Looking at Fra Angelica - Virgin, Child and Pomegranate

The cherubic babe in Fra Angelica's lovely portrait is worth studying, for the coloration of the cheeks and the fine shadows of the infants curly hair. For me  the best way to look closely is to try to depict it in Prussian Blue.  The result here is nothing at all like the original, and so wide of the mark in proportion and detail that if I didn’t make a scribbled note where the drawing came from one would never guess. But it is about looking, the hasty sketch a reminder of Fra Angelicas dazzle.

Love at First Sight - Taj + Mahal

There is a monochronic virtue to the Taj Mahal,  which I first saw here at end of day from across the river, its towers tilted out just enough to ensure their fall and so  imperil the central dome, its ancillary underpinning arches.

 While the photograph reduces it a poor 2-D reproduction,  in reality it  so beautiful I cried when I saw it.  It is not just the aesthetic but the contrast with the poverty of Agra that surrounds it.

Now I hope the sky has cleared,  and might even be blue, and consequentially all that white marble so much whiter, and the people camped out have cleaner air to live in. Taj Mahal, who would not love you?

April in Cuba in a Blue Sports Car

It was not until I went to Cuba, to walk Havana's edgy streets, replete with 1950's gorgeously chromed and lux coloured auto's that I started to wonder about that line about the  April sun in Cuba. Now it is April in Cuba and an afternoon touring in a blue as blue sports car seems like a world away. And it is , being as far as away from Sydney as you can get without starting to come back round the other side. 

Granny Egg’s Gelatinising Isolation -

Thoughts like jelly-blubbering, Granny Egg dreams of diving off her jetty, into the pond - it’s brackish, slimy with a skin of peepers, and silt aside, somewhere between knee and shoulder deep, if one is sitting down, but here we see it’s deep enough to submerge a dream persona.

Old Photographs of Florence

There is something heroic about this courtyard, the lovely eveningness of the light, the grand scale of the columns,  each unique and over everything  that shadowy mood.  The photo dates from decades back, yes- it's those clothes - and  now I think it was the inner courtyard of the Uffizi but I may be  wrong about that. What is certain though, as I write this while water comes to the boil for spaghettini, a ragu simmering  beside it,is that when whe have clear skies again to travel, I am going back.

Mrs Woo-Star’s : Spooked Too Soon?

Mrs Woo-Star ‘s great flexibility gives her the ability to see behind her back, which she has availed of of late,  as she has the feeling that she is being pursued. Is the past catching up to Mrs Woo-Star, and in particular  adverse possession of Brass Acre’s?  Here  she is seen visiting her local library, whether to look up statutes or study up on her favourite poet Thomas Wyatt, one can’t  be sure.  There is an ominous sense of fulminations and it will be interesting to see what Mrs Woo-Star will be reading.

Violas bear Him Away - New Jersey Gothic

Sadly, Bart Brassica has not been seen in these parts for years. This post revisits an old photograph of Bart, bucket-handed and embedded in violas, the New Jersey Gothic gorgeousness of the black ground and all those violas, has Mavis Eggwhistle wondering. If she is not exactly hopeful, she is stalwart and does not subscribe to despair about those who have disappeared.

Scythed Sealed Delivered - Mr Farmhand's Anti-Covid Cocoon

In the current pandemic Mr Farmhand, conscious of the need to stay safe while out walking, is seen   here putting the finishing scythe-wise sealant on his Walking Cocoon. Once inside he will, hamster-esque, merely need to keep his  compass steady and a steady pace to roll to his destination in cocooned isolation.

Dirt in deed and done dirt chic!

It will not come a surprise to anyone who lives within a curcubit of Mr Farmhand that he his favourite band is still AC/DC, and he is still of the view that the lyrics Dirty Deeds is actually Dirt in Deed, and a reference to the virtues of soil cultivation.  Now that Mr Farmhand has traded in his shovel, a digging implement, for a dancing cane,  he still, indeed, likes to dig deep to AC/DC. 

Russians in Prussian

Usually with  these redo's of photo's in Prussian Blue I note who photographed whom. But here while I'm thinking Rasputin, those dark eyes, the cyanotic mouth, I've no notes just that unlovely and  overly large date. 

The Consolations of Lists in Isolation or a Pint of Pins

Having noticed this box of pins on my desk, the impulse to list a Varieties of Pins
commenced:

Tie, map, dress, 

fibula, safety, nappy,

kilt, cross-headed

steel, dental, rolling, 

insular, gregarious,

nafores, money, point,

famous, donkey-tail, 

drawing,  -it-down.

