Who would have thought, without it looking out of place, you could construct a welded-steel frame, turn it into a wooden house and dump it on an island right in the middle in a Norwegian fjord? I love this man’s work. You can see the whole thing here on his website. And God knows why he bothered, but I admire the effort he made to avoid bringing this flight of stairs down to the ground. It’s a fine looking piece:
Also very interesting, here, but it’s in Norwegian, he’s talking about his own quite modest apartment in (what I think is) a rather ugly pre-War block in Oslo. Interesting because his approach to his own place is exactly like Dyv’s & mine is to ours. We’ve fixed up bits and pieces and left some areas as they have been for seventy years or more. The lived-in look with all its little experiments might seem eccentric, or no doubt slovenly to some, but we like it like this.
This is a tiny version of a photograph by Danish Siddiqui (there’s a bigger version here), one of a series he took of the Pyongyang subway (he also took these while he was in N.Korea). He’s a terrific photographer-journalist, part of a Reuters team that won a Pulitzer prize for its coverage of Rohingya, but for me because of the chess-figure reflections and the colour, as well as the subject, this picture transcends most Reuters pics, which set out to be documentary. For that it reminds me of Fay Godwin’s well-known Meall Mor, taken near Glencoe in Scotland (here it is on Google Maps), that’s more than a postcard landscape.
On the left, the view directly* out of the bedroom window showing the hillside beyond the garden. I’m trying to take pictures of green stuff – trees, shrubs, plants and landscape – which clearly distinguish what’s what. Too often in my landscape pictures the leaves of a plant in the foreground seem to smoodge into the blob of trees behind it. In the real world we use our eye’s ability to focus on individual items closer or further away; separating them out doesn’t cause us any difficulty. I took this picture one morning because the mist makes the background layers progressively lighter; and then it reminded me of the watercolour on the right that’s reproduced in James Ravilious: A Life, a biography by his wife, Robin Ravilious.
*(see previous post)
Dyveke bought this print at Kew, last month. Now it’s the first thing I see when I wake up; it and the reflection of the weather and garden. In the foreground is the outhouse roof and its skylight and to the left…well, there’s a large mirror perpendicular to the bedroom window that brings in a view of the meadow in the distance. I remember being irritated when I was young by reflections on pictures; nowadays, I can’t get enough of them.
A Bad Guide 