Camargue

An almost-obligatory part of a visit to Provence is a tour of the Camargue. We went in a 4x4 and the guide spoke English and patiently answered questions. We learned a lot about irrigation and rice cultivation - the harvest is about to start -

Jean-Michel works as a "gardian" during the winter and can spot wildlife when it's just a speck amid the distant reeds, so we saw the inevitable white horses -

 We learned that the traditional houses are thatched with reeds and rounded at the north end because of the wind -

And we saw flamingoes -

and lots of the camargue bulls, including a herd (manade) on the move -

and the grave for the famous bull Rami (1963-1987), at the Mas de Bernacles, a farm that was a stopping-off point on the road to Santiago de Compostela. Camargue bulls (their horns curve up) can live to a ripe old age because they go into the bullfight only once a year for 15 minutes, we were told - any more would stress the bull too much. Unlike in Spanish bullfights, in the Provencal bullfights the bull is not killed or wounded. Spanish bulls (their horns curve down) have a maximum lifespan of six years, though. (And that's just about all I want to know about bullfighting, thanks.)

Rami was buried as is traditional for bulls: on his feet, and facing the sea. The upright marker was salvaged from "old stones" somewhere, and is topped by the symbol of the Camague, containing faith, charity, and hope.

Among the 400 or so species of birds are egrets, which pick parasites off the bulls and horses -

Less spectacular but my own discovery, flocks (bevvies?) of darting dragonflies at the edge of the salt marsh -

The mistral was blowing on the day, which was a touch chilly but fortunate in terms of keeping the notorious mosquitoes away.

Is it cheating? Straightening a warped quilt

A wonky quilt - at least so it seems, in the photograph

These instructions use the full version of Photoshop on a PC. Hilary gave me a demo of how easy it is to un-warp a wonky quilt (but see the sting-in-the-tail below...). Apologies for not adding arrows to point to the part of the screen being discussed - this is something I still need to learn how to do ... Hopefully by clicking on the images to enlarge them, you can see what's going on -

Select "Show Grids" (via the "view extras" square at centre of top menu bar), then "Select All" (ctrl-A)

the location of the "view extras" option

In the Edit menu, choose Transform - Warp

At this point you may want to enlarge the image to see the grid lines better - hold down the Alt key and use the scroll button on the mouse.

Little "handles" appear on each side - click on them and  pull out as needed

The corners are handles too - and you may need to pull in as well as out.

When your quilt looks square on the grid, click on the arrow towards the right of the second row of menu bars

Use the Crop tool (from the toolbar on left) to trim off unnecessary background

When trimming the background, make sure the quilt's border isn't cut off - top left on the quilt below is too close for comfort! - 

After - almost as square as in real life

"Prevention is better than cure" - it would have been easier to check that it was lying flat in the first place!

Pointillist portraits

On the one hand, the work of Chuck Close -

detail from a recent self-portrait

"Why do you paint like this?" someone asked at a talk he gave during his exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. "Because I can," he said (he was severely paralysed by a viral illness).

On the other hand, work by Shin-hee Chin -

showing in Abilene, Kansas, until Jan 2013, in an exhibition called "War and Peace".

Shin-hee Chin's fibre art includes many portraits, some using thread and others using yo-yos. She says: "I constantly try to valorize devalued women’s labor and the women’s body by reversing the negative insinuations associated with female domains and imbuing them with positive qualities. For that purpose, I often utilize needle, thread, and fabric in order to call into question the deep-seated bias that women’s work are trivial, menial, marginal and undesirable. By incorporating wool, fiber, and string into the sculptural production, I convert the conventional “feminine” activity of needle works into a useful medium for the making of art. Through the strategic use of media that have been traditionally associated with the feminine, I want to show that seemingly ‘menial female work’ can be a source of pleasure and power for women."

Here's her own self-portrait  -

From the archive: Little Venice

Pix from this year's canal festival, which has taken place in May since 1983, with many (130 or so) narrowboats and a plethora of attractions at the canalside.

 In Jubilee Year, this little one was royally  uber-decorated -

Berlin (West)

How little I know of the history of Berlin - or of its geography, despite having visited a couple of years ago. This map, from the late 70s I think (definitely pre-1989!), is fascinating none the less. This map shows the Berlin Wall and checkpoints. It was 155 km (96 miles) long, and had 302 watch towers. Building started in August 1961; the physical wall was primarily destroyed in 1990. Here it is in its early days-

August 17, 1961: A citizen of East Berlin asks a woman in West Berlin to get something from a store on a divided street

People carry only a few belongings as they flee to the west after it became known East Berlin was being separated from West Berlin

See more photos about building the wall here.

