beautiful things: visual design and styling by dietlind wolf

This is my new favorite blog. The lighting, composition and eye for colour are stunning enough – but there’s a real creativity and playfulness to the author’s styling that sets it apart from the wealth of attractive but unfortunately similar style and design blogs out there.

The shoot with the lemons? Bright, and fresh in the best sense of the word, and richly gorgeous.

And though I haven’t explored archival depths yet, my favorite photograph thus far is this one. The textures (wood, feathers, flowers, peeling paint) and the colours (I can’t even imagine wearing teal and sugared almond pink, but it’s divine every time) and the composition. I love paired photographs. Photography – particularly now it’s digital, making it essentially an unlimited resource (an erasable memory card as opposed to finite film) – so rarely produces solitary works of art. Because there are no material consequences we can take thousands of shots in the one sitting (the benefits and pitfalls of this are an entirely different discussion), and with a good photographer, creative styling, etc. …well, often we discover, looking the work over afterwards, that some images are stronger in concert than alone.

That kind of display is, I think, one of the things the blog format does exceptionally – uniquely – well. It’s not like seeing a pair of images on a gallery wall. Nestled between blocks of text and the slim margins of a computer screen we focus on pictures differently. Photographs are smaller, more intimate, more snugly fitted together. I love it when artists make use of blogs – and the internet – as an independent medium, and not just a substitute for scarcer physical display spaces.

 

 

why, fancy meeting you here.

What do you say after a long absence? An explanation of sorts is customary, I think.

So, 2011. I spent 6 months with no house, I (unintentionally) internet-detoxed, I found a home, I grew up a little bit, I got a tattoo (oh, the cliché), someone I loved, died (I grew up a whole lot more), I finished my degree, I designed a tattoo for someone important, I threw out half my wardrobe, I started to drag my life into some new kind of order, I did a lot of art, I got the internet again, and…oh, that’s about up to date, I think.

Of course it was more complicated than that. There was bliss and exhaustion; wrenching, unstoppable tears. Glitter-covered nights and gutter star-gazing (stars are always best admired sitting curb-side). Books full of scribbles and drawings and vast ideas; vaster plans. A lot of love and affection. Probably equal parts rage and angst. New skills, old skills. Tearing my hair out writing to deadlines (cutting my hair, dying my hair, deciding to stop cutting it). Tulle and coffee and beautiful books and Lucien Freud and kisses and melancholy and insterstate car trips and rent and heart-stopping boredom and days of painting and giving away shoes and too many cigarettes (and too little dancing, always too little dancing) and you know.

Life happened.

Albeit rather more dramatically than would have made last year, well, nice. It wasn’t nice at all. But it was…stunning, all-encompassed by an awareness of ending. It will always be the year I finished my studies, and the year S. died.

This year…this will be a year of working hard. Of beginnings and the getting done of things. And a lot of art. Mostly art, really. But I guess you wouldn’t be reading this blog if you weren’t into that sort of thing, now, would you?

n.

 (all photographs by me, c. 2012)

beautiful things: photography = magic, marc da cunha lopes

mark da cunha lopes, from the ‘vertebrata’ series, title unknown, via trendland.

this photograph by french photomanipulator Marc Da Cunha Lopes just does my head in, in a very pleasant way. i told you bones and pastels were not incompatible!

what this photograph has, indupitably, is the element of surprise; but it’s more than the ‘wait, what‘ moments scattered throughout the rest of the series (‘vertebrata,’ which has just finished showing at rabouan-moussion gallery in paris). there’s something viscerally alarming about this one – of course there is, it’s a huge disembodied head, floating around some ordinary suburban home like it belongs there – or perhaps (more chillingly) is on the prowl. more than that, it’s clearly a parrot, and i’m pretty sure i’m not the only one who wouldn’t want to run into a beak like that in a dark ally.

maybe i just have an over-tactile imagination, but this image actually fills me with a bit of genuine horror. it brings to mind legendary creatures like the nukekubi, a japanese and chinese capable myth capable of detaching its head from its body so the former can float off into the night to devour victims with a mouthfull of shark-like teeth, before returning to its neck in the morning to create a deceptively human whole. in similar fashion the image above instills in me a spine-groping sort of dread, in part because it looks too real to be anything other than terrifying.

mark da cunha lopes, from the ‘vertebrata’ series, title unknown, via trendland.

of course, since parrots aren’t really carniverous one has to wonder whether what looks like a saber toothed-something skeleton might in fact be more lethal. on the other hand, if you’ve ever had interractions with a parrot, you’ll know they do like to…chew things. or chew everything. in something that size you’ve got to admit that’s a little intimidating.

yours, with snappish affection,

nyx.

when someone gives you moldy grapes…

nyx mathews, sickly, sticky, sweet, 2011.

…make photographs.

first photoshoot taken with my new Nikon D3100 (aka, True Love In Black Plastic). the rest are on flickr. sticky, sweet, a little grotesque. i got wine on my chin, and had to swallow more than i bargained for when my housemate came home unexpectedly early (we’re rather new at living together; i’m afraid i caught her unawares, traipsing about in the shed with my shiny new tripod (!) and a pile of faintly putrid red grapes).

yours, a little stickily,

nyx

in which amanda (fucking) palmer wins again.

kyle cassidy, amanda palmer on the set of map of tasmania‘s music video, december 2010.

i can’t wait to see the video for amanda palmer‘s map of tasmania (which you can listen to on her website or download here for pay-what-you-will). clearly (if you know me at all) this has nothing to do with patriotism on my part, and everything to do with my being ridiculously easy (aesthetically speaking). kyle cassidy‘s photos make me want to live in this video, and i haven’t even managed to listen to the song yet.

kyle cassidy, amanda palmer on the set of map of tasmania‘s music video, december 2010.

i love the bloody, smokey quality of the set in the second photograph. like the video seeps into another world around the edges (images like this always make me think of the pit in the silver chair); it’s not necessarily a safe world, all hot and shadowed, but it’s pretty intriguing. and considering the clothing involved, it can’t exactly be bad, right?

i mean…can anybody honestly tell me they don’t want a sparkly corset like that? no? didn’t think so.

xn.