HIGH UP IN THE TREES

'Velicate', 'drift', 'glide', and 'sing'.

{The same as it ever was.}

Dear you,
 
'Slacks'? Really, 'slacks' is the word not the item of clothing that for one week the New Yorker have cheekily said no to? Of all the words I do not like, 'slacks' does not feature high or indeed anywhere on my list. That word for the casual trouser, for me, it is one I like to say and wear. I could not, for example, sit at the café Fish Fly By without them. Rather than list those words that I do not hold a fondness for, here are several I do fancy for both their sound and meaning.

'Vellicate'. To touch (a body part) lightly so as to excite the surface nerves and cause uneasiness, laughter, or spasmodic movements. The verb 'hibernate'. An animal or a plant spends the winter in a dormant state. Add to that 'vicissitude', the alternation between opposite or contrasting things, like seasons. 'Glide', 'drift', 'slink', 'night', 'sing', 'eyelids', and 'wowser'. These are words I like. And 'coffee', I like that word too. It's a word to drink if ever there was.

Now, when will you join me for a roasted brew and perhaps some cinnamon toast?

Yours, Blue Java blended,
X

+ The fish flying above are the Hardhead silverside (Atherinomorus stipes). Its eyes are large relative to its body size, and its colouration is variable. By day it is almost transparent whilst come the night, it darkens save for a narrow silvery stripe. Range: N. Atlantic Ocean: Florida to Brazil, including Caribbean.

+ Me and my young friends: Marie-Louise has a tiny paper zoo to attend to.

+ Thank-you for your assistance with picking a visual quartet. You've been most helpful, and your selection little short of illuminating. It's not too late to put forward your desired four here or here. Tomorrow, we plan to send the new greeting cards to print. Exciting stuff!

Have you time to help me decide?

{Please click to enlarge, if needs be.}

Dear you,
 
I’ve a favour to ask. It’s quite big, but not so big as to send you scurrying to the hills. As Bathsheba Everdene wrote to Gabriel Oak when faced with a flock of sheep with bloat (my current read being Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd), "do not desert me…", friends. (Help me, too, to stop parroting the likes of Joseph Poorgrass with his "slight attack of the multiplying eye" or Liddy "I stand as a pelican in the wilderness" Smallbury. Someone, please, that Hardy speak is contagious stuff and not suited for my day-to-day.) For you see, Louise and I thought it might be a good idea to print a quartet of new cards for the year four moths old. We were thinking of going with four of my postcard collages, though as to which four, well, we’ve no idea. Truly, none whatsoever.

Perhaps you might like to lend a hand. Chip in, as it were. Offer your two cents’ worth. We’d both be ever so grateful.

Above are 16 we were thinking might lend themselves to a greeting card. Some you’ll be familiar with, and others you’ve yet to see here.

Simply leave in the comments below a list of your favourite four (number will do).

Forever in your debt,
G

1. You're in my sights.
2. Of another hemisphere, surely.
3. Before the hush that darkness brings, I search for trinkets and beetles in the earth.
4. With rainfall and thunder close behind.
5. Surrounded by what seemed to be tiny priceless treasures.
6. Afloat for now.
7. Keeping in line.
8. Guiding me home.
9. Still a crown, view dependent.
10. The Venezia Two-Step.
11. Looking for something someone may have lost.
12. Feeding off treasures.
13. With quiff extended.
14. The merriments and sport of the water called.
15. I enjoy your company.
16. The lesser Malay Chevrotain begins her homeward climb.

For Natalie.

{I gave them back their hearts broken. Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison. Collage. 2012.}

Natalie from the University of Ballarat sent the following questions to Louise and me.

Q: How did you first become interested in your work?
No clear start can either of us recall. It feels to each of us as though we have always been interested in making our work, in working with our hands, in drawing that which we see around us, in questioning what we see. I can’t recall a beginning for it always was, and if I look through the scrapbooks and photo albums my parents kept throughout my early years, I see that drawing and making was something I have always done and something my parents, too, have always done. Like everyone, drawing and mark making is something that we all do in some way until some of us become discouraged by the perceived inaccuracy of the hand or other pursuits become of greater interest.

