Category — Art

Christmas card, 2009 by Christina Crook

I’ve been wondering why I haven’t been writing on here a heckuvalot lately. For me, blogging happens in bursts. Sometimes I am spilling with things to say, and other times I’m not. I don’t want to fake it.

Plus, it has been busy. Christmas is around the corner. (Literally, I can see him peering, wiley, from behind our apartment-sized tree.)

This year’s Christmas baking included the tried-and-true: shortbread (with a red and green twist,) a newcomer: orange-laced date bars (I’ll post the recipe tomorrow,) and the kick-ass: the chewyist brownies you’ve ever laid your teeth into (I took the liberty of adding cranberries which, as Michael can attest, was a spectacular choice.)

I’ve also been back at the crafting. 2009 marked a new tradition — the inaugural year of homemade cards. Not cheesy scrap-booky-kinds but collage-y ones hacked out of magazines and pasted on beautiful cream papers from Granville Island’s Opus. I likey.

Here is one of my favourites:

Also, I made a ton of my little magnets. I love sorting through bins of paper and meticulously cutting circles… It’s a little bizarre considering the fact I normally hate this kind of monotony.

Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la.

“One Voice” by Calgary artist Connie Gibbens. Read her artist’s statement, where she describes her Circles theme, here. 

“We love wherever we can love, and the power of that love spreads until the circumference of the circle of love grows wider and wider. At least that has been my own experience, even though I know to my rue that the circumference of my love is still much too small.” 

- Madeleine L’Engle, The Irrational Season

“When I think of the incredible, incomprehensible sweep of creation above me, I have a strange reaction of feeling fully alive. Rather than feeling lost and unimportant and meaningless, set against galaxies which go beyond the reach of the furthest telescopes, I feel that my life has meaning. Perhaps I should feel insignificant, but instead I feel a soaring in my heart that the God who could create all this - and out of nothing - can still count the hairs of my head.

Our tininess has nothing to do with it. The peculiar idea that bigger is better has been around for at least as long as I have, and it’s always bothered me. There is within it the implication that it is more difficult for God to care about a gnat than about a galaxy. Creation is just as visible in a grain of sand as in a skyful of stars.”

- Madeleine L’Engle, The Irrational Season  

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I started dabbling with paints this past year. Here is one of my first attempts, in process. It was inspired by the sense L’Engle describes above.

Brilliance from the Wooster Collective.

In the artist’s own words:

“these days it seems shoes and clothes just aren’t enough anymore.

i’ve always loved working in different mediums on the street - stencils, pastes, stickers, cardboard, wood, etc.. over the years you watch your works disappear no matter what the medium - from weather, other artists, property owners, etc.. anyone that does this for a while starts to realize that with more thought out placement, things can last a long ass time, a lot longer than pieces placed haphazardly. so lately i’ve not only been choosing my locations more wisely but have been doing things that attempt to blend in with the existing surroundings. i’m sure these alterations go mainly unnoticed for the most part but for me it offers the same satisfaction as the other things i do on the street - it’s all about altering the outside world no matter how subtle”

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P.S. We decided not to move. It’s a faith thing.

Long grey corridors dance
with candy cane stripes
choreographing
even-heeled steps
of close-mouthed
white coats.

today, inside,
it feels like a tomb
where condolences lie
like musty window-dressings.

it is here we are
met by unexpected blue-clad smiles
darting in and out from
melancholy sheets. 

it tastes like honey.
and the day is still beginning.

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st. paul’s hospital. september 25, 2006. during my mom’s cancer.

Tonight I welcome friends in through my doors, into my heart. We join in creating — dream boards, calendars, paintings, poetry. Where will the evening take us? Into ice cream sandwiches and typewriters and onto balconies and into each other’s stories. 

Welcome friends, let’s be makers.

I am spending part of this sunny Canada Day writing my next fashion column for Comment.

I often find myself asking the question: what’s the point of writing about fashion? (Or about any topic for that matter, be it strollers, art, bike rides — just a few of the articles I have in process at the moment). And then I stumble across a bit like this that reminds me that all things in life, if seen in the right light, have value, importance, even spiritual significance.

Syliva Plath seems an unlikely source but, then again, God’s great legacy is using the broken of us, right?

“…I wrote a very clever essay ostensibly in praise of style in all its forms as a religious devotee of style, defining it is that order, line, form, and rhythm in everything from the sonnet to the whalebone corset which renders the unruly natural world to becoming bearable.” - 

Sylvia Plath in Letters Home

Happy Canada Day everyone!

Yesterday we took to the sunny streets and enjoyed an afternoon at the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Golden Age of Dutch Art exhibit. (More free tickets!) 

Inside I tried my hand at the bourgeios style of the time

and outside we found men fighting with cardboard armour. (The guy on the left has nunchucks, the white-haired guy is trying to flee.)

Quote: Albert Camus (French Novelist, Essayist and Playwright, 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature, 1913-1960;) Art/Image: Christina Crook  

I am terribly disappointed to have missed the make it fashion, art & design market. My very own slice of London on Vancouver soil! Did anyone make it? (pun intended)

I hope there’s another coming soon…

Any other recommendations? Portobello or otherwise?