On an almost daily basis I’m passing through an infrastructure which normally would attract my attention due to its spectacular lines, shapes, many types of repetition, etc. – this in particular when the sun renders light and shadow areas augmenting the entire scene.

Recent weeks’ bad weather with grey indeterminable and diffuse light gradually attenuated my catch of motifs. In all the rain – I ran dry.

Dry of awareness, dry of inspiration to take on new motifs.

Came home with fewer and fewer images – and this is not good when having taken up the photo-a-day challenge. I was like a stone-age hunter who returned empty-handed to his hungry family – or like my shaver when it hasn’t been charged for a long time. You know, the bar on the battery level indicator being hardly visible.

I was about running completely dry when my attention was directed towards reflections – Reflections in puddles, in windows and on walls.

It appeared to me that reflections in a train’s windows can capture the entire essence of a railway station – actually of the whole concept of travelling.

It appeared to me that reflections in a puddle – with its limited space and different perspective and mirror image – can emphasize details which otherwise would have gone unnoticed.

It appeared to me that reflections in windows of a few minutes of rare sunshine can transform the façade of a house on the other (shadowy) side of the street into a playful backdrop for a street scene.

I’m writing this on the morning train and we’re now approaching a wet Paris that seems to duck under a grey and heavy sky. But in there I know that puddles and windows will be playgrounds for reflections – just waiting for me to capture them.

So, have I just made a reflection on reflections? I think I have.

My literary occupation in the recent week has been a re-encounter with the Song of Roland – more precisely the English version translated in 1957 by Dorothy L. Sayers and re-issued by Penguin Classics in 1978. 

Reading this masterpiece of an epic now for the 2^nd time I took good time to go through the splendid foreword and subsequently plough my way through the 291 laisses. It has been an interesting parcours – I have been in noble and royal company, listened to councils of the adversaries, been amidst horrific and bloody battle scenes – and discovered that my boyhood’s ability to transform a written text to an inner visual version of it is very much intact today. 

It was in particular the descriptive parts where the costumes, equipment and horses are presented to the readers that nourished this inner visualisation. Despite the stringent narrative form of the laisses a rich flow of nouns, adjectives and superlatives are passed on. These cover of course the mimics and gestures of the actors in the epic, but abundantly also equipment like helmets, shields, weaponry and garments.Take for example these verses from laisse no. 228:

…He dons a byrny whose skirts are saffron’d o’er.

He’s laced his helm with gems and gold adorned,

…About his neck he hangs his scutcheon broad:

The boss is golden and crystal is the orle,

The straps tough silk with broidered roundels wrought. 

…and horses!

Horses are described with a veneration that would leave no car enthusiast of today untouched, because the vocabulary would fit right into an episode of Top Gear. Just read this part from laisse no. 114 where the Archbishop Turpin reopens the battle:

…He rides a charger that from Gossayle he took

(That was a king in Denmark, whom he slew).

A steed he is swiftly-running and smooth,

Flat in the knee and hollow in the hoof,

Short in the thigh and ample in the croup,

Long in the flank and the back well set up,

White of his tail and yellow of his plume,

Small of his ears and his head tawny-hued;

He is a horse no courser could outdo. 

Did you notice the details went all the way down to the colours? I did. And when I read it, I could not help thinking what rich thoughts that might have come to mind when we earlier this year worked on one of the pieces we will have on display at the Quilt Festival in Houston this fall – had I read the Song of Roland before we started that project. Inge and I discussed back and forth on how to render a pair of horses, from the basic colour scheme over the quilting pattern and applied thread – trying to imagine how we could make the end result turn out as we wanted it to.When implementing the quilt I would have loved to recite something homemade like this: 

Well have we heeded our ideas on design,

For a fair motif we have chosen you two,

Horses of Chantilly don’t let us down,

Ride off to Houston and become our crown. 

I’m afraid though, that with the time it took to finish the piece, I would have driven Inge crazy – because no Turoldus I am.