In terms of the artists’ books Louise and I make, this sprang chiefly from a bookbinding course in Ascona, Switzerland (thanks to a Freedman Foundation Travelling Scholarship for Emerging Artists in 2002). Previously, we’d each dipped our toes into the bookish waters (working in sketchbooks or modifying through collage those that were found), but it was in Ascona that the world of the book gripped us and held us that little bit closer. We dived in, knowing little, and have been grateful ever since that we did.

Q: What has sustained your work?
Our own interest in making our work essentially sustains it. Nothing is ever finished, there is always something else on the horizon, something you wish to explore. The investigation is never complete if an interest remains, and looking back at earlier works, you always see what you could have done better or differently. This drives you to make more, to keep going. A real love of making, an interest in it, this sustains the work.

On perhaps a more practical note, our work is made possible by the support of loved ones. Some days it feels all too easy to not make or do something, to become disenchanted or to give way to apathy, but the embrace, the support, the cheer squad that is those nearest and dearest reminds you to keep at it.

Q: What is it that you love about what you do?
In short, every little thing. The giddy highs, the crashing lows, the solitude of working, its quietness, the unexpected things that come about through a constant plugging away at it, whatever that ‘it’ may be. There is everything to love about working on a collage, artists’ book, drawing, or other thing yet to take shape. For me, a certain enjoyment is essential to all making. It is also very liberating.

Q: How do you organise exhibitions?
Some exhibitions are ones we have applied for and been successful in our application. Other exhibitions are ones we have been invited to put together, such as our recent exhibition at Latrobe Regional Galley, By This Unwinking Night. We were shown the gallery space available to us and informed of the dates of the show. From there, we took off at a gallop.

We had the gallery floor plan as a guide, on a practical front. The longest wall of the gallery is 13metres. As we work from home, we mapped out 13metres and discovered that this equaled our hallway and lounge room in length (we live in a single storey terrace house). This helped with being able to visualize the space we were making new work for, as the actual gallery is some 2 hours drive from our house. We played around with what was to go on what wall and how, and in the end concluded that a grid of my postcard collages should go on this wall. For this one wall, we figured out how many columns of postcard collages would fit on the wall and how many rows, keeping in mind that most were horizontal. Working from the left, the postcards begin in black and white. This leads into sepia before giving way to golden highlights and rose. Light blues follow, and the seascape comes to the fore. From here, near to the mid point, brighter colour splashes appear and the works (postcards from Spain, Monte Carlo and Cannes) give us pinks, blues and sunlight. This is followed on the heels by green, mountains and various interiors before nightfall and midnight inkiness. This pattern, this arrangement 11metres in length, it was organized on two large drawing boards. I need not tell you that the details of this took an age, but it was a fun challenge to meet. How each collage related to not only that which sat above and below but to its left and right had to be considered. This is but one part of an exhibition, but it will perhaps give you an idea of the things that happen in the background. With any exhibition we do, we like to try to do as much as possible before the installation process begins. We like to iron out any quirks and particulars; it serves as a working drawing before a painting. Organisation helps you face the unexpected things that naturally crop up.

Cabinets for the show were sourced and provided by the wonderful NETS Victoria. We loaned six cabinets in total, and this meant that we could display our artists’ books securely. Had we not of been able to borrow these, we would have had to rethink our plans for the exhibition. Organising an exhibition and its installation is something we both love. It takes many forms before it finally settles and, of course, it leaves you wanting to do it all again.

Q: What are your most challenging aspects of your work?
One of the most challenging aspects would be finding new spaces or, indeed, any space to exhibit our work. The ideas, the actual making of work, this is for us at this moment not where the greatest challenge lies, or if it is, it is one we so relish that we don’t think of it as a challenge.

