David Neale’s Colour Fold series of painted metal on canvas remind me of mountainscapes, icebergs and handfulls of sea glass. They’re simple, crudely made, and so very lovely. I love his chalky colour combinations and the texture in the metal. There’s a feeling of rough cut gemstones to the work, which given Neale’s life long commitment to goldsmithery and jewellery design makes sense. It’s always so interesting to see how an artist manifests from one medium to another and these artworks are similar to his jewellery in that they have a warm, organic and tactile feel, but the overall impression is decidedly different. How exciting.
Artist, W. Tucker draws with both his left and right hand. He isn’t ambidextrous, he just likes to explore both sides of his brain and the dialogue between them. “Over time, I felt like the work I was doing with my non dominant hand was much more alive and honest and at that point I decided to nurture that voice,” says the Texas native. There’s a childlike quality to his left hands drawings that’s hard to resist. Simple, playful, weird and exuberant. “The closer my work got to what a child would do, the happier I was with the work.”
Over two decades, we’ve amassed a collection of glasses that ranges from tiny vintage tumblers to hand-blown goblets to dainty champagne coupes in every colour of the rainbow. We’ve attempted to buy glasses in sets, but they rarely stay as such, and so our dinner table is a mish mash of all the above. What I love about Drew Spanenberg’s stemware is that it works both as a set and as a one of a kind piece. This peach cup –– as perfect for prosecco as it is for lemonade –– is just dreamy. They’re all hand blown and limited edition. Wash by hand and keep away from buttery fingers.
When I was 17 I sat on a park bench with my friend, Marina and told her that I wanted to be a Mum. Not now, but one day. There was little I was sure of at that age, but I was sure of that. I was raised by a woman who loved being a Mum. I was raised by a woman who made being a Mum seem so fun. She wore paper party hats and black chiffon cocktail dresses and danced around the kitchen to Dire Straits. She took us half way across the world to ride horses and raft down whitewater rapids. She made our house a safe, colourful place where every stray teen felt at home. She was fun, she was brave, and she was a steady presence. She still is. Years later, I became a Mum and realized that it wasn’t just that I wanted to be a Mum, but that I wanted to be my Mum. As anyone with a larger than life image to live up to knows, this can be problematic for one’s ego. There’s no room for it to breath, let alone evolve. After much reflection, I’m now learning that the confidence, daring and joie du vivre that I felt in my Mum throughout my childhood was in part the result of a woman who didn’t compare herself, and didn’t bother too much with what others thought. She was herself, not a version she aspired to. It’s taken me a while to understand that to be my Mum meansto be myself. And the more myself I become, the more I discover our differences, and how very alike we are.
Every year at this time I watch as our garden begins to revive itself. Winter is long, and it’s hard to imagine life beneath the soil. And so it always feels like a tiny miracle when the trees and plants, seemingly from one day to the next, sprout buds. Ordinary, extraordinary miracles reminding us to trust nature, and that all things must end to begin again.
We so rarely see sink skirts anymore and I don’t know why because they’re charming. Okay, so there’s the obvious impracticality of spilling mouth wash all over your vintage Guatemalan textile, but really, who doesn’t love to floss over a bustle of fancy fabric? I’d brush my teeth all day at this marble sink, and this candy cane fabric brings the circus to a country kitchen. My favourite is this gorgeous stripe; I love it so much that I wish it was an actual skirt!
The first and last time that I had a space of my own was in the winter of 1997 when I moved into a tiny attic apartment in an old palazzo next to a shawarma shop in Florence. I remember the weight of the huge wooden doors –– likely Medieval –– that I walked through everyday for the six months that I lived there. My flat was tiny, with little more than a bed and a canvas futon in the way of furniture and a kitchen so small that only one person could fit in it at a time. I had views of the terracotta rooftops below me and traveled through the building in one of those vintage birdcage elevators. Over time, I added spider plants and vases filled with Mimosa. I put books on shelves and postcards on the walls. I bought a pepper mill and cushions for my futon. By spring, Jason (who I had met on Valentine’s Day) had moved all his clothes into the cupboard beside the pots and pans. It became our apartment. All the many people we met at school and in nightclubs came back to the flat for late night arrabiata and endless games of Rummy. It was the meeting place, and I was happy to host. So many years later, I have rented a tiny attic studio in an old church rectory in downtown Toronto. It’s small and poky with no kiln or proper sink, and it’s kind of perfect. Maybe, mostly, because it’s mine.
There was a period that I visited a chiropractor as often as people buy milk. I was sapped of energy and often in pain. It was around that time that I started to think about change as a series of minuscule adjustments rather than one sudden thing. It’s advice I’d often given others; tiny steps versus giant leaps. But we teach best what we most need to learn. Drink more water. Start the day with a cold shower. Wake up with the sun. Over time, tiny steps form giant leaps. “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” It’s a shame this quote is so cloying because it really is true. Adjust. That I can do. An adjustment is small and manageable. Change is inevitable, and whether it comes about as a positive or a negative is often down to the day to day adjustments that we do or do not make. I am the slowest moving tortoise, let’s call me a giant galápagos, but even the giant galápagos moves a couple of kilometers each day.
For several years my family has travelled to a small island on the Gulf Coast side of Florida for beach walks and grouper sandwiches. The sand there feels like pastry flour and is laced with a million shells from cockles and lightening whelks to rough scallops and calico clams. If you’re really lucky, you may even find a sand dollar or a dried-up starfish. Shelling takes time and patience. My largest shells are from Irene’s house. All the best shells wash up on her little beach. Irene and my Mum have been fiends since childhood and no visit to Anna Maria is complete without a drive over the bridge to her weathered clapboard on Longboat Key. Most of the shells have some imperfection –– a small crack, a chip or some discolouration –– but they’re still so beautiful. This time, I found two large Southern Quahogs, chalky white with rough lines on the outside, and a fighting conch (the ones with the jagged spires at the top). I also brought home a bag of broken seashells; teeny, tiny fragments that I’ll piece together to make something whole. Eventually, I hope to take shells collected over many years and mount them on some lovely fabric, but in the meantime, they live in pockets and drawers and inside my shoes.
My grandmother was a Bostonian of Irish descent, a heritage somewhat washed out by all the Greeks in the house. I remember her making beer battered shrimp a few times, (that must have originated in somebody’s Nan’s kitchen?) but other than that, my very Greek Papou did all the cooking. I’m not sure I even knew my Yiayia wasn’t Greek until my teens, which given her terrible Greek accent and strawberry blonde hair shows how very up my own arse I was. She had freckles on every part of her body and wore yellow visors bedazzled with jewel encrusted frogs. She was a very young grandmother, seventeen-years younger than my grandfather, and after he died she only lived three short, sharp years without him. I came to visit her the Spring before she died at the apartment they had shared in North Palm Beach and within minutes of arrival we were at the local karaoke (a cafeteria in a nearby plaza) with my grandmother on stage (a chair) singing Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Please Release Me,” followed by Irish super ballad, “Danny Boy.” She was wearing a cream cotton pant suit that night. Or maybe it was spearmint satin. My memory is froggy. She died a year later and “Danny Boy” played at her wake. And six-months after that, I sat on her memorial bench in Central Park and listened to the same Irish ballad singing at The Boathouse nearby.
