time traveller

MLRfishfossil.jpga couple of my photos of Hornby Island petroglyphs were included in a book called In Search of Ancient British Columbia.

A while back, in one of those wonderful connections that blogging rewards us with, I received an email by one of the authors of that book, Heidi Henderson. We had an interesting conversation and I learned that she lives right here in Vancouver and also has a blog Archea, Musings in Natural History. Over a period of several days, I read through it all, finding it quite fascinating and making me recall a visit to the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta where I was more excited by the beauty of the fossil collection than by the dinosaur specimens. The image above is one of many I took at that museum.

And Heidi herself sounds fascinating, being a passionate time traveller, amateur paleontologist and head of the Vancouver Paleontological Society and The British Columbia Paleontological Alliance. Her articles are well researched with cited sources; the stories about the group’s fossil hunting trips around BC and Washington made for enjoyable reading and almost tempt me to join some of their outings!

I wish we could see more and larger photos of these fabulous finds on the blog. The ever-changing slide shows near the bottom of the main page are an interesting supplement and another journey.

Elaine de Kooning

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Elaine de Kooning: Torchlight Cave Drawing 4, 1985
from a portfolio of eight aquatints, Crown Point Press

I’ve written before about Crown Point Press and founder Kathan Brown and their importance in the printmaking field with its famed studio and book publications. In fact, I purchased the book Magical Secrets some time later and have enjoyed it, as well as the accompanying website and blog.

Recently I discovered Elaine de Kooning and some work she had done at Crown Point over 20 years ago. Two things immediately excited me – first I did not know that Willem de Kooning (whose work I love) had a wife who was also an artist. Secondly, this beautiful series of aquatint etchings called Torchlight Cave Drawings is inspired by the cave paintings in southern France. (And you know that’s a subject dear to me!)

The point of departure for Elaine de Kooning’s etchings is the cave paintings near Les Eyzies in the Dordogne region of southern France. The paintings date back to Paleolithic times (10,000 to 30,000 B.C.) and the caves are thought to have been necromantic sanctuaries for the worship of the hunt. The primary subject matter is animals –bulls, stags, mammoth, and bison of a variety that have been extinct for thousands of years. When de Kooning first visited the caves she was captivated by the phenomenally lifelike appearance of the animals and inspired by the aura of magic in the underground enclaves.

More about Elaine de Kooning at Magical Secrets and at wikipedia

Looking back: Jule favourites

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Deep in the archives of three years ago is this favourite Christmas season post of mine and reposted here almost fully:

My favourite things about Christmas are the things that appeal to the romantic and the child in me. I love the visual delights of little white lights, red candles, evergreens, snow, red berries, pine cones and red folk embroidery on linens. I love exquisitely illustrated childrens’ books like Jan Brett’s The Wild Christmas Reindeer, something I bought just for myself to enjoy every Christmas.

I love Christmas music, especially when sung by young voices like Heintje (O Tannenbaum), romantic voices from the 40’s and 50’s like Doris Day, Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby (I Dream of a White Christmas), or powerful operatic voices.

Virtual Finland’s Christmas* appeals to the romantic and the child. Visit Santa or “Joulupukki” in his gorgeous clothes, with his elves and reindeer in Lapland (that’s where Santa lives, didn’t you know?). Look at the lovely cards from Christmases past and recipes for traditional Finnish Christmas foods. I also love these little Finnish folk poems* about the little animals in the wintry woods (click on ‘lorupiha’ then each creature, in Finnish only but sounds interesting).

We are busy preparing the house, the decorations, the gifts, and all the favourite foods for our family Christmas of blended traditions. Christmas Eve is our big night, a tradition with both the Finns and the Germans, with a lovely meal, carols around the piano, and then Santa’s visit, so carefully planned to happen out of sight of little children. Oh, such excitement! Happy childhood memories evoked by all the sights, sounds and tastes and watching the shining happy eyes of another generation (a grandchild) make Christmas special for me.

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What can I add this year? Two things come to mind. One is another grandchild now 2, who with her 7-year old sister makes up a lively happy pair through whose eyes we can experience the awe and the joy of this season. Otherwise we might be a bit jaded by it all now, hmm?

Secondly, I must mention a beautiful music CD, already quite old, from our modest collection: Vienna Noel with Placido Domingo, Sissel Kyrkjebo and Charles Aznavour. The Norwegian Sissel is absolutely divine and angelic, fitting beautifully with the equally great male singers. My heart soars at every listening!

