Tropic April

A tropical Carmen Miranda complete with little frog makes a cheerful April greeting. I wonder if this lady is daydreaming of synchronised swimming or the like? She looks like she should be.

This month’s Frankie calendar page features the painting Julie Blue’s Marvellous New Swim Cap by Janet Hill. Hill is a Canadian artist whose work is displayed in private collections all round the world, as well as featured in editorials and corporate collateral. Her colour palette is warm and rich, her style nostalgic and engaging.

You can see more of her work on her website, or purchase a print in her Etsy shop, including Julie Blue.

Happy April!

Decoding Thoughts

Psst She Said, Helena Turinski 2015Psst she said.
The Pistols aren’t revealing secrets.
That which was once thought forbidden forever is trapped in conversations.
The first thing you’ll need is a pen to decode thought
and make your own word play
for there are no secrets here any more.

I really love assembling my random poems. It’s such an exciting and serendipitous process that evolves rapidly as I snatch up cut-out words that seem to fit whatever I am weaving under my hand. I never know where a poem is going to go either. I haven’t actually ‘written’ any for a while because I have such a huge backlog of poems that I have yet to turn into collages.

The words obviously inform the pictures, but sometimes the pictures themselves add an extraordinary power to one’s perception of the poem, such as in this image. The women were cut out from some innocuous advertisement, although for what I can’t recall. The blackness of the figures adds such a sinister tone, especially with the highlighted white teeth, as does the gun pointed directly at the smiling woman’s head; the metaphors are obvious. The strange and stark contrasts make me chuckle – that’s what society is like sometimes – but we should never ignore the undercurrents.

Shipboard Romance

One of my biggest fantasies about living in the glamorous 1920s and 30s must always have been travelling abroad on a great ocean liner. Imagine the dramatic skies with seabirds wheeling overhead; the feeling of the ship moving beneath you; fascinating shipboard companions and amusing deck games; quaint cabins and trunks full of exquisite clothes of the magical era between the wars. Thus it was the cover illustrations that made today’s purchase of Ideal Book for Girls absolutely irresistible. The covers of this vintage 1920s teen girl’s storybook evoke the absolute romance and excitement of going abroad on holiday by ship.

I had a tiny taste of it a few years ago when I realised a long-held ambition: crossing the Strait of Gibraltar from Europe to Africa. I went by ferry, and it was only a short trip of a few hours, but still! I can only imagine the excitement of a young girl packing to go on holiday and being given this book to read on the journey.

I can only imagine the excitement of a young girl packing to go on holiday and being given this book to read on the journey.

I hoped this book would be full of girls having exciting adventures, but alas, these are very moral tales told in a perfunctory style, which makes me suspect each author was handed a particular moral theme by the publisher and told to write a story around it. How the reader got there didn’t really matter, as long as they arrived in a few pages.

There is a good reason this book is entitled ‘Ideal’ Book for Girls! I wonder if that young girl found herself somewhat dissatisfied when she came to the end of it?

However … let’s focus on the good stuff, which are the illustrations. I really love the back cover in particular, and am full of admiration that the spine has a separate illustration too, but it is all of 4cm wide. Page three shows a pretty watercolour of The Book-Worm lounging in a hammock, nose buried in a book. (Note the extra-long skirt fabric modestly covering the left leg.)

The rest of the illustrations throughout the book are in black and white, the drawing style so evocative of a bygone era – surely no such innocent 15 year olds exist in the world anywhere anymore. The title page illustration is very sweet, although like the bookworm, it bears no relation to the events in the stories, which are mostly set in senior high school.

I did enjoy the fact that all the schoolgirls and teachers have bobbed, marcelled hair. Though most of the characters are schoolgirls wearing uniforms, there are a few touches of contemporary fashion in the details of teachers’ outfits. In this age of very individual style, it’s quite fascinating to remember that once upon a time practically everyone dressed in the established mode.

The Lost Photographer

The Lost Photographer :: Elijah Lens // Pearl Film // Yuletide FlashI am always keeping an eagle eye out for Lost Things, and really it is quite remarkable how many there are in my hometown of Melbourne.

I don’t know if Melburnians are simply more careless, or whether in other cities the custodians of tidiness are more zealous about picking up after people. Perhaps there are Committees for the Restoration of Lost Property to Rightful Owners? For recently two friends (and already sometime contributors) of mine were overseas, one in London, the other in Hong Kong, and both were on the lookout. But neither of them spotted anything in either of those two great cities! It’s a mystery.

The Lost Boater :: Elijah Lens // Pearl Film // Yuletide FlashHere I am in a Melbourne shopping mall, taking a picture of a Lost Boater, forlornly residing on a table. My brother-in-law snuck up behind me to take a picture of me wearing a boater while taking a picture of a boater – he thought that would be rather amusing.

I post daily on my Lost Collections Tumblr blog – there you can check out the myriad of lost things I’ve amassed over the years (I’ve been capturing them on Hipstamatic for six years).

Temple of the Winds

Salvador 84 Lens // Uchitel 20 Film // Yuletide FlashOn Sunday I went for a walk in the Royal Botanic Gardens, a few minutes walk from my home and which I fondly refer to as ‘my backyard’, and took this photograph of the Temple of the Winds.

The structure was created by William Guilfoyle, one of the directors of the Gardens from 1873 to 1909, and who is often described as “the master of landscaping”. The Temple overlooks the Yarra River and beyond to Melbourne’s sports grounds such as the MCG and tennis centre, and further eastwards, Richmond.

I took the photo with the iPhone 6 native camera app, and used the randomiser in Hipstamatic to create the sepia double exposure. I love to make modern photos look vintage, and I love the happy chance combinations made using the random button in the Hipstamatic app. You never know exactly what kind of double exposure the Salvador 84 lens will make, and the Yuletide flash in monochrome images has a lovely aging effect. The sepia film, Uchitel 20, also produces random spotting and foxing.

Although it’s not the same as analogue photography, it is a rare instance of serendipity in the digital age, as I mentioned in my previous story on Eugène Atget. While I was not trying to emulate his work, it did remind me of him.

Here’s to happy chance.