by Marja-Leena 
Still working much too hard in the garden.
Here are a few images of what’s lovely today,
a drizzly day and a relief after yesterday’s heat.
How does your garden grow?
Addendum June 18th:
Leslee asked for a wider shot of this part of my garden, where the above photos were also taken.
It was cloudy so the colours aren’t very bright.
I have not yet put out all my potted plants and the garden bench.
by Marja-Leena 
The Opera Gala with Anna Netrebko, Elina Garanca, Ramón Vargas, and Ludovic Tézier performing opera favourites in a live concert from Baden-Baden, Germany. My husband joined me for a most pleasurable two plus hours of wonderful music by these superb young artists, all new to us except for Netrebko. I think we’re going to purchase this DVD or CD!
A late bedtime, then I was awake at 5 this morning, restless in body, still sore from the weekend’s labours, and a wee bit anxious with the work ahead of me today and tomorrow. An afternoon nap is on the schedule!
by Marja-Leena 
Alternating between gardening and utter exhaustion these May days, I’ve not being doing anything in the art-making side of my life. Interrupted by showers in sunshine this afternoon, I had time to play! Wanting to try making a birthday card for a gardening friend, I picked these raindrop covered petals off my favourite rhododendron and tried some scans. I like this one and hope it will print well.
Update May 28, 2008: There’s actually a name for this process – scannography!
by Marja-Leena 
Silent Messengers: Writing-on-Stone III
archival inkjet and collagraph
76.2 x 50.6 cm.
I’m excited and happy to announce my slide show gallery** of print works is finally online. I believe it makes viewing my work much easier and more pleasant than clicking on the individual entries in the blog archives. I hope you agree! Long time readers may have already seen most of my work, except for the last five pieces in the Silent Messengers series. Subtitled Writing-on-Stone, they appear in the beginning of the slide show.
I’ll be adding lots more selections from the older series, so please check back again from time to time. The ‘gallery’ link is up on the top left area of this blog.** As for the current print series I’m working on, I’ll announce when I have some of them installed.
Being quite hopeless with web geekery, I’m hugely grateful to my graphic-designer-daughter Erika for researching different options and finding an easy presentation program to incorporate into the blog, then setting this ‘gallery’ up for me so that all I do is upload the images and information to it.
Related: This work was featured in qarrtsiluni.
**Update May 3, 2012: the ‘gallery’ link has been removed. Work is in progress on a new one…
UPDATE AGAIN much later: the link above now goes to the latest brand new gallery, and you can find it also at the top of the left bar on this site – enjoy!
by Marja-Leena 
I’ve just learned that one of my favourite contemporary artists has died at 82: Robert Rauschenberg.
The New York Times has a very good obituary on him. In case you cannot get past the registration wall that it may fall behind, I’ve saved it here as a PDF.
I’ve just fetched my copy of the monograph Rauschenberg: Art and Life by Mary Lynn Kotz, (2004. Abrams) (cover image above) and am revisiting my favourite images while pondering on his vast output and influence on so many artists.
by Marja-Leena 
Remembering my mother this Mother’s Day and Äitienpäivä, here in Canada and in Finland, US and a few other countries. I still miss her almost every day even after 20 years since her passing.
On this sunny afternoon, I’m eagerly looking forward to a salmon bbq and dessert with our three daughters, two little granddaughters and the men in our family. I am so lucky. We’re also celebrating youngest daughter’s birthday (actually tomorrow), a Mother’s Day baby 23 years ago!
Wishing everyone a happy day, remembering your mother and/or a mother figure dear to you. If you are a mother, enjoy your family today.
Related links:
day before Mother’s Day 2007 in my garden (the lilacs and Mexican orange are late this year!)
Mother’s Day 2006
Mother’s Day 2005
by Marja-Leena Whenever I have to take the car over town somewhere, I usually try to do several things on that journey, to maximize pleasure over pain, for I dislike driving in Vancouver’s crazy traffic, and then there’s the cost of gas. So it was that I had arranged a date with my husband for yesterday afternoon. After a visit with my wonderful naturopath, I headed over to nearby Granville Island. I wandered for about an hour around some wonderful shops like Maiwa, highly tempted by their lovely artistic clothing and Asian fabric arts. Thinking about sewing, I checked out their craft supply store but did not find what I’d hoped for… maybe next time.
Then my husband arrived, having cycled from work. As always when we meet after work somewhere in town, he finds our van in a designated area, loads the bike inside and changes from cycling gear to regular clothes that he’s left in the car the night before, then comes find me. It’s such a delight to meet like this, makes me feel like twenty-something, almost.
