by Marja-Leena 
In the late afternoon today, the sun was streaming into our office, filtered by the trees outside and plants in the window. My youngest daughter was using the inkjet printer for a school project, when I turned around to leave the room and was struck by this image on the wall opposite the window. Erika grabbed the camera and captured this ephemeral moment. Just a little PhotoShopping to increase contrast and to crop, and voilà!
by Marja-Leena What a busy week this has been, making art, seeing art and meeting artists! I finally completed editioning a group of prints that took me several months to develop and print many trial proofs. I’m testing another hanging method (not a frame) and I hope this will be resolved next week. The prints still need to be trimmed and assembled, signed, documented and photographed. Then I will post them here for you to see. After a slow January and February, dulled and lacking motivation due to a long running flu, it has felt good to be productive again this month. So I felt pretty high with a sense of accomplishment this morning.
After my morning in the printmaking studio, I went to meet artist Pnina Granirer. She had expressed her pleasure that I had visited her exhibition earlier this week and blogged about it, and thus wished to meet me. I was thrilled to accept an invitation to her studio. I felt instantly comfortable with her and we had lots to talk about as she showed me her work and her spacious studio with a water and mountain view. I learned a lot about her processes, our mutual love of rocks, experiences with galleries, and much more. Thank you, Pnina, for your generosity! Once again, blogging opened another wonderful connection and friendship.
I also managed to see Janet Strayer’s work at Enigma which is in the same area of the city. It looks very colourful and adds a European ambience to the restaurant. Naturally I’m biased towards prints, and Janet has several great selections there. A couple of paintings using plaster for texture really caught my eye. Congratulations, Janet!
Then sushi with some of my family – thank goodness it’s Friday! Spring is here and the garden beckons this weekend.
by Marja-Leena 
We returned refreshed and relaxed last night from a short holiday, a retreat to our favourite rustic little cabin on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, on Vancouver Island. We were lucky to enjoy the last lovely sunny days of a record-breaking sunny February. March roared in like a lion with some heavy rain on our last night and morning, but it was thrilling to see the wild waves crashing on rocks and sandy beaches. The winter storms actually attract many tourists to this area. The ferry trip across to Vancouver Island, and the drive from east coast to west is always very enjoyable too.
We first visited this part of the Pacific Rim coast in 1992, fell in love with it, and have gone back a few times over the years, last in May 2004 as a special anniversary celebration, and now for my husband’s new-decade birthday. As I wrote last year, this place is a treat and a retreat for us.
We did have a few thoughts of “what if?” regarding potential tsunamis, being at the edge of the wide open Pacific. And it was interesting and good for both of us to be without computers for several days. Many thanks to everyone who sent emails and wrote comments here – I will catch up in a day or so, as well as reading your blogs.
by Marja-Leena 
“The giraffe, in their queer, inimitable, vegetative gracefulness…a family of rare, long-stemmed, speckled gigantic flowers slowly advancing.” – Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), Out of Africa
I had some fun with the digital camera in my indoor garden yesterday, and now I play with words in a state of insomnia…
by Marja-Leena Anna passed this to me, and while I have a vague idea of what a meme is, I’ve never done one. These questions are very challenging and time-consuming to answer and how can I limit myself?! I’m to pass it on – who would like to pick this up?
1. TOTAL AMOUNT OF MUSIC FILES ON YOUR COMPUTER: over 800 (not 100 as I wrote before!), actually on the iTunes on my husband’s computer. We share the same tastes so he looks after downloading the music off our CD collection. We enjoy falling asleep and waking up to the music from our iPod through inMotion speakers. These come along on trips too.
2. THE LAST CD YOU BOUGHT WAS: Pálgáh, by Sámi singer Aune Kuuva
3. WHAT IS THE SONG YOU LAST LISTENED TO BEFORE READING THIS MESSAGE? I don’t remember, because I wasn’t listening to music just then. The last songs I fell asleep to last night were either from our very favourite Operamania collection of 5 CDs of the some of the best operatic songs by the best singers, or maybe Thomas Hampson’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn, wonderful German lieder, like lullabies! We have our collection playing at random, hence I’m not sure which was playing as I drifted off to dreamland.
4. FIVE SONGS THAT YOU OFTEN LISTEN TO OR THAT MEAN A LOT TO YOU (IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER):
I’m going to name the CDs rather than individual songs, though it’s hard to say which are the top 5 favourites. I’ve chosen some Finns, some Canadians and a Chinese artist.
– Three Finnish Basses (Matti Salminen, Jaakko Ryhänen, Johann Tilli). I do love the bass voice that is so favoured by the Russians, and this is a tongue-in-cheek spin-off of The Three Tenors.
– Yo-Yo Ma’s The Cello Suites inspired by Bach – again the deep “voice” of the cello resonates for me.
