Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

Chameleon rose from my garden.  The answer to "where is beauty?" seems  easy .... beauty is  all around us, but do we all see the same beauty ?  There is a Chinese saying, "Flowers look different to different eyes" Yes, we've all heard that before ..."Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."  Contemporary artists worldwide often challenge our notion of beauty and many celebrate the ordinary and the familiar, making comment on daily rituals and consumer items.  None of this is very surprising since early man recorded every day life in cave paintings  and it has been happening in the art world ever since.  Up until 1960s, household items often appeared in still life paintings, but it was the contemporary pop art movement where artists sought out the commonplace to elevate artistically. What could be more "everyday" than Andy Warhol's iconic Campbell Soup Tins ?  https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/andy-warhol-campbells-...

For all of us, being close to home is not an option currently. There are many positive ways to think of being close to home -  one, of course, is to find inspiration and make art . Recently, probably in the last few years, the sights and sounds in my neighbourhood have provided me with enough material for a lifetime of art making.... and I don't live in a magical place, just a simple ordinary  residential suburb in a regional city in NSW,  near some dedicated bushland, walking tracks, a village shopping centre and a hospital.  On daily walks in the neighbourhood, I have picked up sticks from the ground to make hundreds of "stick" dolls,  fallen leaves to dye and print cloth and paper, flowers and other plant bits  for  various artworks.  I am very grateful to have so much to work from so close to home and as I complete my second #the100day project - 100 small wearable art pins, I have tried to find a new way each day of express...

When I heard the theme for Tag Tuesday this fortnight is "Haberdashery", I rummaged in my sewing drawer to look for "vintage" items of haberdashery which I knew I had in my stash. I was particularly happy and surprised to find a number of cards of press studs, buttons and hooks and eyes. These brought back such great memories of the haberdashery shops which I used to frequent years ago when we lived in small country towns. They seemed to stock whatever you needed. You can tell the age of some of these items in my "habbie" stash as Australia changed to decimal currency on 14 February 1966, and the button card quotes a price of 1/3d...  As I have been making little wearable pins for #the100dayproject, accompanied by a haiku, I thought that Day 30 had to be about haberdashery ... hence my tag within a tag for Tag Tuesday....  "Just a word recalls Sewing notions long since used:  Haberdashery"  This is a cloth /mixed media collage with...

Samples of TV viewing activities. With an audience captive at home 24/7, it would be expected that TV viewing numbers would increase. Quartz reports in USA that it took social distancing restrictions to stop the decline in broadcast TV viewing. "  The pandemic has been especially good to reality TV, medical dramas, and shows about first responders. "  I was surprised at this because I thought there was enough  medical content in the news to avoid more in fictional format.    Of course, higher ratings for popular shows does not mean that the long predicted demise of free-to-air broadcast TV has been arrested.... during the last month, Netflix reported that it had added 16 million new subscribers. (ABC News)   It seems that whatever our choice, whether it is free to air  or streaming we have been "glued" to our screens during   stay-at-home , work-at-home, and school-at- home.  If TV is our default activity during the social re...

During the last week,  I think my #100pinpoems have taken a definite turn towards the more abstract. There have been a couple of days when I was prompted to convey a more direct representation of a moment in the day , but generally, I have moved towards stitching and collaging in a more impressionistic way. For example, on day 22, I tried to convey the feeling of waking up early for a Zoom meeting.... and ended up with what looks like sound waves representing electronic communication ( not the sound of me snoring through the meeting!)  "Alarm too early Sleepy nods in agreement  Meeting via Zoom."   stitched wearable art pin   stitched wearable art pin  Some of the tags although abstract, describe actual occurrences ....  Day 23 : I watched rainbow lorikeets flying into our garden to land on some tall grevilleas... I reproduced only their colour and a stitches a sense of the quick movement.  When they open ...