I know.
Information and exchange of views are not flowing that intensely here for the time being. Don’t see this as if we are in hibernation – which we are not. We are as busy as ever!
Inge has recently gone on Facebook. You can find her under her name: Inge Mardal
I would like to show you a couple of photographs Inge shot during a recent trip up north to Denmark. They were shot in a small provincial town, and are not dramatic, sensational or fancy in any way. On the contrary…
But what really struck me when seeing them was that they seemed frozen in time. Perhaps it was because we have been restoring old family photos in the last months that it appeared to me that they could have been shot way back in the 50′ies. Take a look at them (if you would like to see them enlarged, just click on them):
It can be quite relaxing for the mind to rest for a while in a time bubble, and images like these certainly help getting this rest.
But, we all know that time does not stand still. Some of us would agree that it flies like an arrow – too fast. One of the ways to get a sensation of this is to take a look at what happened in recent months.
Ha! On this blog not much happened recently, you may think. This is correct, and makes me contemplate to train my small helpers (introduced in the previous blog) to also help me editing blogs.
But something happened elsewhere!
The quilts mentioned above are included in our Quilt Show on our Website. Just click on QUILTS on the top of the page.
It has now been a while that I wanted to introduce my little photo studio friends. I ought to introduce them, since they now for some years have been very helpful indeed, always available and never moaning about late and long working hours. So this is what this blog entry will be about, that of introducing my little photo studio friends.
Here you have them all, lined up at year’s end.
You may wonder in which way they could possibly be helpful to me. Well, the answer is straightforward. They help me in meeting the Photo-a-Day challenge, which I with Inge’s support have met every single day during a couple of years now. Participating in this challenge is supposed to hone my photographic skills. Now, to avoid that you mistakenly should regard me as a real hero with a will of steel, I should confess that I am a playboy participant in this challenge. Inge does all the image processing – I only do the shooting.
But without shooting these images, there will be none to process and upload to the album on PBASE. So I have to shoot every day.
Knowing this now, you easily can understand that it is particularly during weekends that they come to my rescue. Very often we do not go places outside the trodden paths where I feel that I have already exploited all inspirational sources for landing an interesting image – and before bedtime I realize that I haven’t shot a single scene all day!
That is when I scramble my little friends. Together we build up compositions we think could lead to an image that would attract other users of PBASE, in particular those who also do the Photo-a-Day thing. Since we have to do the shooting before midnight you can easily imagine that we often feel a bit stressed while setting the scene and determining backdrops and the way light and camera should interact. Once this is settled, though, we relax a trifle and concentrate on the choreography and accessories.
As the subsequent shooting progresses relaxation gradually finds its way back to us.
To better understand what I’m talking about here and what our joint efforts can lead to, I kindly invite you check out the following images:
The images above are all extracted from my Photo-A-Day album on PBASE. There you find many more examples on how my patient and helpful little friends cooperate.
I recently tried making minestrone for the first time – and really enjoyed it, because all the ingredients are so pleasant for the eyes and easy to handle. While soaking in water the mix of a dozen different dried peas and beans reminded me of pebbles on a summery beach – which is not bad on a grey winter’s day – and pealing and chopping carrots, turnips, garlic, onions etc. added the pleasure of handling fresh and crisp vegetables.
Intuitively I crunched two small red peppers and a spoonful herbes de Provence.
You can imagine that my expectations were high after this ouverture in the kitchen and they did not get smaller when I served it with grated Conté cheese sprinkled over.
After the first couple of spoonfuls the crisis set in. It tasted of absolutely nothing.
”Waterish” was one of the words that were exchanged over the dining table. I repeated this word when explaining my disappointment to my Italian colleagues the next day and asked them how they made minestrone. Being Italian they should know, I thought.
One said that his late mother was an expert in the field, but when still staying at home at this family he did not like vegetables at all and could not care less about a recipe for minestrone.
