Desperate Damsel v's Femme fetale

Saturday and the melancholy of last nights frivolity has worn off, I have showered, I am clean and good to go. So I made made my way to Glebe markets with $100 and hoped for something divine!

There she was, fat, aboriginal in origin, rude, mid-50's maybe and pumping out works dedicated to Robert A. Maguire classic crime noir illustrator. Where have you been all my life fat, rude, talented lady?

The interesting thing is that she only illustrates, desperate damsels. There are classically two types of crime noir heroine. The desperate damsel and the femme fetale.

My whole blog is femme fetale inspired. I just don't identify with the other. Crying bitches... please, just shoot the daddy in the back of the head and be done with it, right? Plenty more where they came from.

So, I bought one.

This one.

I thanked her profusily, tried to wax lyrical about the genre, told her to send me a catalogue of her other work.

She didn't even look up, I was not even on this angsty middle aged womans radar. She was to0 involved getting her creative sad on. I love her! I wonder, if I had been the man that broke her heart would she have put her ink down, who knows?

Love it. So the teary love smacked damsel will sit pride of place above my couch and there she will stay. A constant reminder of why I will never be the desperate damsel!

This is one of mine... spot the difference.

Cya Daddy...

Uniting the twin disciplines of red shoes and mens hands...

"In Hand" water color and ink on paper. Mark Schwartz.

Anyone who knows me knows I have a weakness for two things, red shoes and men with nice hands.

Oh hello....
GOD CREATES MAN... MAN CREATES SHOES. S is having both, thanks.

Was what I thought when I made an impassioned decision to buy one of Mark's works this week. It's so powerful, raw and I just love it!

I've been checking out his work, prolific work actually, Mark can you sell me your work ethic too? Very few of them seem to have a human element, so this one had a particularly visceral appeal complemented by the bleed of the water colors.

The title has a resonance with me as well. There is nothing about my life presently that I feel like I have in hand. So it makes me feel kind of steady and reassured.

It's also just a little bit sexy.

It just fills me with such immense joy! It's marvelous!

Thanks Mark.

The girl who's house threw up Mexico!

I adore understated genius.

I had lunch on Sunday with a girlfriend I have known since primary school who smiled and allowed me to rant incoherently about my new years resolution to return to dress making. The vintage patterns I found online, the fabric I had bought and the mission it was to get my sewing machine home from the coast to Sydney on the train when I have the upper body strength of a tadpole.

"yeah, I do furniture," she said.

She pulled an elegant antique tin from her bag and pushed it across the table. It was her portfolio.

Oh holy Jesus! Maaike, you are a clever bitch! Her extensive travel through Mexico combined with her eclectic and tangential thought processes have influenced some of the coolest and most unique furniture projects I have ever seen.

Maaike, I hope you don't mind that I put your image here ; ) Of course you don't , your marvelous!

The Beppe (Frisian for Grandmother) Chair is covered in green velvet stripes previously destined for the dump, and labelled as "too ugly" by anyone who saw it on the bolt. Combined with Mexican roses and princess-and-the-pea cushions, the chair resembles my Beppe's adhoc sewing basket. http://www.maaidesign.blogspot.com/

I think you either love it or you hate it. Her house is full of these pieces, someone, who didn't love it once described her home as the house that threw up Mexico! I love it, played hard man, nice work!

In the words of Maaike, my new favorite creative she-hero.

If anyone, man or woman, tries to get between you and your creativity tell them:

"Stop making me a lesser person." : )

The Deadly Nightshade 2

The windows of the Brown estate were boarded up. The contents of the house disappeared as Byron Browns creditors clawed at everything that wasn’t nailed down.

Like a complete jigsaw puzzle being dismantled one piece at a time, Belladonna watched the life she knew disappear and the skeleton of a new one form.

The feeling of cold invisibility, she felt like a wallflower, a spectator as strangers in single file raped the contents of her home.

“No,” she screeched at one of the removalists, clutching her wooden spinning top until the carved symbols on its surface pressed red indentations into her palm. Set about his task he ignored the little girl’s protestations and her pain.

She was the last thing to be liquidated. Lilydale’s Finishing School sent a car for her one overcast Sunday. A heavyset Turkish schoolmistress, Ma’am, as she insisted on being called, had been sent to escort Belladonna to her new home.

“You will collect your things and come with me, your Grandfather has enrolled you and you will receive an education commensurate with your breeding. The death of your irresponsible parents was the best thing that could have happened to you, imagine, home schooling a child,” without making eye contact Ma’am judgmentally surveyed the wreckage of the once proud Brown estate, “Don’t dally child we have a long journey, go!”

Tears stung her eyes, “No!”

Throwing her toy on the ground she ran for the door. With her eyes closed she kept running but she could no longer feel the ground under her feet. Ma’am had her suspended by her shirt colour as she struggled desperately to free herself of this circumstance.

“You’d do well not to make an enemy of me young lady and I’ll only say this once more, GO!”

What do you pack? How do you pack a childhood into a single trunk? You can’t.

So she packed nothing.

