So strange, so beautiful

Wonderful, dreamy and peculiar they are, jellyfish - and you never really get to look at them properly. They are quite abundant in Danish waters, but hard to study in detail. Imagine my delight, when we visited the fantastic Monterey Bay Aquarium*, where an entire section is dedicated to them. These are common types in the Pacific area near Monterey, not odd or exotic varieties. I didn't write down the names, but just stood there, hypnotized, in front of the giant, backlit tanks, in the dark rooms, that made them gleam like jewels, and every tentacle, detail and colour stand out. Stunning!

 

*Check their Live Jelly Cam! 

 

Summer is coming to an end, and I am slowly starting to digest all the impressions from our long trip in July and August (we travelled on the US West coast), not to mention roughly organizing hundreds and hundreds of photographs, something I am always very keen to get done, but sadly do in short bursts of wild energy and determination (and then I don't get much done) and at very odd intervals.

I have thousands of unsorted photos in folders and folders, and they are both my treasure and a constant source of feeling behind. I think this is a very common problem, and sometimes I consider making dogma rules for myself, such as being only allowed to take ten photos per day, or doing a daily delete-session. Because sorting images for me is a big job: it actually means getting rid of all the redundant ones, only keeping the one or two of a certain scene I actually like, and it also means doing the big or small photoshop corrections on each image that may need them. And only then do I consider a folder of images sorted and done. And I do actually enjoy looking at my old photos, I frequently spend hours getting lost in them - I'd think rather have that than Netflix, any day. 

But what a job. Sigh. 

Inspiration: giant mobiles by Xavier Veilhan

Xavier Veilhan is a French sculptor / installation artist, who does these massive mobiles - among many other things. The mobiles are the part of his work I really like, they are fantastic. He doesn't stray much from his style: they are always done with very simple elements: spheres, sticks and sometimes round discs.

Sometimes they hang from a contraption, that becomes part of the work (the one above is particularly great, I think), and at other times they hang from the ceiling. What makes them intricate and really impressive, is the sheer scale of them, they are huge! Wow.

All images here are from his own very informative website - which you can check out here.

Here is a bit about him on Wikipedia 

This year he will be representing France at the Venice Biennale.

And now: the mobiles! Or a small handful of them, anyway.

La Maison de la Photographie in Marrakech

I was in Marrakech in November, and will probably get back to that visit in a few blog posts, since it's a spectacularly interesting and visually overwhelming city. I only had my old iPhone with me to take pictures this time, but had a wonderful trip and fell as much in love with the pink labyrinth-like inner city, as I did on my first visit, some years ago. 

This time, my two friends and I, made sure to visit La Maison de la Photographie, a small photo museum I will most warmly recommend. It's hidden away in a narrow medina alley, in a very pretty old house, that houses a large collection of old photographs of everyday life in Morocco, from the late 1800s up to around 1960, roughly. They only have parts of the huge collection on display, but change the exhibition regularly.

Marrakech is a place where the past seem very present, and this wonderful little, tranquil house full of fantastic photographs, makes you realize how much - and how little - the place and the people have changed.

Here are a few impressions.....
(all old black/white images below are courtesy of maison de la Photographie)

The house is, as I mentioned, very pretty, and when you reach the roof, you will find a small café and a gorgeous view! They also have a shop that sell high quality prints, if you fall in love with a special image. Most of them are available as prints.

Link to the Maison de la Photographie website, with all the practical info

There is one image you see again and again, in reference to this museum - and one you will remember, because this is a most remarkable face. It is a portrait of a young man, a slave called Hamidou, taken in 1885, and his sad eyes, and strong, beautiful face are impossible to forget.

When we visited, on a rainy quiet day, there was a gnawa street musician sitting outside the open door, and his singing and the sound of his sintir - a kind of slappy guitar bass - was following me all the time, while I was studying all these pictures. It was quite magical, like a perfect soundtrack.

He was really great, and I stepped outside and made a little film - you can see it here (very un-edited), and get an idea of how beautifully the old images and the old music just blended together.....

See (but mainly listen to) my little gnawa video on flickr

Spring favorite # 3: Vivian Maier, street photographer

I went to Dunkers Kulturhus in Helsingborg and saw the exhibition of the photographs of the mysterious Chicago and New York nanny, Vivian Maier (1926 - 2009), who turned out to be a world class street photographer, but only received the recognition she so enormously deserved, after her death - and by sheer chance. 

The story of this private and unusual woman, who earned her ways as a nanny for wealthy Chicago and New York families for more than forty years, but simultaneously managed to take hundreds of thousands of sublime photographs of street life in the 50ties and 60ies - is quite amazing. 

Check out the documentary 'Finding Vivian Maier', it is a really intriguing story! (It's on Netflix at the moment).

Here is a very small taste of her wonderful work (starting with one of her many odd self portraits). So full of human empathy, so gentle - and yet sharp and unflinching. And her mastery of graphic composition, is almost like a thing secondary to that fantastic eye. I will never stop being curious about just what it is (besides a certain technical knowledge) that makes a great photographer. She sure was one. 

See much more on her official website - and be prepared to browse for a long time!

Pumpkins. Or Yayoi Kusama by numbers.

Okay, I write a lot about Yayoi Kusama, but the lady fascinates me. Her show at Louisiana is very popular, and Instagram is overflowing with a veritable polka dot frenzy. And I still feel the need to write another blog post about her. Or rather her pumpkins, mostly. 