Now that our show is no longer at Latrobe Regional Gallery, we are working towards shaping what comes next. We are putting in grant applications and exhibition proposals and keeping our fingers crossed. Whittling a description for a proposed new body of work down to 100 characters is a challenge. Dusting yourself off and starting again in the face of scores of inevitable rejections is also a challenge.

In terms of our artistic practice, not repeating yourself, too, can be a challenge. Coming up with new things can be a challenge, if you find yourself in a rut. Gluing collage pieces in place on a hot day and finding the glue dries too quickly, too lumpy, why, this can be a challenge. As with anything, I guess it is just how you look at it at the time.

Q: Do you or did you have mentors?
Of course. Many lecturers and curators we have been fortunate enough to study under or work with. We have enjoyed working with various people, from printers to bookbinders, when making our artists’ books, and their advice and patience has been invaluable. Add to that long list, librarians, book experts, and the good folk at Craft Victoria and NETS Victoria for their boundless knowledge and enthusiasm.

Q: Have you ever had to deal with copyright issues?
The images we use within collages we make collaboratively, or that I make independently, are often out of copyright or have been altered in such a way that they are removed from existing source. If another artists’ work were to feature within, we would credit this or refer to it. My piece for Of Birds and Fishes, From this bed, with the wings of a bird, I flew to the sea as I slept last night, for example, features owls, ducks and fish of all sizes that swim and leap their way through a theatre set by the painter Paul Nash. The set was created for a one-act play, The Truth About the Russian Dancers, written especially for the dancer Tamara Karsavina by J. M. Barrie. The play was first performed in 1920 at the London Colosseum. At the Savoy some six years later, the play was revived, and now it forms the backdrop to a collage. The history of this sourced image is important to me and informs how the image is incorporated.

Q: Do you have a contract with your gallery?
Whilst we are exhibiting a body of work, we have a contract with the gallery. This outlines what our responsibilities are and what their responsibilities are. This is only for the duration of the show and they are standard, covering insurance of artwork, freight responsibilities (if applicable), artists' fees (again, if applicable), and other costs related to the exhibition.

Q: What's the benefit if you have a contract?
A contract with the gallery is not negotiable, and it outlines clearly for the benefit of all parties involved (both gallery and artist) what their responsibilities are. As a gallery does not represent us, we only have a contract for the duration of an exhibition.

Q: Do you ever require contract or permission release forms?
We often have to sign forms to give publications and institutions permission to reproduce an image of our work and happily do so. Recently, the State Library of Victoria used a detail of our work within their Fine Impressions: printmaking and artists' books in Melbourne 1999–2010 catalogue and their SLV News publication, and Melbourne University Library used a detail from our artists’ book Sleeping During the Day on their Christmas cards (2011).

Q: Where do you get your inspirations from?
Everything and anything. To me, it is not where you necessarily find your inspiration that is important, but merely that you find it and in turn use it in some way eventually. As I find myself often writing in my feedback to my students who study painting (Exploring Painting at RMIT through Open Universities) and thus may sound like a broken record, you could find inspiration for a composition in the palette of a film recently seen or in the colours of the clothing of someone you pass on the street. It is not always important the source, namely that you find it and recognize it.

Many things are inspiring to us. Classical music is inspiring, from Shostakovich and Stravinsky to Riccardo Eugenio Drigo and Hayden. All music is inspiring. Literature is inspiring and our home is lined with books. Gardening frees up the mind, offering time to reflect and thus is inspiring. Travel and film, performance and nature, they, too, give up inspiration freely. Really, everything is inspiring, anything can impart a truth or spark an idea. The trick is to remain open to them.

Q: Does your work have any hidden meaning?
Yes. Our use of the ever-present animal within our work is there part as decorative lure. Hard to miss, the animal runs up hills, scales rooftops, performs cartwheels, and passes through a scene new or more familiar. For us, the animal is there to question our very behaviour, those moral principles one governs the self by, and to explore the relationship with the natural world. It is not really a hidden meaning, but it is what we are interested in exploring through our work at the moment. It is up to you to see what you wish to see. You can see riddles to unravel; you could stumble across the unexpected. You could find the scene amusing, and we like to keep in mind that “the longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes”, as Nikolai Gogol wrote.

