a good friday

It's about time this space got a little attention. I've been absent due to wonderful things. Things like getting married and going away for some rest and adventure. Speaking of which, I'm currently deeply busy preparing for my solo show next month. 

It's called H O N E Y M O O N and I promise to share all the necessary details very soon.

In the meantime, here are two pictures Deon and Irene of Modern Hearts took on our wedding day. More, here. I'm a bit smitten with these two, they're the loveliest people and they take very beautiful pictures.

Paper walls

These walls are paper-thin. Our poor silent neighbours must share all our triumphs and disasters.

Who knew yarrow could be so good-looking (and useful)! 

I didn’t. Thanks wiki…

I like the common names, nosebleed plant, old man's pepper, devil's nettle, sanguinary, milfoil, soldier's woundwort, thousand-leaf, thousand-seal.

From my temporary bush studio

Last Wednesday I saw galloping giraffes, a very happy thing to witness. This week I'm back in the city and still dreaming of those long legs and necks.

Friday's sun, rising over eastern Botswana.

one evening in Ravenna

There are magnificent things to see in Ravenna; photographs are pointless in conveying the scale and intricacy in the craft you may find there. I can only share tiny things I saw next to things that sustain open-mouthed staring for several minutes.

Ravenna has grand mosaics in the true sense of grand but at some point I stopped looking. I saw bamboo flapping against the top of a high wall. Of course I found a gap to spy through and was rewarded with a daffodil garden and six white peacocks just before it got too dark to see.

We only just made our train back and then decided to take the next one anyway and spend an hour exploring the joy that is a supermarket in a foreign place.

Visit Ravenna, the city bikes are free and the mosaics are heavy on gold (and old).

(I found sugar-paper confetti on the pavement outside the train station)

gelato + douglas

Some quick pink love from Bologna: Pompelmo rosa gelato (amazing!) and dark chocolate (better). They don't go together; they're two separate heavens. And a bike called Douglas. I think my pink-phobia is officially over.

holiday reads

From Day 2 and Day 7

I’d like to share two books I read over the Summer break that have really stuck with me and that I look forward to reading again in a couple of years. They’re the kind of stories that will give you something new each time you revisit. 

The first is Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides in which the imagery kind of blew me away and although I appreciated the film adaptation very much it just doesn’t come close to the loaded sentences on these pages. 

Matthew bought The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes as a Christmas gift to my mom. We chose it for her because it won the Man Booker last year and … we both loved the typesetting and typography on the cover. It's a quick, surprising read and leaves plenty to discuss. I was really slow to notice it at first but I think the ambiguity in the title really nailed it.

I snapped them with a collection of finds, drinks and gifts from my December beach holiday which was almost too good to be true thanks to my wonderful parents and M.

the best kind

last saturday, two good women

the wilderness downtown

friday in this city

Green on Green

Green is a name for many colours. This is why I love it.

Upper orange

I walked all the way up Upper Orange street last week on my way to the Finnish embassy, found a park called the Homestead, sat in the sun under a fruit tree and stuffed these in my purse.

things i saw on sunday

Hello 2011

 

Happy New Year!

(photograph from Matthew's first medium format venture!)

I am going swimming in cocacola tsitsikamma water

This is my mother doing just that . 

(One of my recent characters kind of reminds me of her)

swimming pool season