fierce bunnies

Sonja and I did our 2nd Annual Fierce Bunny Photo Shoot at my place this weekend. It was really fun. Sonja is back from the Yukon to present her bunnies at the One of a Kind Show here in Toronto from Nov. 25 - Dec. 5. She will have an astounding array of heartbreakingly sweet bunnies, some of the favourite prints from last year, and of course prints of the photos we took this weekend. This is one of my favourites

sphalerite finished

I finished this guy a couple weeks ago. It was a fun one. Lots of colours! Look at my rainbow palette:

ROCKS and MINERALS OF NEW YORK STATE

from here

The European Roe Deer, 1854

from here

tomatillos

Even with our hot summer this year, I didn't have much success with my purple tomatillos. If they had full sun all day they would have done better, I'm sure. I got plenty of little fruits, but only a few fully matured. They really are beautiful regardless, which I suppose was the main reason I wanted to grow them. So maybe they were a success after all.

autumn garden

aka gnarly mess of mostly dead weeds

hello november

brrrrr... time for coats

image from here

Sphalerite

This Sphalerite, more than any of my other specimens I think, benefits immensely from being lit well and magnified. It has so much detail and crazy iridescence that is difficult to see with the naked eye because it is so tiny and dark. Under the greasy iridescent metallic coating it is actually a dark transparent rusty red stone. Without the light hitting it in the right way, it just looks black. I think it's going to be fun (and a big challenge) to paint.

On a side note, it is so hard to take photos in my house in the evening. It is just too dark, and I lack the skills to compensate for the lack of light. I apologize for the badly lit blurry photos which will likely become the norm here, now that it's getting dark earlier and earlier.

*edit - In case you can't tell in the photos, the colourful image is just the photo I took and printed out as reference and the painting has only been sketched out so far. When I took these photos I hadn't actually started painting.

spring 2011

I've been slowly browsing through the Spring 2011 collections, and I can't get this one Costello Tagliapietra dress out of my head.
I want to wear it. Image from Style.com.

Crystals, 1851

From here.

Shary Boyle

I am so excited to be attending the private reception tonight for Shary's new four person show at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, Breaking Boundaries. And for those of you in Toronto who haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend checking out her AMAZING exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Flesh and Blood, which is up until December 6. She sure has a lot going on right now. It makes me so happy to see such a brilliant hard-working talented and lovely woman enjoying so much success. Yay Shary!

All photos by Rafael Goldchain. Artworks by Shary Boyle courtesy of Jessica Bradley Art + Projects.

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

I have recently developed a serious addiction to Swedish Crime Fiction. It, of course, started with the Millenium Trilogy. It got me wanting to look for other authors of the genre. My boss Patrick shared this sentiment, and has been collecting novels by other Swedish writers and loaning them to me (!!!). The first books he passed along were the Martin Beck series, ten books written in the 60's and 70's by the Swedish couple Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. This is them in the picture above. Don't they look great!? This series is really wonderful, and was highly influential to many writers in this genre, within Scandinavia and beyond, including Stieg Larsson. The stories are really well crafted with an engaging cast of characters whose lives and perspectives evolve as the series progresses. Sjöwall and Wahlöö were committed Marxists and there is a strong thread of social criticism running through the series. Having absolutely no idea how to pronounce their names, or countless other names in the books, I turned to the internet and found this really helpful blog page. I recommend it for Larsson fans too. Now that I've finished this series, I've moved on to the Kurt Wallander series by Henning Mankell. It is also so so good. Next in line is an Iclandic writer. Every once in a while I have to wait a few days before getting a new stack of books from Patrick, and I'm forced to read something else for a little bit. I blame Sjöwall and Wahlöö for the fact that it took me 6 months to get through Anna Karenina. Ha.