Today is the last open day of an exhibition we would have liked to visit. We did not make it, and with the venue being in Denmark and us being in France, we will not make it. It would have been interesting for us in several ways. One way would in particular have been to find an answer to the question we were left with earlier this year after having reviewed a book on Danish art quilts. We posted the review on this blog under the title Art and How-to. 

Knowing that the exhibition would show works of all members of the art quilt group “Quiltequnstnerne” we wondered whether the exhibition would feature some form of coherence across the exhibited works – despite the fact that the group includes 24 individualists, leading naturally to a wide diversity in artistic expressions. 

A possibility for finding an answer appeared the other day in the form of images of the exhibited works, coverage of the private view day and a press clip – all kindly provided by Bettina Andersen. 

Knowing the venue well and supported by the images from the private view day we could with a high degree of fidelity get an impression of the way the 70 exhibited works were physically displayed. From that we could take a closer look on the works – as a whole and individually. The diversity we expected in terms of artistic expression, design and implementation was evident already after the first look over. A closer look at the individual works did not change the fact that the works indeed represent 24 individualists. Is this bad or is it good? 

It is good if the purpose of the exhibition is to mark the 10^th anniversary of “Quiltequnstnerne” by showing the public what they can do with the textile medium they have chosen for expressing themselves artistically. The exhibition did not include the retro aspect, so we could not see from which level the artists started out 10 years ago – rather where the group is today. From whichever level the individual artists started out we noticed several pieces with good and well thought through designs. And this is good. 

But, by representing everyone in the group, in virtue of their membership, the exhibition becomes, however, more of a quilt show than an art exhibition per se – and indicates that “Quiltequnstnerne” today is more an interest group for collectively arriving at exhibition venues than a group of even levelled artists. Representing everyone in a group bears with it the negative side-effect that the weaker peaces pull the overall impression of the exhibition downwards.  

Now, the quilting medium is interesting in itself. We all know the advantages of the non-reflective surface, the effect of the quilting and the various ways art can be implemented through textiles. Even the journalist, who we believe has an academic background in fine art (or its history) seems in her very well written and enthusiastic review to have gotten carried away and unknowingly discussed implementation techniques with more emphasis than the artistic aspects, design and overall impact. But this is not bad. 

We should not leave this blog entry without congratulating the group for hanging in over 10 years and expressing our admiration for the professional set up, which seemingly characterized this exhibition, in terms of venue, hanging of works and all the way to dealing with the media, arrangements of the vernissage, and provision of good quality images for someone like us. 

So, in a way we made it to the exhibition – after all – and found our answer.

This morning Inge pointed out another source of artistic inspiration, which may not be directly apparent to everyone. It wasn’t to me. It is now and those using coffee capsules for making their espressos will immediately understand what she meant when referring to the container for used capsules. Ours can only contain a dozen used capsules and it was yesterday when emptying it that it appeared to her that here was a motif with artistic components in the form of circles, ovals, colours, light and shadows – all framed in by the cubic form of the container. 

I caught in particular her reference to the colours. Perhaps because I two days before had purchased a new portion of capsules and noted the interior design of the Nespresso shop in the 6^th arrondissement of Paris. While waiting for the shop assistant to serve another customer I had a few minutes to note how the negative space of the shop deliberately was kept in deep brown, almost black, so that the coffee capsules could sparkle as jewels and the prints on the boxes, although muted, could sing out and send signals to the customers. Every coffee type has its unique colour. 

Colours, when presented in the form of the whole colour-wheel or even as a limited range of hues, seem to have a positive effect on people. Some people at least.  Since childhood I have belonged to that category and it were the small boxes of first grade crayons that started it all.

It has stayed with me ever since and you can imagine that when Inge suggested that I bought a box of Swiss water colour crayons as her gift to me for  my 50^th birthday I needed no 2 seconds of persuasion. When unpacking at home I was of course not surprised. I knew that the metal box contained 120 different hues, spanning the entire spectrum. 120! 

Opening the box these days – several years after that birthday – and looking at the crayons as they lay side by side still changes my mood in a positive direction. Knowing this I cannot help thinking that the coffee company’s interior designers may have had someone like me in mind.