If I were in Europe, I’d love to go to the traditional Christmas Markets. On one of his business trips many year ago, my husband was in Austria before Christmas. He brought back many lovely handmade tree ornaments that we treasure. I learned that Helsinki has a Christmas Market too. This could be another favourite!

What are your favourite things this time of year, dear readers? I hope you take great pleasure in them as you prepare for the holidays!

UPDATE Dec.23, 2007: Just read this in our weekend newspaper, A land of Christmas: “For hundreds of years, the towns of Germany have celebrated the yuletide season with markets filled with the produce of local artisans…” Exactly what I dream of visiting!

UPDATE Dec.3, 2013: Almost six years later, oh nine for that earlier linked post, I am saddened by the many dead links, some marked * and removed.

Marianna Schmidt

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Exhibition Catalogue Cover: MARIANNA SCHMIDT, When You Are Silent, It Speaks 1991, mixed media on paper (38.5 cm x 28.2 cm). Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Belgium

I have a bad habit of visiting exhibitions at the end of their run but my excuse this time was that I learned about these very late. Over the summer there were three concurrent exhibitions of work by Marianna Schmidt around the Greater Vancouver region, but by the time I knew about them, only one was still up. As a printmaker, I would have loved to have seen her prints at the Burnaby Art Gallery. However, I was very pleased to have seen a large body of Schmidt’s mixed media works at the Evergreen Cultural Centre in Coquitlam (a suburb of Vancouver) on its last day and last hour!

Her work went through many styles but for me her most powerful and moving works are those that remind me of the German Expressionists.

I met Marianna Schmidt many years ago when she was a visiting artist at our studio. Her personality and her prints made a strong impression on me that I’ve not forgotten. I always wanted to learn more about her life and work so I was eager to buy the excellent exhibition catalogue, written by Robin Laurence, Darrin J. Martens, Bill Jeffries and Ellen van Eijnsbergen – and have already started to read it. The inside fold has a perfect summary for those who don’t know this artist:

Marianna Schmidt (1918 – 2005), who lived and worked in Vancouver, British Columbia from the mid-1950’s until her death in May 2005, was an accomplished and idiosyncratic modernist. Hungarian by birth, she fled her country as a refugee in 1944, and spent years in displace persons’ camps on Austria, Germany and England before eventually migrating to Canada. Not surprisingly, the most persistent feelings in her art are those of loneliness, alienation and painful dislocation. Whether depicted in prints, drawings, paintings or collages, her twisted, distorted and fragmented figures are often stranded against featureless grounds, huddles in inhospitable rooms or suspended above place maps and generic landscapes. The crisis they evoke is both universal and particular.
Still, humour, irony, pathos, celebration, and a keen interest in the human circus also find expression in Marianna Schmidt’s art. This publication is the first posthumous attempt to honour her entire career and to place it within the context of her life and times.

Links:
the Evergreen Cultural Centre page and Photo Gallery
Review by Ann Rosenberg with more photos of work
Carnaval Photos and Paintings at SFU
Article in the Straight
Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK) in Ghent, Belgium which has a large collection of Marianna Schmidt’s works, loaned for this exhibition

sun and shadows

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summer is here at last
hot days, warm nights
seeking shade, cooling breezes

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just finished reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
amazing, spell-binding writing
a disturbing and haunting story
I recommend it

Tove Jansson biography

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Way back in February of 2005, I wrote about trolls and my love of folk legends, myths and fairy tales especially anything Finnish. In that context came up the name of internationally well-known Tove Jansson and her Moomintrolls. There were some interesting conversations in the comments that I’ve enjoyed rereading just now.

Recently, Finland’s biggest newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat (in English) published an interesting article, Dedicating 25 years to Tove Jansson.

It is about Jansson’s biographer Boel Westin and how her relationship to the author began first as a child reader, then as researcher for her doctoral thesis in 1988 when she met and became friends with Jansson. Westin went on to do an extensive biography, “Ord, liv, bild” (“Word, Life, Image”) now appearing in Sweden and in Finland. The book, which is a rich and tantalising depiction of both Jansson and the cultural history of Finland, will appear next year translated into Finnish by Jaana Nikula. If you are a fan of Tove Jansson’s books, do read the article which gives us some interesting perspectives on Jansson and her biographer.