Q: Do you have a favourite artist?
Happily, too many to list. No one favourite artist, be it in the visual arts or otherwise, for either of us, I’m afraid. Perhaps it is easier to say that we are looking forward to seeing William Kentridge: Five Themes at ACMI (before it closes on the 27th of May), and Napoleon: Revolution to Empire at the NGV (opening the 2nd of June). Perhaps, too, it is easier to say that we enjoy seeing the new work made with image or words by our friends we have meet through blogging: Lisa Solomon, Camilla Engman, Alexandra Hedberg, Hila Shachar, Anna Emilia, Denise Parsons, and others.

And on our bookshelves, there are books featuring the work of Kiki Smith, Edvard Munch, Paul Klee, Malevich, Eva Hesse, the Ballet Russes, Joseph Beuys, Max Ernst, Dieter Roth, Joseph Cornell, Christian Schad, Louise Bourgeois, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. There are novels by Tolstoy, Orhan Pamuk, Robert Walser, Emily Brontë, Wodehouse, Herta Müller, Gail Jones...

All inspirational.

Q: Have you any special places where you source your materials?
Yes, and they are all secret, I’m afraid. In addition, though, we are often sent postcards and ephemera to make use of and for this we are most grateful.

Q: Do you use Photoshop and/or cut and paste with your collage?
Both. The postcard collages, as medium suggests, are all made by hand with a pair of sharp scissors and glue and the aid of a strong light source. Other pieces, namely our collaborative collages, are created using Photoshop but are built largely the same way through layering. The only difference is the off cuts digitally we have not so far found a use for (unlike when working with paper). Images are scanned large to ensure versatility and this means that we can widen the scope of our source material. They are both enjoyable ways of working though quite different.

Thanks, Natalie, and I hope these answers fit the bill.
GH

Le Rocher Blues...

{Recalling an earlier sadness.}

Dear you,
 
Today, if ever was there a day, seems one to keep the words of Nikolai Gogol in mind. “The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes”, he wrote and I agree with him wholeheartedly. Here, this clear crisp day in Monaco, this I ask you to keep in mind as scenes new and familiar dance before the eyes. Whimsy and the unexpected can be seductive that way.
 
Yours not always as I may appear at first glance,
X

+ All things Winged with Louise
+ It's a Fine Little World with Elizabeth and Steffie
+ Elsewhere it is springtime, 1843 with Mette
+ Carousel Collage with Joseph Cornell

Of curious dreams...

{Of curious dreams.}

Dear you,
 
The autumn finds me preparing to hibernate. Summer tucked away, I am early to bed and early to rise, making most of the light by day and chill by night. I am skimming through The Handy Book of Object Lessons by J. Walker as my tea simmers and bubbles on the hotplate, and learning all manner of things. The first types of soup, why, they contained the hippopotamus. True, I kid you not. The hippo was chief ingredient in the soup pot of 6000 BC. My soups, they begin with browned onions and garlic. To my pot, I’ll add thyme, parsley, savoury lovage, and the bay leaf too. My cabin it be good friend to spice. To peeled spud too. Little will not for a fine soup make. Watch out! Look sharp!

Yours pyjama clad already,
X
 
+ The Handy Book of Object Lessons: From a Teacher's Note Book (First and Second Series, London, Jarrold and Sons, 1873) features particulars about the chameleon, the wolf, the cuckoo, and the silkworm. It features from the vegetable kingdom, the mahogany tree, the sugar cane, and the cork tree, and from the mineral kingdom, one can learn of gold, iron, silver, and tin. Part IV brings with it delicious miscellany, and here one can learn of the looking glass, the feet of animals, their tails, too, it follows, the thermometer, dew, the diving bell, bones, pins, and the china tea cup. Of the formation and use of mountains you can learn. Of the structure of the ear as well. The terrain covered is broad, and all contained in one small now tattered well-used book that I picked up for $2 last Saturday en route to local café haunt.

