We love the Cat & Fish books by Neil Curtis & Joan Grant: they have the most amazing illustrations and words. We bought two ex-library copies from BetterWorldBooks and Kitty cut out some of our favourite illustrations and framed them for the new sleeping room that Junior Pixels and Little Bear are now sharing. They look fantastic.
I recently put some new photos on one if the walls in our bedroom. They’re 11″ x 14″ prints (on sale at Big W for $1 each: save $13 each!) in black IKEA frames ($3.98 each). I think they came out well at less than $5 each.
Yesterday on a walk we discovered by chance a show at the Arts Factory Gallery at South Bank titled “Nature of the Duchess” by Monique and Faye Dobson. It contains lots of bonsais and antiques mixed with art and categorized by world region (Australia, the US, the UK, Japan and Africa), and all the plants and art are for sale.
I really enjoyed the combination of art, furniture, collectibles and bonsai. The bonsai that Faye has grown and displayed are amazing, some of the best I have ever seen. She has an amazing old fig for sale that I would love to buy but I think it’s out of our price range.
The show is on for the next couple of weeks (until October 5th) and Monique and Faye are planning on conducting some art and bonsai classes, which can be arranged via moniquedobson@hotmail.com. Check it out before it disappears!
The empty block next to us is about to be developed, which is a shame as it has quite an eclectic collection of street art. The old brick walls on the site make the perfect texture for all sorts of art, so I thought I’d ignore the ‘do not enter’ sign and capture these before they’re gone forever.
Whlist wandering supermarkets in Austin, Texas, last year, I spotted a whole shelf of cheap yet aesthetically pleasing candles in tall glass jars for sale at $2 a piece. Naturally I picked up one to bring home to Kitty and to see what it was like.
The candle ended up being one of the best candles we’ve had. Not only did it last for weeks, it also had one of the nicest rose scents I have smelt from a candle. Not bad for $2!
I later found out they’re known as prayer candles, or veladoras in Spanish, and each candle has a picture of a saint and a prayer printed on it (in both Spanish and English). They’ve been made in Texas since 1947 and there are over 350 saint varieties alone! They’re often left at vigils as they burn for about seven days straight.
I will be making sure I stock up on these if I am ever in Austin again.
We took Junior for a walk in the pram to GOMA this afternoon to check out the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT6). He only gave us enough time asleep to view one floor, but from what we saw it was an excellent collection. Luckily it’s on until 5 April next year, so we have plenty of time to go back and check it out again. Here are some of the cool things we saw today.
Chelsea and the Meatpacking District in NYC are home to some awesome street art.
We saw a Fritz Scholder exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York City this morning.
A couple of his quotes were quite neat:
“You must walk that tightrope between accident and discipline. Accident by itself…so what? Discipline by itself is boring. By walking that tightrope and putting down something on a canvas…coming from your guts, you have a chance of making marks that … will live longer than you.”
“I give thanks every day that I’ve been able to take my craziness and make it work for me.”