When entering my office the following day I found to my great surprise a bowl filled to the rim with minestone. Another of my colleagues and his family had had that on the menu the evening before and thought that this would be the best way to make me know what their recipe was about.
I served it when coming home in the evening, added a little olive oil on top, as my colleague had recommended, and sprinkled with a little grated cheese. Although it did not taste of much either it was less “waterish” than mine and appeared creamier in consistence.
My colleague now has the problem of reconstructing the recipe they use at home, because for a while the responsibility of making minestrone has been passed on to their au pair! So now the minestrone crisis has spread to his home as well, but together we will get out of it and serve tastier and creamier minestrone in the future – at least, that’s what I hope!
Now that we have said “Goodbye” and “See you next year!” to Santa Claus and the Holidays formally end with Epiphany today it is a good time to start this year’s blog by wishing you all a very interesting and personally creative 2009.
One of the advantages of receptions and other “get-togetherings” with international participation is that small talk here has wider boundaries than is usually the case where everyone comes from the same country or region. The wider boundaries embrace the multitude of languages and national/regional habits of the people present at an event – and that fact makes a fantastic difference.
At Yuletide small talk amongst a group of mixed nationalities is as good as it gets, because this time of the year is so rich on traditions and that not only at regional level but all the way down to family level – and often loaded with nostalgia. So, launching a little remark about the Christmas decorations in a restaurant, for example or about a meal in December almost automatically triggers discussions and exchanges of views and experiences that can last for half a day or the duration of an entire dinner, dessert included.
It is through such small talk that our very modest Christmas decoration was influenced by Catalan traditions. Along with a pair of Nisser, a traditional (definitely of pagan origin) Swedish style billy-goat of straw and a “Danish design” candle holder for 4 candles our Christmas decoration portfolio now also includes two Catalan objects. One is a pipe-smoking Caganer figurine neatly and creatively modelled in terracotta by an artist living north of Barcelona. I introduced him on the blog in December 2007, so some of you are already familiar with this little new friend of ours.
The other Catalan object is a small-scale Tió de Nadal made in the low mountains west of Barcelona. It is a Christmas log equipped with a little blanket, a little Catalan hat and a little stick to beat the log with when time is ripe for it to produce Christmas gifts.
I like such items rooted in popular imagination.
These two Catalan items are very sympathetic and so un-Danish that if we had Danish visitors at Christmas time they surely would focus on them – and surely an easygoing discussion on habits and traditions would follow. The loop would be closed in the way that what came out of pleasant small talk a couple of years ago at Yuletide would again sustain exactly that.
We got our quilts back from the MAQS where they had been displayed in the exhibition “On a Grand Scale”, a dialogue exhibition with works of Florida based artist Eleanor McCain. They returned in the same two robust boxes in which we had sent them, so there was a little touch of déjà vu already when the FedEx man stepped out of the lift with the boxes on his sack truck and approached our front door.
But the interesting part did not begin before the boxes got opened and I (yes. I did the logistics) took the quilts out for inspection and storage. The interesting part is this defile of works after they have been away for a while as they pass through my hands, the unfolding of them and instant recognition of the piece.
This familiarity with each of them must of course be unique for Inge and me, since they were created by our minds and hands, and it is incredible how fast the eyes track details and the brain recall how these details were deliberated over beforehand and sometime the problems of creating them as we had envisaged.
Some days later 3 boxes arrived from Houston, bringing back the 2 of the 7 works we had exhibited in the various exhibitions at Quilt Festival (the remainder 5 are all going on tours) plus one that had finished its touring. It is only a couple of weeks ago since we last saw the two most recently exhibited so they were rather fresh in mind. But what the unpacking of these boxes brought instead was the instant recollection of many of the conversations we had with viewers in front of our works while they were on display in Houston.
I consider this a very nice and rich experience which complements the interesting aspects of unpacking.
