further to my painted, peeling wood obsession...

... is the work of Dolan Geiman.  I've been trolling his etsy shop for a number of months now, and finding myself falling ever more in love with his reclaimed wood constructions.   It's charming, affordable, green... I think my fate as a future-owner of his art is pretty much sealed!

Check him out here, here, and here!

on the thrill of music

brilliant!

Having recently been challenged to see worship and creative expression through an intergenerational lens, I find myself inspired by two places on the web.  Adie Loves Polly is the photoblog of 4-year-old Adie, who takes pictures with her polaroid camera named Polly (she has a good eye and takes some rather charming photographs, in the vein of her very own mother).  I adore that she been given her own camera - and a blog too!  

Further:

The Blog WeeMade is another visual blog that showcases the mini masterpieces of kids from all over.  I've said it before, we are all artists!

new, old

{Thanks, mom and dad, for passing along these lovely and old analogue cameras...  Can't wait to load up some film and explore the city through these lenses}

designed for good.

Silkscreen with a local, social conscience... These guys find a need in their community, document the story, design, screen and sell only enough shirts to meet the need, then give the proceeds to the people who need it, and post a follow-up on their website. I get the goofiest grin every time I check their site!  I have the green one, and I'm already eyeing 2 more...

33 rpm

Many years ago, after stumbling upon the interweb home of 33rpm designer, Andrio Abero, and finding myself quite enamoured with his screenprinted gig posters, I began to listen to the bands and artists who had been his clients, unwittingly beginning a happy journey into the unique spaces and sounds of indie music.  Thank-you, Mr. Abero!  I am greatly indebted.  

would you go along with someone like me?

{peter bjorn & john's "young folks"

amazing song, amazing video...!}

cape horn interchange

{art is everywhere}

love!

In grade 6, I dabbled in stop animation as part of a cartooning module at my elementary school.  My two partners and I laboured for weeks on a whimsical story of the Easter bunny.  All I remember is being hunched over the camera on a musty pea-green carpet in the sunny school library, and click-click-clicking the camera over painstakingly minute changes to our backdrop made of cardboard and crayon.  The film was lost in the mail on the way to being mastered and I never saw it completed.  That must be why I love this stop animation video by the Terrodactyls so much.  It evokes wistful childhood nostalgia, old-school creativity, and that hopeful optimism of one day being a "cartoonist."  

currently eyeing...

...3D type in the form of a pop-up book!  Of all the combinations that could ever be, this might be the sweetest.

me and my friend

A few months back, I sent some roughly recorded songs to my friend Mikey, and then proceeded to forget all about them.  What a treat today, then, to be sent the songs back slightly altered, rife with inspired changes.  He added a few tracks, played around, and brought new layers and dimension to my decidedly simple songs.  After years of butchering pretty much every song on my old, beat-up guitar, it's fun to hear things I have written augmented by real musicianship!  Thanks, Mikey!

currently eyeing

...peeling, painted wood.  

It seems more and more my eye is drawn to the decayed and the vintage. 

 

I took these photographs on a long walk in Skagway, Alaska, where I happily ran across all sorts of beautiful deterioration.  

There's a certain charm to buldings that have fallen into disrepair... like the deep wrinkles of my granfather's face, the peeling paint indicates a long, and interesting life, and I love to imagine the stories that are held within these walls.  I daresay I might one day live in a little, refurbished cottage myself!

currently eyeing

vintage shutters, 

paint peeling and 

slightly askew

{photo: decaying elegance}

guerilla beautification

There's this tree that I pass every morning on my commute to work.  It's a small Douglas Fir - probably planted within the last 10 years - and it has made its home on the boulevard between the freeway and the onramp I frequent each early morning.   There's nothing significant about this tree, really, except that every Christmas, someone decorates it.  They must do it in the dead of night, as I'm quite sure decorating trees on the boulevard between the freeway and the onramp would attract some unwanted attention.  And yet, every December, without fail, there is the tree, decorated to the hilt in homemade ornaments of paper and string.  

There is something about this act of guerilla decorating that makes me happy.  It's subversive, and yet it's quite the opposite, as it tends to bring cheery smiles to the faces of the otherwise slack-jawed commuters crammed unromantically into two lanes of bumper-to-bumper gridlock.  

I ran across this work (above) of poster child   (via poppytalk) and think it is rather delightful.

Numerous of these planters were put up around a city, and people were encouraged online to water any they came across.  