But first a few words. I like her art in a very simple, straightforward way - it's pretty, it's graphically bold, and it's extremely colorful. So, for me, it's natural to like. I know several people who find her work somewhat shallow and superficial, and yes, she does seem to repeat herself a lot, and no, there is perhaps not a lot to say about dots, come to think of it. Other than the fact that they are pretty, and perhaps resemble the stars of the universe, or perhaps also tiny cells in a Petri dish. The wonders of the small and the huge, etc. etc.

But the show at Louisiana, which is big and cover most of her career in a quite narrative and educational way, made me see something more than the dots. I saw her obsession, and how clinging to the obsession, is her way of staying sane and relatively happy. And how painting is, quite simply, physical therapy. And soothing meditation.

It's not as if these are deep or profound conclusions, but they really set my mind to work, and most especially, at how she has managed the superhuman workload of physically creating her pieces!

As far as I have been able to find out, she does not employ a hoard of assistants - but much is unclear about Yayoi, who is sometimes a bit enigmatic, when answering questions in interviews. In this one, she claims to have done her work herself, and makes a point of it.

I started really looking at her pumpkins. They have become her sort of peace-love-fertility symbol, and are said to be a reference to childhood memories. She grew up in a wealthy family who had a seed- and vegetable business, and has told, somewhere, about feeling guilty about the abundance of food her family had, in war times when the Japanese were starving.

At Louisiana they meet you already outside in bronze supersize, and there are several fine pumpkin works inside - especially a giant yellow/black cabinet, filled with pumpkins. 

(I borrowed the top photo from Designboom, and the cabinet one from snilla.blogspot)

I don't think there is even an official estimate at how many times she has painted, drawn or sculpted this plump vegetable. I just fill with wonder at how much variety she puts into this tedious motif.

Just see how she does the stems in slightly different ways - how she has a variety of ways to do those rows of dots that make up their pattern, and how they vary a lot in their outer shape. But still seems to be the same kind of pumpkin. 

All those little varieties and decisions - about every single one of those pumpkins. I know she did a lot of other types of wildly repetitive and detailed themes, the Infinity nets, for instance, but I just love those pumpkins for their way of occupying her mind for a whole, long lifetime.

So, when I saw a cheap papier-mâché pumpkin in my local hobby shop round Halloween, I just knew I had to make a close study of her pumpkins in the most obvious way: I had to make one myself! And I had to be very faithful to her way of doing them, I had to deliberately copy her, just to feel it.

So, one pumpkin and some paint supplies later, I set to work.

I gave it a few coats of spray paint, and had decided (wisely) to not do the dots with a brush, but rather with Posca markers. I started with the stem, and decided on a 'random dots' type stem. Then I did the tiny ones in the grooves of the pumpkin, and moved on to the central rows of big dots on the swollen parts of the pumpkin. And then moved on to the smaller rows on the sides.

Here are some numbers: After about 1200 hand painted dots and some eight to ten hours of fiddly work doing them - spread out over a few evenings and a Sunday morning - I ended up here. And decided that my pumpkin was done. Yayoi would have kept at it, of course.

So, you might say I took a very small stroll in Yayoi's polka dot shoes. And that was interesting.

A bit of Yayoi and a bit of anniversary

Louisiana has a stunning Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the moment, and it is not to be missed, if you are in the least bit interested in visual art, art history, pop art - or if you just happen to like to have your senses bombarded with color and wowness. It is a very in-depth look at her long life as an artist, and I found it completely absorbing, and spent hours there, even reading a lot of the tiny print about her fascinating life.

I have written a bit about her before, a mini-portrait of sorts, read here, and also a bit here (I am a great Yayoi-enthusiast!) and I have shown some of her most characteristic polkadotty work - so I thought I'd show some impressions from the Louisiana show, of her more subdued work. All her work is a partly about obsessive repetition, but you have seen the colorful dots and pumpkins such a lot, and I was thrilled to see these pale, discreet paintings (the Infinity nets), all the beautiful black/white photos and her graphic work. 

I also adore the color explosions, the whole sensory overload - and if you do too, you will be richly rewarded. But I really like this side of Yayoi Kusama, and of the exhibition. You should really, really go see it! It ends in late January 2016.

And now for a bit of a long PS:

I discovered, quite randomly, that this is my blog post number 200!

This is not what I had ever in my wildest fantasy imagined, when I started a little semi-private advent calendar event in 2011, but this blogging thing has grown on me. 

I will never be an every-day-kind-of-blogger, not even close, but as it is, I always have much, much more I would like to write about, than I actually manage to find time for - and that tells me I should keep it up. Also, I started a job outside home recently, with an almost full weekly schedule, and that makes blogging harder, but not impossible, no no.

And Christmas will come to the blog as well, for the fifth season this year - yay, another anniversary! 

There will be paper projects - well, not quite daily, but absolutely weekly. So keep the printer, the scissors and the glue handy. And if you want to get warmed up a bit; here's a Pinterest board that links to most the DIY's I have posted over the years - or go to 'DIY's - the full list' in the top menu on this page.

And this year I will even open a small online shop, as well - for one very special product!
More about this is to come, real soon. I'll keep you posted.

Let me use this PS to thank everyone who finds their way to these pages. You are so very welcome, and I hope that my tips, thoughts or paper designs add a bit of color to your life. And you are always more than welcome to leave a small (or large!) comment and let me know who you are.
 

I'd love to know!