“I’m ready, Ma’am”

“That’s a good girl.”

People to eat, things to see...

Not all cities can do food. Of course, all cities have food but Amsterdam is a city that does food, it enjoys it's food. It was an interesting dichotomy from New York where food is plentiful and quantity and economy are king to Amsterdam where quality reigns supreme.

No where is this dichotomy more evident than in chocolate. At the Hershey's store on 5th Avenue in New York I saw plump tourists smack their lips at the prospect of a bargain 3kg block of chocolate while in Amsterdam there are small, independently owned chocolate shops where you pay about the same but come away with half a dozen petite and artful morsels.



Puccini was a on the corner of our block and had everything from white chocolate with vanilla, dark chocolate with chili, gin with lime rind and walnut truffles with cinnamon.

When in Rome? When in Amsterdam, Pancake.

Pancakes at Barney's with strawberries and from Sara's pancake house with Bananas. Also my own attempt at French toast with the Maple syrup or Ahornstroop that I bought from the near by organic farmers market.





Cheese, Cheese and more Cheese. My favorite is the white fleshed semi-hard goats cheese which is made by hand in Holland. Above was my breakfast, Goats Cheese, Triple Bree with truffles, Saint Agur blue, tomato relish, Grapes and Sourdough (the coffee and the joint are out of frame ; ).It's worth a trip for the food alone but the best thing was the sense of community that all these small independent shops engender. I loved it! Although I think I'll go easy on the maple syrup next time ; ).

A European Black Hole

When I got home from my trip I had spectacularly vivid memories of New York, memories that wake me at night and pictures that make my daydreams more pleasant than they have been in a long time.

Amsterdam on the other hand...

When I recounted my trip to a friend,

"So, how was Amsterdam?"

"um..."

"Haha," he said, "don't worry, I had the same experience, Amsterdam is a black hole."

Names of places come back in a hazy fog and memories like an avant-garde montage.

Like many tourists holidaying with a new lover in a city where marijuana is legal, I fell into the proverbial black hole.

Walking from the apartment we stayed in, on more than one occasion we passed a preschool. It was -5 degrees and the children dropped off on the back of bicycles looked like adorable walking small winter coats, all eyes, mittens and feet.

Staying in the Centrum (the central precinct in Amsterdam) in a furnished apartment meant I could feel more a resident than a tourist.



Should you like winter and gray days then you would love this city in January.

The architecture is spectacular. Often described as a living museum, you can't help but walk around this city and feel humble. As Australians with our oldest European influenced architecture dating as recently as 200 years, Amsterdam is 700 years old in parts. The streets never built for traffic and the pace of life feels the same. It's foreign and infectious.

The view from the balcony of the apartment.

MoMA

Sorry, that wasn't my 100th post. She's pretty but can she count?

The Museum of Modern Art in New York is spectacular. I am intentionally making next years trip longer so I can spend more time there among other things.

Here are a few of my super favorite highlights! Enjoy!

'Chair No. 41' (1881) designed by Austrian Michael Thonet.

This is 1881 IKEA. Flat pack furniture. It is beechwood and cane and is the worlds first flat pack furniture. First designed to meet the needs of mass production and distribution in 1858.

I love the idea that in 1881 there was someone looking curiously at their new chair and saying,

"Are we meant to have an extra screw?"

I love biological modern art!

This is a series of Tissue Culture Art Projects by the School of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia. It was referred to as 'The Pigs Wing Project'.

Proving that pigs can fly!

'Porca Miseria!' Chandelier (1994) by German Ingo Maurer.

This is totally awesome! Its a Chandelier that looks like a set of china and silver cutlery has exploded and is suspended in the air. Influenced by cinematic slow motion explosions, it is the artists rebellion against fashionable contemporary design.

I want one!

This is 'Drawing Restraint 9: Shimenawa' by Matthew Barney. This work was done in 2005 and the artist was born in 1967. Its a chromatic color print.

There are two incredible things that got me about this. It appears that the couple in the print are wet and only their severed torsos are floating on what looks like a milk bath. Its a divine visual effect, your brain really thinks when looking at this.

But the second, and my favorite draw card about this work is the symbolism. The passionate embrace and the two knives at the ready. So true, don't you think? How vulnerable we make ourselves in that situation, both ready to defend yourselves emotionally if you need to.




This work is breathtaking. You sort of need to be there. While a lot of the modern art around it was making noise and vying for you attention. This one kind sat there quietly but its asymmetrical aesthetic and humble color drew me to it. You feel balanced and happy when you are looking at this.

David Navros 'VI:XXXII' (1966) Vinyl lacquer paint on shaped canvases.



'Untitled' (1990) by Christopher Wool. This work is commanding, taking up almost an entire wall. it is part of a series of enamel on wood language-based black-and-white works. The expression was used in the 1957 movie, Sweet Smell of Success, written by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets.

I love this phrase, its is said to indicate that a dirty job has been done.

Question: "Did you take care of it?"

Response: "Cats in bag, bags in river."

Oh God it was all marvelous! I want to go back now : (