“But Steen”, you may say “You did not make it to MAQS and hence did not have such conversations with the visitors to the dialogue exhibition there. So did you miss this nice and rich experience of recalling conversations with visitors there?”
Yes, I am missing them and would very much have liked being there. But you know what? The curator at MAQS, Judy Schwender has compensated this by sending us a splendid photographic coverage of the entire exhibition, and slide-showing the images gives a very good impression of the whole set up and a good idea of how it must have been walking around in the exhibition area.
Recently, when in Houston at the Quilt Festival a representative of the publishing company Nihon Vogue Ltd. brought us a copy of the 1st issue of their new magazine “Quilt World”. We knew that a copy was in the mail to our home address but we had not received a copy before leaving France. At Quilt Festival it happened that people we met referred to that new magazine – in particular to an article featuring Inge, how she worked and how our teamwork in the studio unfolds. Understandably we were curious to see how this new magazine presented itself.
We knew that the article was laid out well in terms of text and images. But it is not the same as seeing it in print, getting a feel for how images were reproduced and how the article per se had found its place in the overall flow of the magazine.
When it comes to printing and reproduction of images, I truly am a nit-picker – have always been and cannot help it. I knew that the printing quality of the catalogue for the 8th Quilt Nihon Exhibition was superb, but one thing is a catalogue for a specific prestigious exhibition, another thing is the printing of a monthly magazine.
I was not disappointed with what met my eyes, and that was a pleasure in itself. But I have too admit that the closest I come to reading Japanese is the English version of “I am a Cat” by Soseki Natsume, which I’m currently reading – so what regards the written content of the article I have to resort to the knowledge of the input for the article provided by us in English.
For the time being, that is. Because next time we meet with our Japanese friends or those knowledgeable of the Japanese language, I will kindly ask them to read it for me in English, slowly – and I will leisurely lean back and enjoy every word of it!
Oh, I forgot to mention – with a smile – that the editor had included an image from our blog where the little fellow is walking in the Pennines. I found that amusing, and I’m sure he’s very proud of being featured nation-wide in Japan…
Throughout last week we have been as busy as politicians in an election campaign with all our doings at Quilt Festival in Houston. You know, visiting with many of our friends who also attend this event, sitting in on lectures, going to receptions, checking out new materials on the market, discussing future projects and – of course – enjoying the many different exhibits of traditional and contemporary quilts.
We consequently had very little time to meet the public, which is important for us. So many of the visitors walking through the exhibitions have a profound interest in what they see, and given the opportunity they would ask all kinds of questions about a quilt that has attracted their attention. They would ask questions about how it was made, which materials and technique were applied and so on.
Well, most of this visitors can read on a information sheets, but it is not the same compared to entering into a dialogue and ask those questions directly to the maker(s) of the quilts and perhaps also get the story behind it or be pointed to a given detail which may not be apparent at a first glance.
Such dialogues enriches their visit to the exhibition and ours as well, because we get this additional dimension of a personal contact with the viewers of our works and learn which impact they have.
We love these dialogues with the visitors and regret that we have not had all the time we could have wished to meet them this time. In contrast to politicians we cannot cover our absence with TV-spots.
These days are very interesting for us. It is the seventh time we’re visiting the Quilt Festival in Houston.
The excitement of seeing the various exhibitions is as intense as we remember from previous years, and it seems that every day brings new surprises with it – being it in the framework of the exhibitions per se or venues we visit while being in town.
It is such a pleasure to meet friends in the hallways, the market and exhibition areas, at receptions or in the hotel after hours. Often such encounters lead to new acquaintances as well, so it seems we’re be part of something that will continue forever in a place where the distance to laughter and good discussions is not far.
And then there are the many cases where people we do not know yet – quilters and/or visitors to the exhibitions – spontaneously approach us because they have just seen one of our works in one of the exhibitions or want to talk about some of our works they have read about or seen at previous occasions.
Yes, we are having a great time here. It is great to be amongst quilters and those who love to see what they create.