Category: Flashes

Everyday images

subscribe to this category with rss

Posted on
by

Although it’s January, and nominally the middle of the school year, a new ‘back to school’ photo is warranted.
Y starts in group 7 today, skipping a year at the half way mark. She started in group 6 after the summer, and is now moving to group 7. After the coming summer she will move to the final year of primary school in group 8. In the past two weeks she did the middle-of-year tests of both group 6 and 7, and already spent some hours in her new group to get used to the change. She asked us to make a new first day of school photo today.

Child getting on a bike

Going to school the first day in 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020.

Posted on
by

My (since recently former) colleague I. gave us a deeply thoughtful and touching gift during our team’s Christmas dinner last week, as her personal goodbye to us.

She gave us a broken vase.

We talk amongst our team about picking ourselves up after the loss of Frank and all that entailed this year and last in terms of collecting the shards and building ourselves a new vase from them.
My personal sense of beauty resides in the layering of all our human emotions, the scars we carry that make joy and happiness more noticeable and richer. I’ve remarked on that before.
Colleague I. said she feels that’s true not only on a personal level, but for groups too. The shared experience has its own intensity of meaning, a separate layer in what beauty is made out of.

She gave us a broken vase.
One she put together again, Kintsugi style, not trying to erase the damage, but making it a key part of the identity and beauty of the renewed object.

And she filled it with multiple layers of encouraging messages and compliments from people, organisations, clients around us expressing what we as a team mean to them. Messages from our company’s extended family members, she said. For the moments in which we feel broken, so that we can pick a message at random and can be encouraged, comforted.

Such an awesome gift. Beautiful. Thank you I.

Posted on
by

A few weeks ago Y and I visited the printing art fair in town. The local second hand book shop had, as curiosa, put up a number of frames containing things they found inside books they received. Paper money, shares and other official documents, paper cigar bands, post cards, all things used as bookmark or perhaps hidden between the pages. It was fun to look at, and with Y wonder why some of those things had ended up between the pages.

A book I ordered, Information Anxiety by Richard Saul Wurman, at Kennys Bookshop and Art Galleries in Galway, Ireland, arrived today in the mail.

Leaving through it, I noticed towards the end something between the pages.
A rail road ticket from 28 January 1991, one way from Chiasso (on the Italian border) to Biasca, in the Swiss canton Ticino. The book itself is a September 1990 paperback print (from a 1989 publication).
So whoever made that train trip, may well have been the books first owner, and have browsed through it on the train, with the ticket ending up between the pages.

While the book is in excellent condition, not at all ‘well traveled’, it does make me wonder about its path through the world. From that 1991 train trip up the valley towards the St. Gotthard massif, to a bookshop in Galway, Ireland. And now to my bookshelves.

I’ll keep the train ticket, with the punched hole, and use it as bookmark in this work myself.

Posted on
by

For some other reason I happened to open Jane Jacobs 1961 work ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’.
Leaving through the Contents overview my eye fell on the heading ‘Illustrations’. Of which the book actually contains none at all.

Underneath the heading it reads

The scenes that illustrate this book are all about us. For illustrations, please look closely at real cities. While you are looking, you might as well listen, linger, and think about what you see.

What an awesome call to action. In my work we often try to encourage our clients to go outside, or it is our actual work to bring them outside.
Go out, look around, experience what happens around you. Hear it, see it, smell it, touch it. Sense it.
Watch the stories unfold around you, be part of the complexity they represent.

As a necessary element of thinking. As the much needed phenomenological stimulant for thinking, having the world or other subject matter in front of your eyes.


The quoted phrase seen in the Contents section of the book

Last Saturday Y and I went to the Drukkunst fair, where printers of all stripes and from across Europe presented themselves. We chatted with Roy Scholten and his colleague about the upcoming book on the Hilversum Method, and their crowdfunding action to make it happen (which I since supported). The book will be printed in two separate versions, Dutch and English, so get one if you’re interested!

Y proceeded to make her own print using a A5 sized lino press.


Y’s print inspired by the autumn weather outside

Showing her work back home led to E suggesting we might make our own cards for Christmas. And that in turn meant we needed to get our own little lino-press. So we did.

Today our turquoise Woodzilla was delivered.


the Woodzilla lino press