speaking of

beautiful book covers. I've been reading this again.

Please click on the images to enlarge them. You must see the detail of her incredibly perfect stitching:
Jillian Tamaki for Penguin Threads Deluxe Classics.
They come out this fall.

Here is an interview with J.T.

(Many Thanks to J. G. for the link to the Penguin info).

I'm not fond of the majority of her designs, but these two are so pretty.
Dreaming of levity and the prospect of wearing something in a season that will finally bring it on.

Infinite Variety

Three Centuries of Red and White Quilts ends tomorrow at the Armory in NYC, presented by the American Folk Art Museum.

drawings

a few.
Old and new. And more to come next week once I have a chance to photograph them.

Forgive me if I don't post for awhile. I'll be away March 31 to April 3 and the preps are demanding.

Yasushi Jona

lovely and tender and soft ...with a little cloak around

E in a crate

As soon as I opened this crate up to prepare it for shipping work off yesterday The Ball (Edith) curled up inside and napped for 2 hrs.

. . .

And last night I witnessed something like this.
In earnest.
I shit you not, as Mary Karr and her Daddy would say.

whites

Drawing with many whites these nights.

Look at this from Young-Hae Chang.

"I lost my wife. Maybe."

- Futoshi Toba, mayor of Rikuzntakata, a Japanese coastal town where 1 in 10 people is either dead or hasn't been seen since the tsunami.

PLEASE SUPPORT HEARTS and HANDS IN THEIR EFFORTS.

microrevolt: 146+

Armbands commemorating the 146+ women killed in the 1911 Triangle Waist Factory Fire in New York City and to connect that history to the contemporary crisis in the global garment industry.

146+ is a craft action initiated by Cat Mazza in which 146+ artists have each knit or sewn a numbered armband to be worn this Friday March 25th from 11h - 13h30 at Cooper Union Great Hall and stand with Workers United (formerly the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union) as we commemorate the 100th anniversary of the tragedy that catalyzed an international labor movement.

The top 2 armbands were made by jake moore and myself to commemorate Lizzie Adler (#80) and Jennie Pildescu (#66). Lizzie was 24 and Jennie was 18 at the time of the fire. Here is a complete list of the women, their ages and armband numbers.

Cat Mazza is Microrevolt.
Here is her blog.

met ticket

c. 1961?
from here.

And, if you like art and the writing and reading about it, please become a follower of Stephen Horne's blog!

Polarette

A collaboration between Donna Akrey and me, put together at PALSV last night.
D. made the googly icebergs. The polar bear came from here. I'm responsible for the concept and camera and D. for lighting, editing and sound.

PALS is a small society of 4 artists:
Donna Akrey
Jo-Anne Balcaen
jake moore
Candice Tarnowski

Our first meeting was in Nov. 2010. Subsequent meetings have taken place on a monthly basis, rotating studios and deferring to the host to orchestrate inklings and thinkings, makings and doings at each. Productivity, connectivity and insight could be our primary goals. If there's a mandate written, you'll be privy.

Bon week-end, Dear People.

what is the light

Spring ! I dare say.
This was last week, in an auditorium in Kingston.

the pizza place

at ConU metro.

Alex Ott

the sorcerer of shaken and stirred.

trading posts.

O K A P I

This remarkable creature is the closest living relative (not of the zebra, but) of the giraffe, and the structural relationship is quite clear in the head and lengthy purple tongue. But the okapi have a tongue long enough to clean their own eyelids and ears! And their coloration is quite different. They have a velvety chocolate/red and black coat with white flanks and legs encircled in slender, undulating black stripes, and what looks like white socks up to their knees printed with black skeletal structure images.

The word okapi is from the Lese (Central Sudanic), oka (to cut) + kpi, a kind of arrow design of the Efé (Mbuti Pygmies) from the myth that the okapi decorate their own hindquarters with the arrow. When seen in their natural habitat - the Ituri jungle of Central Africa - their outfit becomes perfect camouflage for blending into the sun dappled shadows of dense jungle vegetation. This photo of the okapi diorama at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC is a beautiful illustration of how effective their unusual patterning is in breaking up their silhouette.

They are 2-2.5 metres long, 1.5 - 2 metres high at the shoulder and weigh 200-300 kg. They're timid, essentially solitary creatures who come together only to breed, with the exception of mothers and young. They prefer living in large, secluded areas wherein they can forage a herbivore diet of grass, ferns, fruits and fungi as well as charcoal (from trees burnt by lightning).

I'd never heard of or seen them before tonight.

Thank-You, j. for the lead via this.

Camille Flammarion - Telefonoskope, from La fin du monde, 1894

Flammarion was an astronomer and writer who maintained a private observatory at Juvisy-sur-Orge, France and in 1882 began publishing the magazine L'Astronomie. The idea of contact between a solid sky and the earth is one that repeatedly appears in his early works: a blue vault, solid crystal, plate glass. These limitations.

There are stars whose light shone some millions of years before we arrived … The luminous rays that we receive actually then departed from their bosom before the time of the appearance of man on the earth. The universe is so immense that it appears immutable, and that the duration of a planet such as that of the earth is only a chapter, less than that, a phrase, less still, only a word of the universe’s history.

- Camille Flammarion

hey diddle diddle

Nursery rhymes selected from over 3000 works in the Sheila R. Bourke Collection of the McGill Rare Books and Special Collections.
The exhibition runs Feb 16 - June 1, 2011