A similar idea can be found in the form of one of the assignments on Learning to Love You More.   This one is my favourite, and it's even in Vancouver (click the little arrows to see the project from beginning to end).

While I have been known to do some guerilla beautifying in my day (stay tuned for a post about my guerilla lamp project), it's been decidedly small-scale.   One day I may just plant my own garden of blooms in an unusual spot.  In the meantime, let's all look for ways to bring beauty to unexpected places in unexpected ways.

vintage mint sheets

As a 12 year-old kid, I went on a brief foray into the world of stamp collecting.  Mainly I would just carefully steam the stamps off the letters my family would receive, and delicately place them into my wax-paper-lined stamp-collecting book.  At the time it all felt very official, and I would often marvel at the little vignettes and old-school typography.  What a find today, to come across a book full of mint sheets from the late 60s. Given to me years ago by my Grandpa Jantzen (and purchased long before I was born),  the collection is entirely middle-eastern in origin, and worth decidely more than my own initial collection of individual stamps.  I really love the vintage illustrations and fonts, and am already dreaming up ways to showcase them properly in my home.

A sheet of stamps from Israel.

Futuristic images of satellites on these stamps from Ras Al Khaima (United Arab Emirates)

I adore these bright brontosaurus stamps from Fujeira (U.A.E.), dated 1968.

These stamps bear the name, "The Mutawakelite Kingdom of Yemen," and are dated 1967.

I love the rich colour of the portraits featured on these stamps from Dubai, 

celebrating Children's Day, 1968.

Two more sets of stamps from Fujeira (U.A.E.) featuring weather balloons (?) and locomotives.

These feature a metallic silver background, dated April 1969.

j'adore

Amelie reminds me how much I love french, and films with subtitles, and accordions, and, most of all,  photobooths.  The first time I saw it, I was huddled into a cavernous, vintage high-school theatre, with my friend Dan, in the dark of night, in Trois-Pistoles, Quebec.  There were no English subtitles that night, as we were learning French and speaking it toujours.  Though I didn't catch all the subtleties of the plot,  I did fall madly for the juicy richness of the colour, the spaces and the silences, the beauty in the mundane, and the hopeful optimism of the titular character (and let's not forget the bestest, chastest kissing scene on film to date!).  Amelie remains my favourite film, and je pense, a subconscious influence on my  own aesthetic.

Note:  There are a couple of shady scenes in this film.  You have been warned!

sky blue sky

God writes the gospel not in the Bible alone

      but also on the trees,

                               and in the flowers,

                                                            and clouds,

                                                                              and stars.

{Martin Luther King, Jr.}

lomo love

What I love about Lomography is its carefree, shoot-from-the-hip, happy-accidents attitude towards photography (the banner at the top of this page represents one such "happy accident" - I double-exposed a roll of film in my Lomo Oktomat without realizing, and voila!  Layers of photos on top of one another!)  Even more, I adore the vintage quality that the developed pictures have.  Every picture looks like it was taken 30 years ago (indeed, these cameras were first introduced almost that long ago, in 1980, the year I was born.  How fitting!).

Further:

My Lomo Oktomat (see below) takes 8 frames in sequence and prints them all on one photograph.  I've posted some of my favourites at my "lomohome."  Go check them out!

Watch this documentary (part 1 of 7) for a run-down of the Lomo aesthetic:

<>

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This is my Lomo Oktomat!  

confession:

i secretly like lowercase letters better than properly capitalized ones, but because i am an english teacher, i feel guilty about committing such a punctuational* transgression.

i type every title in lowercase as a secret rebellion.

* this is not a real word; i made it up.  english teachers have license to do that, you know.  

a seed

I can't take intellectual credit for the definition of worship that I love the most;  I overheard it at a coffee house, a snippet of conversation displaced, like seeds blown by the wind, and planted into my own conciousness.  And so, as I flipped through ReadyMade magazine, and sipped my (grande non-fat no-whip one-pump sugar-free hazelnut white chocolate) mocha, I heard a phrase that has stayed with me, and informed my own idea of worship for many years: 

"Worship is touching God's heart, and inviting God to touch ours."

Years later, I am still working through the significance of this statement, recognizing and confessing (often!) my self-centered ways, and seeking to please God in all the arenas of my life.  

"Therefore I urge you, brothers [and sisters], to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God.  This is your spiritual act of worship." Romans 12:1