Together we went into the Circle Craft Gallery to see our Finnish-Canadian friend Kaija Rautianen’s exhibition of Jacquard tapestry weavings, entitled Natural Images: Bear Encounters. Lovely work as always, and a very interesting process. Kaija’s images of bears were taken on a sailing trip up the coast of BC, where the bear is considered sacred by the First Nations. I thought of how the bear was also sacred to some of the ancient people in Finland* as well. Check out this excellent review.
Next stop was Emily Carr University of Art and Design (formerly Institute) to see the Emily Carr Grad Show 2008. Read about it on daughter Erika’s blog. We saw the website she assisted in creating, like she did last year when she was a grad. I didn’t have the energy to go through the entire massive show, but what we did see was impressive.
By this time we were hungry and headed over for an always wonderful meal in a favourite restaurant on this Island, overlooking all the boats in False Creek, with the city’s highrises glowing in the sunshine on the other shore. Nice date, don’t you think? I only wish I’d remembered the camera.
(*expired link has been removed)
by Marja-Leena 
Boogie Street’s Mr Zip, an artist and blog pal in the UK, wrote this on my previous post called rust circle:
Lovely piece of metal, and I can understand why you’ve kept it for so long. When at university I picked up a sanding disk with black patches and scraps of paint attached, which I found similarly attractive, and it’s been hanging on my studio wall ever since. I know it can be used in an artwork somehow, but have yet to find the right way. Meanwhile, I just enjoy it for its own sake.
And he kindly offered these images to me to put up here. Aren’t they gorgeous?! I can just imagine a future archaeologist excited by finds like ours.
Circles, especially man-made ones, have recently figured in some of my work, so maybe I was led to rediscovering my long-saved rust circle…. and receiving another from a reader! Anyone else have similar weathered treasures?
by Marja-Leena 
Virtual armchair traveller that I am, I appreciate it when art museums provide online exhibitions.
I’ve just had a wander through one of MOMA’s current exhibitions Color Chart –
Reinventing Color 1950 to today. Interesting curatorial theme and website design.
(thanks to Marc for pointing this out via the CARFAC-BC e-digest)
It’s not so much about colour charts and colour theory, but the title did make me think of The Colour Museum. And inspired me to play with my ‘crayons’.
by Marja-Leena Yesterday we headed out to Burnaby (a city next to Vancouver) and the Scandinavian Centre where we enjoyed a recital of songs sung in Finnish, Swedish and Italian by a beautiful, rising talent, Finnish-American singer Maria Männistö. Here’s the announcement we received (hyperlinks mine):
Canadian Friends of Finland, Vancouver presents Finnish-American soprano Maria Mannisto in a recital of songs by Finnish composers Jean Sibelius, Toivo Kuula, Oskar Merikanto and Erkki Melartin. The program also includes two arias by Giacomo Puccini.
For the second half of the program, Maria will be joined by double bassist Scott Teske performing a selection of beloved Finnish folksongs and tangos.
Winner of 2007 Finlandia Foundation Performer Award of the Year, this talented young singer has performed to great acclaim in numerous cities across the USA, including Washington DC, Chicago and San Francisco. Maria is director of the Finnish Choral Society in Seattle and organist and music director of the Finnish Lutheran Church. She is studying operatic performance at the University of Washington under Thomas Harper and recently auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
We loved all of it, the Puccini arias the most of course, as well as hearing the Finnish language in song. My husband commented that my late father (a keen amateur singer) would have loved this, I agreed saying my parents were very much in my thoughts. The first half of the program, accompanied at the piano by Terhi Miikki-Boersma, consisted of the more serious music and showcased Ms Männistö’s beautiful voice and range of musical styles. The second half consisted of lighthearted popular Finnish and Swedish songs, with the singer accompanying herself at the piano and with Scott Teske playing a double bass, a curious guitar-like instrument we’d not seen before. It will be interesting to watch her career in opera take off.
Afterwards, because we were in the neighbourhood, we went to the Burnaby Art Gallery to see an exhibition of prints, drawing and paintings by Ron Eckert, recently retired from a long teaching career at Vancouver’s art school, Emily Carr Institute. We liked his looser drawings the most.
As always when we come here, we went for a walk around the lovely gardens and down along Deer Lake. As we returned it began to rain. We drove up to Burnaby Mountain Park. I wanted to revisit the Ainu sculptures, the Kamui Mintara (Playground of the Gods). I have written about them before, how remarkably similar they are to the Northwest Coast First Nations’ totem poles.
To cap the afternoon, we had a wonderful dinner in the restaurant overlooking the park and sculptures and with a fantastic view west over Vancouver (except we could not see it because the rain turned to snow!). We shared a dessert of a most divine chocolate mousse with pecan crust, mmmm.