Snow from Nowhere New Years Day 2014

I know I took this photo, it's the falling snow, the way it has snuck in and just keeps drifting down, like a snowdome that never needs shaking that makes me wonder. Like the milk playing rain in the puddles and dance scene in Singing in The Rain, this seems like a kind a trick.  A variety of the ghosts one finds in phones.

Hakuba, Japan

A Fairy Tale With Three Rabbits

Three shadow rabbits, one shadow grandma, heads only, and a fine Japanese bowl, the world writ small. The bowl, by way of Kyoto, is reminiscent of the brilliantly graphical lines of Keith Murray's designs for Wedgwood from the '30's and onwards. Murray, New Zealand's exemplar designer.  Murray's keen sense of form, his elegantly stylised geometry, might or might not be referenced in this technically tour de force thrown off so precisely by Yoshinori Ohno.  The only tricky question with this is getting your attention back from the lovely and precise game the shadows play.

The Long Lunch and Wabi-sabi

Lunch, daily but ephemeral, is often the forgettable meal, a mid-way refuelling, a matter of fact calorificaton of self. But here we see the  end of a long lunch, long on table and long on time, slipping gracefully into the past tense, the afternoon light a soft apricot that adds some length to the perspective and a grainy softness to those elegant former hosts, the chairs.  Why is this qualityof fading, valued and named  by the Japanese as wabi sabi, so moving? Is it the integration of tonality, the quiet cohesiveness of colour, or the tug towards the irreversible nothingness, that pulls us back a moment, asking us to pivot between being and remembering?
This photo is from  the Olive Long Table Lunch at Whispering Brook,  a perfect lunch. Don't fret though, there is always next year.

Kitchen Still Life with Shadow

Why would an ordinary bowl with its strange plate chapeau evoke a sense of the great French still life painter Louise Moillon (1610-1696)? Thinking back recollected an intermediary, a fine white china bowl, shallow, handles broken off and lid long gone, itself now the same, that was a favourite place for cherries, which in their turn evoked those of Moillon. Hers, of course, were much finer offerings than these.  A homage then? Or a recollection.

Footnotes to an Autumn Tree

Last week the Pepper tree, probably Schinus spp, tree in Edwards Bay Park found itself footnoted by yellowish mushrooms. Why this tree I wonder instead of the local angophoras?  The whole fungi thing is intriguing, the idea of their labyrinthine subterranean habits, the back seat drivers of the plant world as it were, to borrow from  Sylvia Plath's fine take on the genus, they are 'the nudgers and shovers',  inheritors of earth. Now is the time to keep your eyes peeled.