EVERYTHING SHINES IN THE MORNING LIGHT

An idyllic week at the wild coast

We had Long Beach to our selves every day
Not another soul to be seen

 Hours of walking, fishing  and foraging

I'm drawn to the broken shells
especially the black turbans 
which peel back to reveal spirals of rust

BREAKAGE by Mary Oliver

I go down to the edge of the sea.
How everything shines in the morning light!
The cusp of the whelk,
the broken cupboard of clam,
the opened, blue mussels,
moon snails, pale pink and scarred --
and nothing at all whole or shut, but battered, split,
dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture
gone.
It's like a schoolhouse
of little words,
thousands of words.
First you figure out what each one means by itself,
the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop
full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

Our room had a little garret above it
which we named the eagle's aerie
We did a lot of holiday reading there

 I savoured Donna Watson's exquisite book
The Beauty of Nothingness

and lost myself in several novels.

"Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too."  -  Iris Murdoch, The sea, the sea

CATCHING UP

It's been a busy few weeks amidst a long heat wave 
Today seems to be a little cooler 
but I won't hold my breath 
since every day has turned into a scorcher

The storm that didn't...

Bella and Digby are relishing a cooler morning
Diggers doesn't particularly enjoy the heat

This week, I worked hard getting commissions ready 
for fumigation before shipping them out 
across the world to two different continents
It's a good feeling knowing my totems 
are travelling to countries I long to visit. 

 Packed for fumigation

When it's too hot to work I have a good excuse to catch up with my reading 

Wild by Cheryl Strayed,  Notes from an Exhibition by Patrick Gale,  West with the Night by Beryl Markham,  Cold Tangerines by Shauna Niequist. Click to read reviews.

... a little journaling 

.... and endless discussions about wedding plans with the bride-to-be

 Wedding chapel at iNsingizi

It's a relief that we've booked the venue
the photographers
the cake
the dj

..... and that's as far as we've got
but it's a start

 View from the chapel deck

Inside the chapel

A beautiful setting for a wedding

It's going to be a busy year!

SCRUMPTIOUS BOOKS AND AFRICAN FABRIC

Patchwork Kuba skirt. The Elements of Design by Loan Oei and Cecile De Kegel

"You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend". - Paul Sweeney

.... and that's how I felt when I came to the end of Poem Crazy by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge. She writes about collecting words wherever she goes and then later fashioning them into poems. It all sounds so easy and I found myself writing poems without worrying about how to begin or whether I was hopeless or not. For the first time writing poetry felt as easy as breathing. Susan also shares touching stories about teaching children (and adults) to write poetry and how she draws students out of themselves with word play.

I've been meaning to share some of the new books I've acquired since before Christmas. Poem Crazy is definitely top of my list!


Poem Crazy by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge

Leslie recommended The Elements of Design and it arrived on Friday.

The Elements of Design by Loan Oei and Cecile De Kegel

Oh what a delicious book! Brimming with colours, textures, forms and shapes.

The 12 Secrets of Highly Successful Women by Gail McMeekin

Whenever I'm asked to name my favourite books I always recommend, The 12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women. I decided to get The 12 Secrets of Highly Successful Women as well and though I enjoyed it the first one is still my favourite.

Africanismo : Interior Inspiration from Southern Africa, has been on my wishlist for a while and at last I have it. A great book to flip through.

A page from, Meeting the Makers: Contemporary Craft of KwaZulu Natal

Page above from, Nomad by Sibella Court. Though I enjoyed this book , I LOVED Sibella's Etcetera more .

One: Living as One and Loving it by Victoria Alexander

This book appealed to me from the moment I saw the little envelopes within the book for cards and secrets ..... and then I thought, wait this book is for singles , but reading the blurb at the back I discovered that....

"It's not just for those who live alone. I acknowledge every one has a need for space, to keep a little of themselves for themselves. we all need to have our own sense of self worth. I hope it will encourage you in your acceptance of who you are, who you can be. It's the kind of book where you may find a connection to travel, photography, architecture, people or memories." Victoria Alexander

I've just started reading it ...... so far so good.

Click for Amazon here.

A page from One (above )

I was going to have a Lucky Draw for my 300th post. Sheepishly ... I have reached my 308th post, but better late than never. If you would like a chance to win some African fabric (shwe-shwe included), please leave a comment at the end of this post. I thought I would give one or two remnants big enough to make a few cushions or a sling bag as well as a few other remnants for patchwork or collage etc. Winner to be announced on Tuesday 27th March.

And the winner is ..... Deborah Jaouen (Collage Whirl)

SELF EXCAVATION ..... AND DIGBY

Somewhere along the line I gave up reading books ..... hand held books, that is .... and I allowed that gap of time to be taken up with reading on the internet. Now with all the power failures we are experiencing I am spending less time on the computer and more time finishing the half-read books on my bedside table. I'm also renewing my love for poetry...... Reading a poem here and there in the lamp light before falling asleep.

