...onions, I must say.

 Sometime during my fifth year at university I painted this oil of an onion.  I had been reading a Gunter Grass novel, possibly Dog Years or The Flounder, in which he described a postwar underground nightclub in Berlin where were patrons were brought a single onion by the maitre d', who sliced it in front of them at their tables so that they could cry.  That had sort of resonated with me.

Just recently I realised what this Spanish onion that had been sitting on my kitchen counter for about a month was reminding me of.

And now some photos from my walk to the lake (and back) on Tuesday, July 27th 2021.

 

Watch your step, there's a slugfest going on!

Today's special edition blog post is by popular request - well, just one request actually but it's popular with me.  My friend Peter liked the photos of the 'snail-headed' creature in my previous post, and was unaware that it was called a slug.  My friend Caryn liked the slug photos as well as they reminded her of when she was living in Vancouver and 'thousands of slugs' would appear all over the place after a heavy rain.  What with the heatwave currently underway in most of the world at the moment, couldn't we all do with an even moderate-to heavy rain. Another occasional reader of my blog who lives in Norway might appreciate today's post's featured video, if she recalls our lengthiest phone conversation from last summer during which I heard her exclaim "Ooh! I just stepped on a slug."

I can't quite remember which year I filmed this and later composed and recorded the guitar accompaniment, but I do recall that the birds were singing in B major and I set the music to go with their song. 

Here is a second video I filmed and recorded the music for that same year.

Not quite through with 1992

 I guess you could say that 1992 was sort of a banner year for me. I was studying visual arts at university and in the fall I did a three-month exchange to the University of Northumbria at Newcastle in the UK.  

Before I left for England I shared an exhibition with my friend and classmate Bud Fujikawa at the IDA gallery in the Fine Arts building at York University.  The lino cuts mounted on boards in this first photo were displayed, as were the inkless embossments I had made from them. I also displayed the oil painting of the stone wrapped and suspended with twine and the sculpture I had painted it from. The two bronzes, a standing eye-splice and a love knot, were cast from the actual rope I had tied them with.  

Bud came to England that fall as well and visited with me in Newcastle. We saw Carry On Columbus together at the Warner Brothers cinema.

And now some photos from Monday, July 19th, 2021.

Shoes from 1992

In January of 1992 I visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to research an essay I was writing on Rembrandt's self portraits for an art history class at university, Renaissance to Rococo.  While I was there I also visited the Van Gogh museum and did this drawing from one of his paintings.

Now here are some photos I took on July 12th, 2021 as I walked down to the lake yet again, and back.  The first one is a small found object sculpture I put together down at the beach.

Now here are some actual fauna in situ and of course, as always, flora.

A new mural down the street

A little while after I started this blog I noticed four women at work on a mural down the street.  The grand unveiling was last Saturday morning, which I unfortunately missed.  I chatted with two of the artists a few times as I walked by, and was pleased to learn that they had researched the flora and fauna in the nearby park, the one I have been regularly walking through down to the lake.

As some of you do not live nearby and some of you live quite far away I thought you might be interested in seeing the mural itself, so here are the photos I took of it Saturday afternoon.

Here are some views in sequence from across the street so that you can see the size of the mural and read the text, Flow Gratefully Through the Currents of Time.