As Robert Frost said, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall" - but he was on about something rather different; these lines are relevant, though:

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out

Read the poem here.

Intriguing photos in the Story of Berlin museum -

Irons and boats

Sufficient unto the day the evil thereof, is that how it goes? I thought some of these looked evil, and most of the rest looked unpleasant -

They resemble hi-tech trainers (running shoes), and the big white plastic boats that you see on the lower Thames (and elsewhere of course) - but you don't see them on the upper Thames because there's a low bridge round about Oxford that holds back the gin palaces and lets the nice little narrowboats go pleasantly upstream. Some of both, in Docklands -

Pic is from here, where you can see more about narrow-boating on the Thames in the London area (and elsewhere, on canals).

Back to irons - what did they look like "once upon a time"? While looking for the irons that I remember from my childhood, I found this scary thing -

and also some lovely streamlined ones (from here)

This one looks like top-of-the-range mid-70s - the "extra steam" button was new then -

But I'm looking for the non-steam kind; my mother had a bottle of water with the a "rose" to use for sprinkling the clothes. I inherited that rose, and would add a photo if I could find it, but it was put away somewhere for safekeeping (as you do....)

Ah, here it is - complete with a tale (and photo) of sprinkling with a tin sprinkler stopper -

The green ray

A late-afternoon mystery ... and a bit of magic ... what's this green light on the kitchen door? At first I thought it had something to do with the greenness coming through the downstairs window, but that's impossible because that window gets only morning sun...

 Turn around and see the same shape -

It's simply the reflection of the non-reflective glass, which is green-toned in some lights.

Round town - Bonnington Square SW8

On my way home from college, during show preparations, I found myself without a heavy bag and did something I'd been meaning to do for about a year now -- got off the bus a stop early and walked into the back streets near Vauxhall Station. Bonnington Square was a surprise -- so many plants! It's one of those places where the residents saved the buildings from demolition and made a community garden. 

These old windowframes

 came from one of these houses -

 in one of the leafy corners of the square. The houses open to the pavement but even so have plantings around the doors, under the windows, and around the trees at the curb -

 These "speaking tubes" (probably plumbing vents) caught my eye -

 Another leafy corner -

 Vine Lodge, at the entrance to the square, was probably smack dab in the middle of the country before the square was built -

 Rus in urbes -- the country in the city. So green, so quiet. The short walk round the square was a mini-vacation.

One thing leads to another

A quilt shown in the SAQA weekly email newsletter led to looking up the work of Nancy Bardach

I googled her (mistakenly as "Barlach", it turns out!) and was intrigued by this image on the page of results

Which led to Pence Gallery site archive, on which was another intriguing object - booklike this time -

It turns out to be the work of ceramicist Barbara Glynn Prodaniuk ... which led back to google. An image amid the results when googling Prodaniuk led to the dailyartmuse blog, showing Abigail Brown's birds (Prodaniuk also does birds) -

Thence to the spiral image below, which led to a pinterest site ... clicking on it

... I found these pencils made from recycled newspaper -

At which point I found out my original mistake, and by the time I'd looked at Nancy Bardach's work (and written this post) an hour had passed ... and now it's time to stop and do something vaguely useful.

Next week, it's off to the south of France - I'll take my ipad so as to have internet access, but as I haven't got to grips with blogging on this uncongenial device, the posts for the duration are some saved drafts that finally will see the light of day.

Too many options?

Wow. I just encountered blogs that let you choose how you encounter them - flipcard, magazine, mosaic, sidebar, snapshot, and timeslide.

"Choose the nearest" - first in the row of options was classic. Yes -

It shows just one thing at a time - and the whole post is there, no need to click to "...read more..." (as you need to do in "magazine" mode).

"Mosaic" mode seems even more chaotic than the "flipcard" mode (top pic)

while "sidebar" mode actually seems to offer a useful way of accessing previous posts - more useful than having just the title listed, anyway -

"Snapshot" offers busy confusion again -

and "timeslide" has too many sorting options -

In summary: I'll be using classic, or sidebar. Less (clutter) is more (attractive)!

Though on second thought ... faced with so much chaos, so many little pix ... I'll probably move on to looking at something else ...