When Digby arrived he brought with him a little gift the breeders failed to mention. Besides the hernia and tummy upsets he had a ringworm infestation that had to be nipped in the bud before it got out of control.

Thus began the daily treatment baths and re-baths, washing and drying of doggy bedding, extra scrubbing of everything that could be scrubbed (with a little help from Digby) and extra hoovering and lifting of heavy things.

I bet you know where this is going! Of course I put my back out ...... and had no option but to slow down and read books that would soothe my feelings of overwhelm.

With the reading of inspiring books has come a phase of self excavation. These phases come in waves throughout my life and each time I excavate a little more. The excavation theme has overflowed into my carvings .... something that has surprised me.

I've since come to the conclusion that annoying happenings like power failures, water cuts and ringworms are not simply lessons in patience but they can also be positive catalysts for renewal and change .

Sighhhh ..... Well I have to think that or get completely bogged down with bitter feelings toward shady dog breeders and inefficient service providers ;-)

"There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic" - Anais Nin

GOOD SALES AND GOOD BOOKS

Detail of Niche Door by Robyn Gordon. Wood Carving 63cm x 70cm x 6.5cm (24" x 27")

It's been a lucky week! Three good sales and a parcel of new books arriving on my doorstep.....



A little breathing space to page through my new books before starting my next carving.

Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective, is the most beautiful book! Lee's work is strikingly different to anything I've seen before. At first glance these pieces look like metal sheets patched together but they actually consist of canvas and scavenged fabrics stretched over welded steel frameworks, stitched with wire. They are extremely powerful and one wonders where these ideas came from. What inspires an artist to create something like this?

.

An article by Diane Calder gives a little insight .....

"As Bontecou worked in her studio, her short wave radio broadcasted threats of attack by (cold war) terrorists or news of horrific events in Africa. Fear and anger that she had felt as a child, about the Holocaust, began to surface. “I’d get so depressed that I’d have to stop and turn to more open work. Work that I felt was more optimistic--where for example, there might be just one single opening, and the space beyond it was like opening up into the heavens, going up into space, feeling space. The other kind of work was like war equipment. With teeth. Not many people realize that. But the funny thing is that those canvases ended in German museums or Israeli ones. Just where they belonged, without my saying a thing. One of those pieces went to the Jewish Museum in New York. It was a sort of memorial of my feelings. I never titled any of these. Once I started to and it seemed to limit people to a certain response, so I didn’t continue.”

Read Nancy Natale's excellent post about Lee Bontecou, here.

Amazon link, here.

"The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable." - Robert Henri

OLD BOOKS TRANSFORMED INTO ART

Trawling (detail). Installation by Steve McPherson. See Website here.

Old books with yellowing pages, tattered covers and exposed spines, rescued and reinvented, transformed into art. Whoever would have thought that an artform would arise from a pile of discarded books ..... but then nothing should surprise me when it comes to the ingenuity of artists.

Rediscovery by Joseph Hammer. See more of Joseph's work here.

"I’m a lover of books, and I wonder: will there be books as we now know them in the future? I’m partial to using old, discarded hardback books in collages and am inspired by the varieties of colors and textures on their covers, by how they can be used, like paint, to provoke feelings and emotions, to explore things such as line, color saturation and tension. As a lover of history, I pay tribute to these threadbare, tattered tomes. They provide a look back at the bookbinder’s craft and the careful, sometimes elaborate designs, marbling and gold leaf, of long ago. Deterioration does not diminish their beauty but adds a patina of use, of human “hand prints.” - Joseph Hammer

Collected Letters by Joseph Hammer. See more here.

Cartographic No 1. by Steve McPherson. See website here.

"In my bookworks I use empty old second hand photo albums or scrap books, which I collage and montage straight into with mostly my own images and found objects."

"Taking two to three months to complete each work, the works undergo many changes. Time is spent moving and testing objects, images and text without a single item being fixed permanently in its place. Through editing, re-editing, chance and play, meaningful relationships gradually form between the elements and the layers" - Steve McPherson

"Milieu 4" by Brigitte Riesebrodt. See more of Brigette's work here.

"Milieu 2" by Brigitte Reisebrodt

"Langenscheidt 4" by Brigitte Riesebrodt. See more here.

Jody Alexander "likes to rescue books in distress and give them new life as rebound books, scrolls and sculptural pieces."

Exposed Spines by Jody Alexander. See website here.

Bars (Grey) by John Fraser. See more of John's work here.

"The book is just one component; once it becomes a part of the picture plane I negotiate that plane. Nuance, subtlety, and beauty and all things I think are worth looking at, those all matter to me." - John Fraser

Relief with Rule by John Fraser.

Mixed media using book parts by Roberta Lee Woods. See more of Roberta's work here.

Book sculpture by Jacqueline Rush Lee. See Jacqueline's website here.