Garlic scapes

A friend gave me some garlic scapes this summer. Instead of roasting and eating them, I put them in a vase with some Hostas. Very Victorian. The vase is by Frances Palmer.

Yellow on yellow

My neighbor Robert Petersen brought over this painting from his last show. We hung it in a yellow room. It’s perfect. Robert looks quite marvelous too in his blue sweater. When talking with him about color I found out that yellow is a primary color and cannot be made by mixing other colors together.  The primary colors: red, blue and yellow are the root of every other hue imaginable.

The writing underneath the picture of Raphael reads “Cinda saw a fawn last Friday”.

Today is a particularly drab January day with an overcast sky. Bleak is a word I would use to describe the day, but for Robert the sky had all sorts of grey hues. Looking out from my window he thought this particular grey was beautiful. We love artists for their perception and ways of seeing that can tune us back into what is most splendid: a yellow room, a blue sweater and a grey sky.

For more information on his work

Rimpa

“Rinpa” is a modern term that refers to a distinctive style of Japanese pictorial and applied arts that arose in the early seventeenth century and has continued through modern times. Literally meaning “school of Korin,” Rinpa derives its name from Ogata Korin (1658–1716), a celebrated painter from Kyoto. It embraces art marked by a bold, graphic abbreviation of natural motifs, frequent reference to traditional court literature and poetry, the lavish use of expensive mineral and metallic pigments, incorporation of calligraphy into painting compositions, and innovative experimentation with new brush techniques.

Things that give you pleasure – You’ve seen many Japanese screens of iris but never the cobalt blue of morning glories on gold.

It’s also wonderfully pleasing to see books illustrated with gold and silver that are so modern and utterly beautiful they make you want to take them home.