Hello

I have been rather absent from this site for a while. It’s hard to squeeze these things in, in between looking after two young children and relocating from one city to another, amongst other things. I’m hoping soon things will normalise and I can once again redirect my focus towards other interests!

As our lives get organized, my daughter is attending a very nice art camp this week at LUX, down the road from where we’re staying. I was very happy to discover this rather unique place. She’s doing the printmaking workshop. When I pick her up I get itchy fingers looking at all the lovely pieces they’ve been working on. So much fun!

Rainy day.

Little seeds.

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted something. I guess I’ve been pretty distracted by various other things – ongoing projects, clearing, reorganising, reviewing, school, impending arrival of a new baby and so on. Yesterday I was throwing out some old magazines and found a few things of interest which I cut out and stuck into my sketch book. Things that interest me but I can’t always pin-point why, so I stick them in my notebook for future reference. I realised how liberating it is having a ‘physical’ sketch book to make notes in, draw and stick things down. Unlike posting things on a blog, where the desire is to share and have a ‘conversation’ about something (with that underlying pressure of presenting things that you hope will also be of interest to other people), in my sketchbooks I have complete freedom, knowing that I will be the only one to look through them. Unfortunately I’m not as much of an avid sketchbooker as I used to be, in fact more often than not these days I almost entirely forget about them. But when I get the chance to look through and review my visual thought process – in between many pages that leave me wondering why – I can always find something to inspire me. Those little ideas, little experiments, little seeds of things to come.

Drawings

Some drawings inspired by an exercise found in a Mind Workout book that I was browsing recently during Aya’s piano lesson.

Work in progress

Sample

Kaleidoscope

Homework pattern

Stripes

Blooming spoons.

Quick design submission, based on spoons and flowers. Last day to vote on www.spoonflower.com

Tape from my tape drawer

Handprinting

Embarking on some new experiments … not yet to be revealed!

Parking lots

Ed Ruscha

Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles 1967

Ed Ruscha’s Dodger Stadium, 1000 Elysian Park Ave. (detail) from Thirty-Four Parking Lots (1967)

Dodger Stadium today, Google Maps 2009

Thanks to a comment left by my friend Dan in response to this previous post, I discovered Ed Ruscha’s Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles 1967. Ed Ruscha hired a helicopter to fly over L.A. early one Sunday morning in 1967 and shot a whole series of vacant parking lots. Beautiful patterns. Brilliant.

The beauty of Google Maps is that I can fly over all the parking lots, in any city, in any part of the world, and I don’t have to hire a helicopter! Not quite the same I know but … it’s great (if you try to ignore the whole Big Brother thing)!

More images from Ed Ruscha’s set can be seen here.

Stuff

Work, in progress

Sketches for Samsonite furoshiki piece.

See the completed project here.

Yesterday

Working on a pattern made from edges of collected film processing envelopes.