Dan Hillier * blue

Dan Hillier has many prints for sale, both at his website and at the Sunday Upmarket on Brick Lane.
Much of his work is the manipulation of engravings, as below, but I'm particularly fond of this blue ink painting and his tendency for extending forms from the heads of people & animals.



The mixture of engraving is akin to Lhasa De Sela's album artwork for her record 'The Living Road'. I have been listening to her songs lately. She has an exquisite deep voice, a little like Nico, but her verse is quite different, terribly poetic and haunting. She sings in French and Spanish and English because she is half Mexican and lives in Canada.

Drawer

As a person in search of furniture, this set of drawers took my interest.
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It belongs to Valentin Loellmann, of Germny and the Netherlands.


And a very good idea by Karen Ray, found on Dezeen

"The Whittle Chair", she says, "All it requires is a penknife and an unwanted chair."
In do-it-yourself style. So I'm on the look out for discarded wooden household objects to whittle at with my penknife.
Once, though i admit it isn't whittling, i made use of a discarded slender wooden lamp and painted it a grim seaweed green and attached to it thorns from a dead rose bush. It was beautiful but it also took one by surprise in the dark and eventually when I gave it to Louisiana, her father proudly removed each and every thorn as a measure of protecting his daughter.
No photographic evidence remains, but an idea that could be recycled.

Mick Jagger..... & ..... Mick Jagger

We went to watch Performance last night at The Compass,
I've seen it twice before and this time it was completely different which leads me to believe I may have fallen asleep on the previous occasions and invented the story based on the soundtrack.

Swan sketches

Blind Dog and Turnip

Blind Dog and Turnip is a drawing from an old photograph where originally the girl and her dog were all too 'cute'. The intention was not to get so ominous, but the dog turned blind and the girl seemed to want to take credit for this with her turnip.

jumped over

This started out as a tracing of a template I cut out to use for a place-mat design. But then I started giving him a little fur, and then I felt the sky ought to be dark like a winter evening, and it ended up taking all afternoon to finish. And the cat on the roof top is the one who sneaks into our kitchen sometimes when we're eating. He scratches the palms of our hands in an affectionate way.

Hanna Melin

Tile and Plate designs by Hanna Melin.
See also Sara Melin, illustrator. Sisters.

Playing the Building

With it having been my birthday recently, Louisiana took us both to "Play the Building" at The Roundhouse. It's a fantastical concept and of course only David Byrne would realise it.
It's a very atmospheric setting in the cold light of the gutted out Roundhouse auditorium, with wires stretching to the circling metal columns, and a silenced queue of organists waiting their turn under the spotlight, while the building gently taps and flutes and vibrates.

Avalon Juniper

A gift from Iwoncia who went to Florida. The most incredible smelling soap in well designed packaging.
Pacifica make a great range of soaps, candles and frangrances and are ethical in their process.

I like too much

another of Lizzy Stewart's drawings.
It is available in a book which you could buy from Sing Statistics

Happy Birthday to Me

Remember that beautiful blue bicycle?
She is now my traveling companion, thanks to a wonderful husband boy who found the last one in town for my birthday. Here we go through The Hackney Marshes with my head severed.

All the colours

We walked up and down the staircase at Cycle Chic today and for a diversion wandered up Rivington Street where this rainbow of books dressed the window of YCN. I like it.