I’m really looking forward to that Finnish translation and hope that an English one will soon come out as well.

It’s been fascinating for me to have learned over time how much academic interest Tove Jansson has attracted. For example, when I met author, college instructor and blogger Kate Laity of Wombat’s World, I was surprised to find out that she has also studied Tove Jansson and just recently attended a conference on her.

Addendum May 21.07: Dem, comic strip artist extraordinaire at the Guild of Ghostwriters has shared, in the comments below, a fabulous link to the Drawn & Quarterly site’s previews of their recently published book of Jansson’s comic strips. Enjoy! Until Dem told me, I didn’t know Drawn & Quarterly is Canadian!! And they even have a blog. Thanks, Dem!

Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip – Book One, of a series, has now been added to my shopping list, thanks to this reminder.

Kalevala and Vietnam

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I know that the Finnish national epic the Kalevala is read around the world, translated as it is into 61 languages. So I’ve been quite intrigued to read a fascinating story about two Vietnamese women and their involvement with the Kalevala and how it inspired a project to compile a Vietnamese national epic with help from a Finnish foundation. Here are some excerpts:

The home of artist Dang Thu Huong in Hanoi is an austere one-room apartment with nothing unnecessary in it. The eye rapidly focuses on paintings leaning against a wall. They depict Finnish barns and national costumes. Huong has made illustrations for the Kanteletar, the companion work to the national epic poem, the Kalevala, which has been translated into Vietnamese by Bui Viet Hoa. The next effort of the women is to compile and illustrate Vietnam’s first national epic by the end of next year. The two are getting support from the Juminkeko Foundation, which specialises in the Kalevala. It has received development cooperation funding for the project from the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs.

Lönnrot wrote the Kalevala based on folk poetry from the oral tradition that he compiled during travels in Russian Karelia in the 19th century. Hoa translated the epic into Vietnamese in 1994. [Bui Viet Hoa ] has been referred to as “Vietnam’s Elias Lönnrot”. Lönnrot wrote the Kalevala based on folk poetry from the oral tradition that he compiled during travels in Russian Karelia in the 19th century. Hoa translated the epic into Vietnamese in 1994.

Vietnam has 54 ethnic groups with dozens of oral miniature epics. Hoa uses them as a basis for her own work, which is to unite the nation. The most challenging job is to compile a unified story out of very many different epics. Hoa solves the problem by dividing the book into two parts – the world of myths, and the world of heroes. Like the Kalevala, the Vietnamese myths describe the origin of the world. In both epics, everything begins with a bird’s egg. In Hoa’s book, there is a separate story about how water-buffalo and rice came into being.

Like Lönnrot, Hoa has travelled among the people to collect her stories. Accompanying her was the third worker in the project, Hoa’s husband, linguistic researcher Vo Xuan Que. The two have gone into Vietnamese villages and asked men and women of different ages to sing for them.

(Photo from Juminkeko archives)
Related links:
the Kalevala
Epics of the world
Juminkeko Foundation
about the word “Juminkeko”

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UPDATE March 14th: Bill’s comment below has prompted me to do another search for an online English translation of the Kalevala. The Finnish Literature Society did have a full translation on their site three years ago when I’d first mentioned the Kalevala on this blog, but now offers only the original Finnish, and a synopsis in English.

Checking out Bill’s leads, I see that Wikipedia has a very good page on the Kalevala, including a short synopsis as well, and links to translations. The translations are all by John Martin Crawford and I am not impressed with this version.

However, there are many translations in print. After some research last year, I found and bought this translation by Eino Friberg. It is excellent, capturing the wonderful oral quality of the Finnish original. I recommend it highly to any interested readers.

On a side note, the Wikipedia entry excites me because of the illustrations of some of the famous paintings based on the Kalevala by my favourite Finnish artist of the late 19th-early 20th century Akseli Gallen-Kallela. But there’s another subject for a very long blog post one day!

Ancient British Columbia

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We’ve lived in British Columbia well over three decades and have seen many many areas but still not all of this beautiful province. We’re now inspired anew to go exploring those yet unknown corners with the recent arrival into our hands of a beautiful new book: In Search of Ancient British Columbia, by Barbara Huck, with Philip Torrens and Heidi Henderson.

Here’s the blurb on the back:

Once, parts of British Columbia lay on the far side of the Pacific. Once, its ancient seacoasts were inhabited by creatures on the threshold of evolution. Once it was populated by some of Canada’s first peoples.

