Posts from June 2023

14

June 28, 2023

It’s my daughter’s birthday, and as is always the case when one of my children celebrates a birthday, the day was a smorgasbord of feelings, from nostalgia and regret to gratitude, pride and pure joy. Throw in some smoked ham and a boiled egg for good measure. It’s hard to celebrate your child’s next spin around the sun, without reflecting on the fourteen that have already spun. FOURTEEN. That’s a lot of highs and lows (hers and mine), spilt milk, exploding diapers, tears, laughter, jaunts around the shopping mall, to reflect on. That’s a lot of expectations not met (you will fall in love with her the second you see her) and so many that exceeded your wildest dreams (when the love comes it will be so immense that your heart will have no choice but to triple in size). That’s a lot of firsts; first steps, first stitches, first time away from home. It’s Iole’s birthday today, and I watched her open gifts and eat carrot cake with too sweet icing from our local bakery –– all the lovely, mundane things –– while quietly remembering and marveling and wishing her the universe.

flow

June 26, 2023

Rolling out a slab of clay is satisfying. So is making something from it. And just as satisfying is waking up the next day knowing that the thing I made yesterday is waiting for me today. I am in a flow. Maybe I get to smooth down all the lumpy surfaces, add handles or carve into the rim. Maybe I get to paint the whole thing blue. But the point is, I am not starting from scratch; I have something to return to, something that’s alive and emergent. It’s like planting flowers in garden beds that you prepped the day before or lathering a crumb coat on a cake that’s been in the freezer since last week. Of course, in order to have work to return to, there have to be many hours spent wedging clay, tilling soil and cracking eggs. It’s the ground work, the grunt work, and the rewards are precious and fleeting. Soon enough the bowl will be fired, the cake will be eaten and our hands will once again be filled with raw clay, flour and the hope of what might be.

the stripes

June 21, 2023

In a contest between polka dots and stripes, I’d choose the latter. As teenagers, my best friend, Stephanie and I had amassed so many stripe-y t-shirts (many of them matching) we could have run a shop on the green outside our school. Stripes for Sale! Two for a tenner! Anytime I see a stripe, I get excited. These striped cups, coasters, dishes and bowls from ceramic artist, Amy Kraus are terrifically cool. A background in graphic design informs her approach to surface decoration. “Picking a simple pattern like stripes is great because it’s simple, and I can’t get overwhelmed by the possibilities of different patterns and graphics,” she says. There’s something about the stripe that’s bold, fresh and classic. Hello, Audrey sur plage! “The only rules are that I have to use stripes, and there has to be two colours in the piece,” adds Kraus. “Within that framework, I am able to explore different colour combinations and variations of stripe patterns, and I am pushed to see what colours I can make work together. The best results usually come from combinations I wasn’t expecting to work well.”

poppy

June 5, 2023

It’s at this time of the year that my camera roll is chock full of flowers. The peonies on Brunswick, the poppies on Howland, Irises, lilacs, and wisteria. Some flowers are easier to photograph than others. The translucent quality of a poppy’s petals is hard to capture when too much sunlight is pouring through it. All the beautiful detail gets erased by the sun. Irving Penn shot his fragile and exquisite poppy portraits in the natural light of his studio. No photograph of a poppy comes close to his. This painting by Brooklyn-based painter, Shara Hughes captures the wildness and the whimsy of poppies packed together with the early morning light dancing all around in a way that I couldn’t with my camera when I saw a similar scene last week. I was happy to have found this painting, to know it exists, and to know that I can look at it and trace my way back to that morning.

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