+ Gewurzhaus in Carlton has some very nice herbs and spices.

Depart. Some wildness. Return.

{My Mum sends me a photo of a photocopy in which there features at its heart, my Dad. Her iPad is her reliable camera.}

As I wait for my parents to return from their wild and sound filled, colour soaked travels far across the seas, few could doubt that the stock I hail from is not of nostalgic sentimental leaning. I have a bookshelf bedecked with postcards they have sent my way from New Orleans, and, by glory of the iPad age, a plethora of tiny music videos. Photos of the two of them nestled in the plane's cabin, homeward bound, appear as an electronic garland in my inbox. The above photo, however, is one my Mum sent me before their trip. It is of my Dad with his scout mates and it is the one photo where my Mum says she can see where my cheekbones come from. That’s my Dad, there, looking over his shoulder. Third from the left, he is the one with the dark head of hair and long skinny legs.

Of travel and adventure and family, now I give you three postcard collages with that very theme in mind.


{With one triumphant swing.}


{Guiding me home.}


{Mind you don't leave me waiting long.}

That green clearing.

{I would not swap this patch of blue-flowered luck, not for you, not ever.}


{I've been down to the river to see our endeavours safe home.}


{Banashing clouds in Kew.}

The best and only way I know how to get myself out of a creative rut is to do something else completely different and preferably physical and so yesterday found me gardening all the day until the sun was no more. I tore into the garden with such ferocity, or was it gusto, that at one point I looked about me, at the green chaos and thought, what have I done? It seemed as though I had pulled apart every good thing and made it a big mess. Two garden beds, one with a pond in the shape of a kidney, were now empty and their wreckage lay about my dirt covered feet. Nevertheless, getting dirty, head to toe, and working hard was just what I needed. I didn’t think about ‘what next?’ or ‘where now?’ or artwork and things tangled up in the creative. Instead I thought of only how to fix the mess I had caused, the mess that lay about my feet. It became my reduced palette that enabled me to see form.

The pond may have gone back in exactly the same spot (plans to shift it to another bed failed owing to a large Olive tree root. Oh the unforeseen!), but it went back in better and more securely with an edging of bluestone rocks perfect to perch on. A good day’s physical work clears the head. Doing something else, anything else, clears the head, reboots the system, if you like.
 
Now that sun is up on a new day, new week, I plan to shuffle outdoors with first coffee brew and see what there is, and what has been done. Have the canna lilies survived the move? Have the possums approved of the shifting of edges and stones and bricks? Has the mortar set so I can now water down the pea straw? I plan to watch the cats as they sniff their new surrounds gingerly. I plan with my roughened hands (for I wear no gardening gloves and dig largely not with trowel but own paw) to later start making new work and to set to the business of writing grant applications and proposals. There is still soil under my fingernails and I like it this way.

(I've been down to the river to see our endeavours safe home features the Barwon River in Geelong and is for my Dad.)

+ Have you voted for your friends in the Sydney Writers' Centre Best Australian Blogs 2012 Competition yet? I have.

After this romantic excursion.

{Details from my artists' book, This is where the dormouse lives.}

My friends, this second peep at This is where the dormouse lives completes the cover to guts tour. This individual King Penguin is home to many an animal familiar faced and less so. From woolly lemurs prancing to dog bats swinging and sea otters inquisitive, it seems the Isle of Wight is home to great many, and to enchantingly curious quotes too.

“All along the foot cliffs, earnest visitors with special tubes, empty mayonnaise bottles or ambitious jampots are scrabbling the coloured sands into their glass prisons in attractive layers. Some of the sands are difficult, too high up, too hard or too damp, and so as you sit on the shore a number of very indifferent efforts pass your contemptuous eyes. How much better you could do this yourself with a trained eye for colour and tone … In no time at all you have found a bottle and started. I did see a couple of really strong-minded women who sneered all along the bay and back again, but ninety-nine per cent scrape, and still the cliffs are there.”
( Barbara Jones, The Isle of Wight, published by King Penguin, 1950.)
 