Today, B.C. is one of the world’s most geographically varied places. But clues to its ancient past are everywhere, in its mountains and arid valleys, along its lakeshores and seacoasts. For the first time, the geological, paleontological and archaeological wonders of southern B.C. are gathered in one place. With hundreds of color photographs, maps and drawings, In Search of Ancient British Columbia presents an accessible, route-oriented approach for today’s time travellers, creating an indispensable guide to the forces that have shaped the spirit of the land.

Heartland Books is a Winnipeg-based publisher of history, heritage, travel and non-fiction. I look forward to Volume II covering the northern regions.

I’m thrilled and proud to have two of my photographs of Hornby Island petroglyphs, shown above, included in this fascinating and well-designed publication on a subject of great interest to me. We’re going to be doing some wonderful armchair travelling for the next while and start planning a few trips around our own backyard this summer!

the xylothek

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Alnarp, Sweden is the home of a unique Wooden Library.*

The wooden library, or xylothek (from the Greek words for tree, xylon, and storing place, theke) consists of 217 volumes describing 213 different species or varieties of trees and shrubs.

A xylothek is generally speaking a collection of simple pieces of wood specimens placed together in some kind of cupboard. In a refined form it is in the shape of “books” where you can find details from the tree inside, everything arranged as a “library”. This latter form flourished in Germany around 1790-1810. Four different manufacturers existed and three of them offered their products for sale. The Alnarp collection is an example of that.

Each “book” describes a certain tree species and is made out of the actual wood (the “covers”). The spine is covered by the bark, where mosses and lichens from the same tree are arranged. “Books” of shrubs are covered with mosses with split branches on both covers and spines.

Read more about these exquisite works, and their history and how they came to be in Alnarp, Sweden.

View the gorgeous photos by Mikael Risedal – be sure to click on each to view much larger.*

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(Thanks to wood s lot for this stunning find a while ago. I’m late posting this.)

* March 28, 2014 – link updated as site has changed; photos no longer enlarge.

mellow

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Well, it’s still rather soggy in southwest BC, with storm after storm bringing us more heavy rains in the past nearly two weeks than we normally get in the whole month of November, usually our wettest month of the year. More storms coming and no sun in sight on the weather map! Our backyard is a swamp but at least we aren’t flooded by overflowing rivers like in the Fraser Valley east of Vancouver. It’s too wet to rake the leaves or dig up the dahlia tubers buried in wet mud. The past few days have gotten colder so I hear the mountains have lots of snow, I just haven’t seen it with my own eyes with those very low-hanging dark clouds. We did manage a walk between showers, finding ourselves stopping for several pleasant chats with neighbours out trying to clean their yards.

As I’ve written earlier, we are enjoying the coziness of the indoors. Saturday evening, we filled and lit the fireplace with logs, put on some old favourite music like Anne Sofie von Otter’s Wings in the Night (Swedish Songs) and sat down with some books. In this relaxing and mellow atmosphere I found myself often pausing in my reading to enjoy the best passages of the music while gazing at the dancing flames.

I’m reading Anita Konkka’s A Fool’s Paradise. I’ve been enjoying her blog Sanat (Words, in Finnish) for some time and have been wanting to read her books but they’ve been out of print until this translation. From her blog, I know that Anita has a deep interest in dreams and astrology, and that shows in the book. To me the writing is minimalist yet very visual as she describes vivid images and actions from dreams and real life, and sometimes the two seem to merge. Something about the mood, the air of mild depression and the slow almost total lack of a plot reminds me of some of Aki Kaurismäki’s films. I haven’t quite finished it yet but it is deep, thoughtful and satisfying reading. I wonder what it would be like to read in Finnish, probably a bit challenging for my rusty vocabulary.

Husband’s book The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles by Bruce Lipton excited him so much that he was reading passages aloud, leading us into some animated discussions. We’ve been turning away from much of traditional Western medicine and pharmaceuticals and looking at alternatives, so this book was very inspirational and hopeful.

Sunday was family day. Our eldest daughter and her partner were in town unexpectedly so we were all together playing with the grand-daughters and then having a nice meal around the extended table. This long weekend felt almost like Christmas, was it the mellowness?

Reviews of A Fool’s Paradise by Anita Konkka at:
Literary Saloon
Now What blog
Guardian
And an interview