(from bbook)

flower arranging

New Horizons in Flower Arrangement by Myra J. Brooks with Mary Alice and John P. Roche, M. Barrows & Co., NY, 1961

I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.

 

--Susan Sontag 

Sunday Tune

Sheila Hicks

I love this lady.
There is much to read and learn about Sheila. Check out Sikkema Jenkins & Co., her gallery in New York, for even more images of her work. The Smithsonian has also done an oral history with her and there are many nice books out—Sheila Hicks: 50 Years is the one I first discovered her in (Thanks you Camberwell College of Art Library!)

Images:
1. Sheila holding Éventail in 1989 in Cour de Rohan, Paris
2. Convergence I (2001)
3. Wow Bush / Turmoil in Full Bloom (1980),
4. Learning to Weave in Taxco, Mexico (c. 1960)
5. Sketch book
6. Sheila in Guerrero, Mexico, 1964 from Weaving As Metaphor,
7. Wil Bertheux (1973), photo by Bastiaan van den Berg.
8. Working on Solferino Tacubaya in Taxco el Viejo, Guerrero, Mexico, 1960-61.
9. Sheila Hicks, photographed by Giulia Noni

Frida Kahlo Working

...and smoking... images from here

Barbara Shaum

Jennifer Causey's pictures of 84 year old Barbara Shaum in her East Village studio/shop. LOVE.

Louise Bourgeois

Lucie Rye

Read about this great dame on the VADS essay site set up for her in a nice timeline format and with lots more great images. The best spot to check out images of her work is through Galerie Besson, which represented her.

images...
1.  Lord Snowdon’s photograph of Lucie’s hands
2.  Lucie Rie and Hans Coper pottery upstairs at 18 Albion Mews in 1950.
3. Lucie sunbathing in the 1960s. Photo by Stella Snead.
4. pink porcelain conical bowl, c. 1978.
5. Lucie, around 1935, in her Vienna studio.
6.  Page from her Vienna-days glazing notebook, 1920s
7.  The group of vases were on display at London’s Berkeley Gallery, 1962. Photo by Jane Gate.
8. Lucie potting in the 1980s.
9.  Portrait of Dame Lucie by Snowdon

All via GravelandGold

From Javier Serena

Sister Ship

"...You'll never know the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore."

 -- Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things

The Blue House

     It is night with glaring sunshine. I stand in the woods and look towards my house with its misty blue walls. As though I were recently dead and saw the house from a new angle.
     It has stood for more than eighty summers. Its timber has been impregnated, four times with joy and three times with sorrow. When someone who has lived in the house dies it is repainted. The dead person paints it himself, without a brush,  from the inside.
     On the other side is open terrain. Formerly a garden, now wilderness. A still surf of weed, pagodas of weed, an unfurling body of text, Upanishades of weed, a Viking fleet of weed, dragon heads, lances, an empire of weed.
Above the overgrown garden flutters the shadow of a boomerang, thrown again and again. It is related to someone who lived in the house long before my time. Almost a child. An impulse issues from him, a thought, a thought of will: “create. . .draw. ..”  In order to escape his destiny in time.
     The house resembles a child’s drawing.  A deputizing childishness which grew forth because someone prematurely renounced the charge of being a child. Open the doors, enter! Inside unrest dwells in the ceiling and peace in the walls. Above the bed there hangs an amateur painting representing a ship with seventeen sails, rough sea and a wind which the gilded frame cannot subdue.
     It is always so early in here, it is before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. I am grateful for this life!  And yet I miss the alternatives. All sketches wish to be real.
     A motor far out on the water extends the horizon of the summer night. Both joy and sorrow swell in the magnifying glass of the dew. We do not actually know it, but we sense it: our life has a sister vessel which plies an entirely different route. While the sun burns behind the islands.

 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

-- Thomas Tranströmer, The Blue House.

(translated by Göran Malmqvist)

Sunday Tune

Found here

The Fire of Drift-wood

Devereaux Farm, near Marblehead

We sat within the farm-house old, 

Whose windows, looking o'er the bay, 

Gave to the sea-breeze, damp and cold, 

 An easy entrance, night and day.

Not far away we saw the port, 

The strange, old-fashioned, silent town, 

The lighthouse, the dismantled fort, 

The wooden houses, quaint and brown.

We sat and talked until the night, 

Descending, filled the little room; 

Our faces faded from the sight, 

Our voices only broke the gloom.

We spake of many a vanished scene, 

Of what we once had thought and said,

Of what had been, and might have been, 

And who was changed, and who was dead;

And all that fills the hearts of friends, 

When first they feel, with secret pain, 

Their lives thenceforth have separate ends, 

And never can be one again;

The first slight swerving of the heart, 

That words are powerless to express,

And leave it still unsaid in part, 

Or say it in too great excess.

The very tones in which we spake 

Had something strange, I could but mark; 

The leaves of memory seemed to make 

A mournful rustling in the dark.

Oft died the words upon our lips, 

As suddenly, from out the fire 

Built of the wreck of stranded ships, 

The flames would leap and then expire.

And, as their splendor flashed and failed, 

We thought of wrecks upon the main, 

Of ships dismasted, that were hailed 

And sent no answer back again.

The windows, rattling in their frames, 

The ocean, roaring up the beach, 

The gusty blast, the bickering flames, 

All mingled vaguely in our speech.

Until they made themselves a part 

Of fancies floating through the brain, 

The long-lost ventures of the heart, 

That send no answers back again.

O flames that glowed!  O hearts that yearned! 

They were indeed too much akin, 

The drift-wood fire without that burned, 

The thoughts that burned and glowed within.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 

(Found via evencleveland)

A. Ruiz Villar

A. Ruiz Villar

Nancy Spero

Images found here