– Kantele Meditation by Arja Kastinen. It was a gift from my husband a couple of years ago. It brings back memories of a wonderful kantele recital we heard in Finland in 2000. The kantele is an ancient Finnish and Karelian instrument.
– Loreena McKennitt’s The Mask and the Mirror (I recommended this to Anna and I see she loves it too!)
– Liona Boyd’s Miniatures for Guitar. The classical guitar is special for us, because my father built them, and our daughters play this instrument.
P.S. The piano is another favourite instrument which our daughters and I learned to play, but unfortunately our piano is silent too much these days. We have many CDs and records of piano music of the classical composers.
by Marja-Leena This is an absolutely incredible story about a blind artist, who has never had vision, who can draw and paint as well as a sighted person. Scientists are trying to find answers to these questions:
Because if Armagan can represent images in the same way a sighted person can, it raises big questions not only about how our brains construct mental images, but also about the role those images play in seeing. Do we build up mental images using just our eyes or do other senses contribute too? How much can congenitally blind people really understand about space and the layout of objects within it? How much “seeing” does a blind person actually do?
Thanks to mirabilis for this link!
by Marja-Leena Recently (Jan.17th) Arts Journal had a post with a question, “We like art, anyone know why? …. why do we care about art? And, given that we obviously do (and that this is worldwide phenomenon that has stretched throughout history), what is it in art that we care about?”
This originated at Financial Times (UK) 01/17/05, available by registration only, so I never did learn more. Today I see that Maex art blog found it. So, these questions are posed in a book by Matthew Kieran, Revealing Art. There’s a short blurb available at this Amazon link.
My flu fuddled brain does not want to deal with any heavy thinking right now so I’ll leave my readers to think about this. Have you read the book? Please let me know your thinks…er…thoughts on this subject.
by Marja-Leena 
Weather is on everyone’s mind these days. Not long ago I wrote about the Westcoast’s unusually long spell of snow and cold, followed by extremely heavy rains that caused flooding and mudslides (including a buried house and loss of a life, sadly). The temperatures have climbed, fooling the gardens into thinking it’s spring.
This afternoon, despite my flu/cold, I was tempted outdoors for a little while by our first sunshine in a while and a temperature of 14C (57F). I poked around the garden, noticing many little signs of life. The snowdrops are always the first to come up even through the snow, but I was amazed to already see a few early crocuses and a hellebore in bloom. The magnolia trees have fat flower buds, spring bulbs are sending up leaves and some of the shrubs have green leaf buds – my mother called these in Finnish hiirenkorvat or mouse ears.
by Marja-Leena The monthly Opus Visual Arts Newsletter (in print and online) provides useful information for artists such as calls for submissions, some arts news and, my favourite part, an always thoughtful and well-written editorial by arts advocate Chris Tyrell. Sometimes this newsletter seems to be the only source of some of the arts news in our province!
In this month’s editorial New Money for the Arts, Chris Tyrell details the cultural funding program that is now in place for Olympics 2010 being held in BC. Of special relevance to artists and particularly arts organizations is ArtsNow whose “mission statement is as follows: To strengthen and enhance the creative capacity of individuals, organizations and communities throughout the province.[…]They seek to fund projects that create lasting change for a better arts sector and/or community.” Please read the newsletter and the ArtsNow website for all the details.
Tyrell finishes: “This good news is timely. As I wrote in last month’s editorial, Opus has offered to host an artists’ forum later this month on what kind of collective action the visual arts community might take to coincide with the Olympic Games. Now when we meet, we will know that there are new funding opportunities for us should we decide to do something innovative. The meeting will also give the community the opportunity to discuss Artropolis, a tradition in need of help.
Opus’ public forum is on Wednesday, January 26th at 7:00pm in the H. R. MacMillan Space Centre (the Planetarium), 1100 Chestnut Street in Vancouver. The forum will determine if there is interest in a visual arts Olympic celebration, different models of showcasing visual art and about the future of Artropolis. It will be an interesting meeting, so please plan to attend and, as space is limited, please RSVP to my e-address below.” (ctyrell at shaw.ca)
Related link: Artropolis
by Marja-Leena A few days ago I made a short reference to the PEW study about artists and the internet. Ivan Pope has also linked to it, and continued to blog about how the web is creating a generation of Pro-Am (Professional Amateur) artists, and about the ‘Long Tail’ of Contemporary Art. He concludes: “Now we can see that the combination of blogging and online galleries may give rise to a new ecosystem of art. The Long Tail of art may be about to be exposed.”
Good reading! What do you think of the Long Tail of Art, is it happening?
UPDATE Jan.11.05: There’s more today on starting an experiment and more to follow. Keep your eyes on this and if you are an artist blogger, consider some kind of participation…hmmm?