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Gimcracks and knickknacks
or: a girl’s paradise An entire shop full of trinkets against a background of pink wall cloth and a tiger-like stripe pattern on the floor: a truly mouth-watering temptation! In Dutch we have the nice word ‘snuisterijen’ for this kind of trinkets, containing the two vowel sounds ‘ui’ and ‘ij’ that non-native speakers always find hard…
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Under the Sony roof
Why this photo pleases me: The proportion and partition of light and dark parts within the frame of the picture create a strong, graphic image. The straight lines and their angles versus the curved shape of the roof create a pleasant tension. The fact that the dark part on the lower right seems to be a true multistory…
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Moloch horridus
This ‘grotesque Australian reptile’ – in the words of my Oxford Dictionary – is popularly called thorny devil or thorny dragon. I think its official name – Moloch horridus – sounds more horrid than the popular one. Here’s what I read in my friend Jane’s reptile book: “the Moloch horridus is the sole member of the Genus…
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Desert art
Drawings in the sand through the interplay of wind and sturdy desert grass. Using the grass-stalks as a compass, the wind has drawn circles around each plant. At first they must have been very faint, but after days and days of strong wind from different directions they are now clearly visible, engraved in the red…
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Kata Tjuta
or: What’s in a name? Looking from the red planet Mars at the red continent Australia on planet Earth we may be able to see, with the best available telescope, an image like you’ll find here (please click), on a picture made by NASA. From that far we perceive a group of heavily eroded bulges in the…
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My Red Homeland
It’s not easy to write sense about art. I tried my best in last week’s post regarding another work by Anish Kapoor, but I’ll take it a bit more easy this time and quote some lines from the booklet that was distributed at the exhibition in Sydney in 2013. “My Red Homeland is a monumental wax sculpture…
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Please do not touch
Anish Kapoor calls this work of his “Laboratory for a New Model of the Universe – 2006”. This sounds intriguing, maybe a bit over the top, although maybe with a touch of humour too. Who will tell us? Anyhow, it is what it is: an acrylic bloc of 123x134x132.7 cm, with an air bubble caught…
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Before sunset
A catamaran blocks my view of the sun that is about to set in the Indian Ocean. But the very last rays manage to pass under the elevated bottom of the boat, producing a faint reflection on the gently rolling waves. Similarly, but differently, in the photo below the rays of the setting sun penetrate a…
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Backbone girl
Cleaning, cooking, fetching water, looking after the children, feeding and milking the family cow or buffalo, collecting firewood, all this and more is women’s work in many a traditional society. This Kumaoni mountain girl carries a tree home that she may even have cut herself with an axe, because in these parts women think nothing of…
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With heart and soul
Wow! With her wild flowing hair this poster girl explodes in an outburst of energy and joy! In last week’s post we could admire the natural beauty of Gond women at the village pump. This week it’s admiration for self-willed Western girls in their choice of a musical instrument after their heart. Defying the prevailing…
καιρός remembered
… the right moment, position chosen, shoot …
καιρός remembered 