“After this romantic excursion, which excites in no small degree the animal spirits, it is a very grateful sight to perceive the Hotel rising before the view. "
(Beauties of the Isle of Wight, published by Horsley around the 1830 mark and quoted within The Isle of Wight (1950) by Barbara Jones.)

{Over My Shoulder (VII) from GRACIA & LOUISE. Singing in the background, you can hear Clara Smith and the song is Black Cat Moan (1927).}

+ This is where the dormouse lives, from the beginning (or as close to as I can muster).

+ It all ...comes down, so very swiftly.
+ Louise's green detour for the senses has Josephine's kangaroos in mind as a collection of living animals is gathered.

+ Nice Work to encounter. (Thank-you, Milly Sleeping.)

The Wonderful Easter.

{Catherine with her iPhone captures a rare sporting moment on a Good Friday.}

Prokofiev; Mother Goose; a close shave crossing the road; cobwebs in the hair; an exhibition of collage at the Counihan Gallery in Brunswick; GROWL, GROWL, a dear friend’s baby dressed in a tee sporting a bear cub; a collision with a column that left a scrape mark down my left shin (and later a big green bruise); chocolate bilby; forest calling; road trip, near Warburton; green ferns; smoke; dirt bikes; monster trucks; long amble; small creek; tyre swing; bird call; lolly snakes; Infinity; egg painting; the business of weather forecasts, wet stuff will eventually fall from the sky; big storm; neighbour’s heavy tread; Yum Cha; baby peas within; pierce a dumpling artfully, fail; chocolate rooster; jasmine tea; animals smiling one after the other, from owl to lamb to somewhere on a seabed blue; facebook babies; Western Swing Chronicles; quiet spell; yesterday’s papers; my parents beignets at Café du Monde, the inevitable afternoon snooze; Ain’t Got Nobody to Grind My Coffee; Mahler; Shostakovich; PLOP, PLOP, black olives falling from the tree and a ginger tom asleep on car bonnet; picnic provisions; Keilor Botanical Gardens; park rangers on strike; a pill box mended; baguettes with tomato and lettuce chased down by blood orange lemonade; Percy’s extra long homemade leash; a tiny egg thief; garden path amble; the no small room, leg cross; at Mr Fry’s encouragement, Ulysses is a book next to dive into; Franz Schubert; down pour; canary indoors, CHRRUP, CHIRRRUP, singsong, scatter seed; papers; Far From the Madding Crowd. This lolling is exhausting business; all these wonderful things squeezed into a four-day window with unsurprising ease.

Yours?

Done and dusted, well and truly.

{And we are done. Artists' books wrapped. Prints wrapped. Home calls.}

Because taking down a show is never a happy thing, the song playing repeatedly in my head as we prepare to and commence dismantling our Unwinking Night is Iggy Pop’s The Passenger with its angry jangling nakedness. Having seen Paolo Sorrentino’s This Must Be the Place at the Sun Theatre recently, a film made for the big screen, like The Apotheosis of Homer (1827) by Ingres at the Louvre, like Jacques-Laurent Agasse’s The Nubian Giraffe (1827) in The Royal Collection, like a Leonardo da Vinci, or a Francesco Guardi Venetian scene, or any, take your pick, any work made to be seen in person not in some textbook or gracing some postcard reproduction, yes, some films, most films, most art, most of it must be seen big. As artist intended. Not small. At scale. In person. Just you and it. Dwarfed. No audience. And it feels as if it were made just for you and your happily weary tourist eyes to behold for that particular moment alone. I loved this film starring Sean Penn (thank-you, Hopscotch). I loved it visually. I loved it for its humour and for the characters held within. I loved it for reminding me how much I love that particular Iggy Pop and the Stooges song. And I loved that this was what kept me company as I wrapped postcards in column order in archival tissue before slowly giving way to the sounds of my beloved ABC Classic FM playing on the technician’s small black radio. Dvořák, Haydn, Shostakovich, Vivaldi, and Bach. Four days to install and two hours to take down. Not like a feather light did it float. Like a lump of concrete. Thud! We’re done.

