this post does seem to go on forever! 

The twigs have nothing to do with it ... or do they?

Birds on the move, from a print - flying birds can be frightening in themselves

Seeing monsters everywhere!

 

Broken bones - monstrous, especially when inundated with river-bottom mud

 

Juxtapositions can do it, or reinforce it

Monstrous goings-on behind the drying plaster?

The predatory, knobby (mutilated) branches

 

Knobby and bulbous feels monstrous to me (something inside throbbing to get out?)

It suggests slimyness and uncontainability

Another effect of the light - the chaos and danger of garbage, in the gloom

Some monsters have tentacles, a long reach

A situation - shifting light, and something trying to creep in, or escape

If these were people, this could be a situation of psychological monstrosity

Contorted limbs, severed limbs

Contorted and slumped bodies presuppose lifelessness

The monster outside, trying to get in ... are plants so inert, after all?

  

A natural process - sprouting potato - captured in bronze, looking monstrously unnatural

Reflections - shifting, the changes caught in the corner of the eye

... or shaped purposefully

Partly it's the material - mud-soaked straw? tar and feathers? 

... partly it's the shapes and juxtapositions

Many stories going on here...

... and others here ...

... and here

 

Shadows have a lot of monster potential; ordinary things can have monstrous shadows

Various blobs on the ground

Windblown waste, configured randomly

Entrails, remains ... too close to "the bone"

Terrible processes (burning, explosion, etc) = monsters

Blobby silhouettes = monsters

This one is strikingly horrible - like a flattened animal corpse
or a thief stealing away in the night

A squished packet with gilding, rather beautiful ... or is it a bit too much like
the one-eyed monster?

These are boats, but if you're looking for monsters
 it takes a while to convince yourself of that

Some configurations have a threatening aspect; screaming faces?

Chaotic and possibly, but not completely, monstrogenic

Design by Balenciaga, but no less monstrous for all that ... those sinister folds...
and that reflection of a ghostly shape... 

The monster theme started with this inky, spontaneous, unthinking, left-handed drawing

Conclusion: it's a monster when it has asymetry and blobs and empty places and sharp protrusions, and could be imagined to resemble a human or animal form (we're hard-wired to look for faces in amorphous shapes, after all) and yet looks unnatural, therefore frightening or at least disquieting.

The monster-making happens in the mind of the viewer ... somehow an expectation is formed, and the imagination is triggered ...

Here's one I prepared earlier (rubbing)

This horror was unintentional -
the scar-like marks and missing nose, and the proportions,
 make for a monstrous look