Everyday Sublime

today is australia day, tomorrow is grocery day, originally uploaded by Saffron.

Today I had a lamington for breakfast from one of our local bakeries and it led me to reflect on the old aussie country town bakery and wonder why someone who doesn't care about bread would become a baker. When run by an inspired foodie the Aussie country bakery is truly an inspiring place, cream buns with real cream, steak pies full of rich gravy and actual chunks of meat and lovely, fluffy lamingtons, the cake slightly yellow from the real eggs used in the sponge, fresh dessicated coconut and a juicy layer of chocolate sauce, creating a gooey barrier between the coconut and the sponge. (I've thought a lot about this!) Unfortunately many lamingtons are not like this and seem to be an excuse to use up any stale old sponge cake the baker has lying around.

The lack of a good lamington is symbolic of the lack of good solid , locally made crafted products in every area of our lives. When you take your stale cake lamington home and eat it off your Ikea plate that is not really quite the right size and the glaze is chipping off, drink your tea bag tea out of a manufactured mug whos rim is slightly too thick for comfort and add milk that is at least seven days old and comes from a corporate farm thousands of miles away you are wasting an opportunity to experience what I call the Everyday Sublime. These little moments each day when you can relax should be enhanced by the finest, freshest (and that usually means local and often organic), handmade items you can find. As one of my cash- poor friends once said
"When you are poor you can't afford to be cheap."

...drift away

I have blog fatigue after Lepidoptera week! Actually I have everything fatigue due to having a baby and a 2 year old. I have heaps of interesting thoughts but half-formed they just come into my head ...and.......seem..........
.......................to drift away.

I only have the appearance of a normal person due to the extreme effort I put in every day to get dressed and brush my hair!


........What was I saying?
Here are some really lovely toys/jewellery by talented English artists Mike Abbot and Kim Ellwood. you can find more of their work at Akar Gallery.

Butterfly Man

These are well used butterfly bowls from my collection. I love the chips in these bowls, they remind me that I make pots to be used. these chips represent breakfasts, dinners, salsa's, soups and porridges.

All the butterflies on my pots are real and drawn from a range of Lepidoptera encyclopedia I have collected over the years. I have always thought that one day some-one would come into the studio and recognize this. My lovely friend BB brought an Englishman by one day and just as he was leaving he looked up at a dusty old specimen I had hanging around on one of the shelves and said "That's a Meadow Argus!" So it was, his father was a botanist who traveled with his family to a Greek island to study butterflies.

Year-round gardening

Two Lepidoptera art items.
Rose Cobb's "Unity" light shade is made of porcelain with the shadowy moths glowing through the translucent material.
And visit gardener extraordinaire and photographer Rinne Allen's website for an evocative walk through the minutiae of garden life in Athens , Georgia. I feel a certain kinship with Rinne as she has also moved back to the small town in which she grew up. This is a strange thing as I couldn't wait to leave the place when I was 17.

Rinne says of Athens "Athens provides a beautiful place to live and work, as well as a near year-round gardening calendar due to its mild clime." This is very similar to my town, she lives in what sounds like a historic house, and even though my house is not what you would call historic it is historic for me. I used to look at my house when I was a little kid and think what a nice house it was and how I would like to live in it. Rinne Allen has a great vegetable garden - which is what I dream about........

Actias Luna

Prothalamium
Fifth section of "Astoria" sequence
© Aaron Kramer

Come, all you who are not satisfied
as ruler in a lone, wallpapered room
full of mute birds, and flowers that falsely bloom,
and closets choked with dreams that long ago died!

Come, let us sweep the old streets--like a bride;
sweep out dead leaves with a relentless broom;
prepare for Spring, as though he were our groom
for whose light footstep eagerly we bide.

We'll sweep out shadows, where the rats long fed;
sweep out our shame--and in its place we'll make
a bower for love, a splendid marriage-bed
fragrant with flowers aquiver for the Spring.
And when he comes, our murdered dreams shall wake;
and when he comes, all the mute birds shall sing.

This beautiful poem is the preface to one of my favourite books, "Prodigal Summer" by Barbara Kingslover. The Luna Moth is one of the main themes in this book which is about love of nature, love of a partner and love of family and how these love are so strange and complex yet every part of their weirdness weaves itself into a balance that is delicate and strong.

I learnt from this book that a moth's haphazard flight is caused by the fact that moths navigate through their olfactory system. Comparing two points in space by smell and moving towards the one of greater concentration. This creates the typical zig-zag flight path as the moth moves through currents of scent in the air. This is a description of the making process. From the first,faint whiff of inspiration, a dream, something caught out of the corner of my eye, to the clumsy yet compelling first attempts at making a form,lines that don't quite have conviction, drawn again and again on paper, on clay. Firing and firing , until.... you reach the point of greatest concentration, the end of a strange zig-zag path. Olfactory navigation for artists.

(I have learnt nearly everything I know from novels.)

Lovely teapot and tumblers (which somehow in their lightness and earthy nature remind me of butterflies) by American potter Micheal Kline.

beautiful but little understood...

Joseph Scheer is a perfect companion for yesterdays post on Allyson Reynolds. Scheer has developed a photographic process where he takes detailed images of moths and reveals their secret colors, feathery scales in brilliant patterns and delicate fronded antenae. Scheer's book "Night Visions- The Secret Designs of Moths" contains an essay by Mark Epstein examining the beauty and variety of moths, their lifecycle and the scientific difference between a moth and a butterfly. I love his conclusion that,

"Ultimately it is best to think of butterflies as being one of several experiments in the evolution of day-flying Lepidoptera, the species overwhelmingly dominated by beautiful but little understood moths."(pp.13)

dizzy dance toward the light.....

I went to college with Allyson Reynolds. She was a sophisticated third year when I was a gauche second year. Allyson lives in the country and did a series of work exploring colour and composition through watercolours and collages of moths and butterflies. I love these works. To me they evoke the height of a tropical summer, when you can't move inside or out without seeing amazing moths. In examining the minute Reynolds draws the viewers attention to the details of life.

I also love how these works deal with the formal aspects of two dimensional art work. They capture movement through the application of the watercolour, and the compostion, posed but slightly askew creates a tension between life and death. Are these moths found under the lamp, dead then pinned for scientific scrutiny? Or are they resting about to fly off in their dizzy dance towards the light?

Happy April

Happy April. To celebrate the coming of winter (finally!) in sunny Queensland next week is officially declared Lepidoptera, week. For those among you who are not Latin scholars or naturalists this means......

Butterfly Week

In honor of this, I post the profound words of Dolly Parton...

Love is like a butterfly
As soft and gentle as a sigh
The multicolored moods of love are like its satin wings
Love makes your heart feel strange inside
It flutters like soft wings in flight
Love is like a butterfly, a rare and gentle thing

I feel it when you're with me
It happens when you kiss me
That rare and gentle feeling that I feel inside
Your touch is soft and gentle
Your kiss is warm and tender
Whenever I am with you I think of butterflies

In appreciation of my dear friend Rebecca the Wrecker I have to add that Nana Mouskouri does a lovely version of this song also.

Feel free to e-mail suggestions , images and Lepidoptera, related things.