+ What goes up…

+ Films and Performances and Exhibitions seen 2012

Sunday splinters and wicked sprites.

{Omar, in one of his favourite spots, warm inside the (unplugged) dryer.}

For some, Sunday passed by without a hitch and as it so often does. Why, it was only recently I spoke of pets dear and their familiar patterns and oft-unvarying loops. Omar spent the chief part of his day in a warm cocoon man-made. Inside a metal pod lined with clean washing brought in from the line and in need of folding and sorting. It becomes, for him, a giant nest from which to survey initially and to soon come snooze. He is a jaguar in a tree, maybe, yes. He is in a lair, this I know. In his man-made lair of fabric. Today, it is jeans and tea towels, and to extract him is a tricky affair.

As to my Sunday, I was reminded that a small thing can big impact make. One knocked glass broken on the floor yesterday and two splinters later, I am bemoaning my clumsiness and grateful for your kind tweets. A splinter that must have found a nest on my cuff made its way into my right eye when I rubbed it and oh! the pain that followed. One tiny glass splinter floating on my eye gave me cause to yelp and panic. Blindness?! Blood?! But, no, out it rinsed with relative ease once wings had desisted with their panicked flap. Sometime later, I managed to find a second tiny glass splinter with my right sole. A second vacuum of the floor and now I fear the Snow Queen’s troll mirror may well have pierced my heart as well as eye (and foot) for not a nice word did I utter.

Now then, let us begin. When we are at the end of the story, we shall know more than we know now: but to begin.

Once upon a time there was a wicked sprite, indeed he was the most mischievous of all sprites. One day he was in a very good humor, for he had made a mirror with the power of causing all that was good and beautiful when it was reflected therein, to look poor and mean; but that which was good-for-nothing and looked ugly was shown magnified and increased in ugliness. In this mirror the most beautiful landscapes looked like boiled spinach, and the best persons were turned into frights, or appeared to stand on their heads; their faces were so distorted that they were not to be recognised; and if anyone had a mole, you might be sure that it would be magnified and spread over both nose and mouth.

...

One day Kay and Gerda sat looking at a book full of pictures of animals and birds, and then just as the clock in the church tower struck twelve, Kay said, “Oh, something has struck my heart!” and soon after, “There is something in my eye.” The little girl put her arm round his neck, and looked into his eye, but she could see nothing.

“I think it is gone,” he said. But it was not gone; it was one of those bits of the looking-glass—that magic mirror, of which we have spoken—the ugly glass which made everything great and good appear small and ugly, while all that was wicked and bad became more visible, and every little fault could be plainly seen. Poor little Kay had also received a small grain in his heart, which very quickly turned to a lump of ice. He felt no more pain, but the glass was there still. “Why do you cry?” said he at last; “it makes you look ugly. There is nothing the matter with me now. Oh, see!” he cried suddenly, “that rose is worm-eaten, and this one is quite crooked. After all they are ugly roses, just like the box in which they stand,” and then he kicked the boxes with his foot, and pulled off the two roses.

“Kay, what are you doing?” cried the little girl; and then, when he saw how frightened she was, he tore off another rose, and jumped through his own window away from little Gerda.
(From The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875).)

{Painting by Thomas Bromley Blacklock (1863-1903), The Snow Queen (detail), 1902.}

Someone with nice words to say this Sunday is Zebra Books.

"Paper. Animals as subjects. Nature as urban background. These combinations creates amazing collages. Each element belong to a travel experience, which show us new geography and new territories. In this work the animal kingdom are the conquerors. By This Unwinking Night is the name of the current exhibition from Gracia and Louise."

Thank-you.