So, while not exhaustive, and let's face it, we have enough of that of late, lists console.

In Two Minds - and Two Hats

If you cannot decide to wear  a chapeau, a topper, a top hat or a bandeau, you can be in two minds with two moustaches, so get ahead of yourself and double your chances.

Kawabata: Beauty and Sadness - A recommendation for days of isolation

 Yasunari Kawabata's slim novel  'Beauty and Sadness'  is both of these things, from the opening scene in a near empty  first class train carriage with its swivel seats idly turning, expensive luggage left unattended, the feeling of being a passenger in an elegant and profound tragedy grows. The sense of  transitory beauty, haunted and fatalistic is established through carefully observed details, when the young artist Keiko straightens the back seam of her lover and mentor's kimono, it is likely a shiver will run up your spine, even though you won't know why.

While everyone in this novel  has impeccable manners, and the aesthetics are exquisite, the story opens into a disconcertingly moral morass. Kawabata in writing so neutrally about the moral failure of the Oki, the novelist and a principal character, makes a biting statement about how corruption can be glossed over by proper manners and a due regard for beauty.

Published first in Japanese in 1964  some eight years before Kawabata's suicide in 1972, the author's preoccupation with beauty and the beauty of death gives us a cinematic novel that echoes, like the Kyoto New Year bells' , long after midnight.

Footnote: While we are largely at home, I will write these short asides on what I am reading, just in case my blog followers are need reading inspiration.

Lichens to a Soft Shoe Shovel

These are strange times indeed and for a moment I thought Mr Farmhand had come down with a case of Existential Crises driven by erosion of his trusty  implement - the head or shovel part of the shovel, to call a spade a shovel, but now I see he has adapted his ex-shovel into a cane and is caught here in an impromptu soft-shoe  shuffle, lichen or not.

Study in White

Whitewashed wall, white vase by Dinosaur Design, and contemporary Japanese porcelain bowl that is practically perfect in its balance and geometry and morning light.

The Brothers Bunraku Pianola - or the uses of Campari and Soda

 The Brothers Bunraku -Pianola are keeping an eye on things, patient observers of the everyday, of who comes in and who goes out.  This last months, being in days of Covid 19, the traffic is confined to two yours trulies.  Still they are optimists, and having waited five years in a drawer in my house before I constructed bodies for them, Mr. Bunraku-Pianola the Elder - below - corporeal self being a Campari and sofa bottle, and Mr Bunraku-Pianolo the Younger, is built around a bottle whose contents once provided the peach part of a Bellini.  They are excellent company, subtle and never a cross word to say.

Swimming in Heavy Weather in the Empty Egg City Pool

It has been too long since we have checked in on Mavis Eggwhistle, Florista extraordinaire and plucky first adopter of stem cell therapy (See Rearmament - Mavis regains her arms) . 

Always one for the pond, Mavis has recently taken up ocean swimming, although this presents challenges in landlocked Hunterdon County.   Ever adaptable she swims in Egg City Pool.

Due to a a scarcity of resources the pool is diminutive but being built on a geothermal vortex it is consistently subject to such tremors and high end geological processes, its form now properly mimics a rough day in the ocean. And it has been emptied due to You Know What that rhymes with Ovid, So, Mavis, sets out, undaunted that she is alone,  at sea, and tide is completely out.

Con Fuschia

Autumn, the fuschia is that handy thing, a constant bloom.  A run of hanging, balletic particles,  unfashionable like witch;s britches or hats without a race course.  These suggest a chord that might ring with bell like clarity, though not in this dimension. 

Granny Eggwhistle in Splendid Isolation

Granny Eggwhistle has, until now, been loquacious but unseen personage in the intermittent reports from Hunterdon County that have come to be known as the Episodes from the Mr Farmhand Series.  She has, as she says of herself, cow-alessed here, in the April Sunday sun in Splendid Isolation. Splendid Isolation is her small farmlet, or as the novelists like to say, plot, it is bucolically woody ( but only as far as the floor).  So she is taking the sun, with her favourite oversized Orpington, the Three Wise Rabbits, a China Lamb ( this to avoid any suggestion that Granny is a carnivore) and Betsy the Curious Calf. Is that an overturned post box behind Granny Eggwhistle?  All of this is something to Ponder on.

Dark Star or No Dearth of Darth Orchids

Some years this dark orchid puts out twenty flower spikes, last year there was none.  This year’s set is not profuse but still abundant and being largely in a state of stasis in the house, and in need of flowers, this, with its heady scent, its intensity and steady blooming, is what the epidemiologist calls for : a good reason to stay home.