Penguin Great Ideas and bloody great covers

So recently I've been reading and writing alot more than i had been for a long time. it's been creative and inspiring.

There's an english bookshop on the corner near my work that i've been going into every few days for the last couple of weeks...but why? i discovered they stock the Penguin Great Ideas series of books - short works by different philosophers and writers from Ancient Greece and China to Victorian Britain and pre-war Germany. The authors range from Schopenhauer to Lao Tzu, Nietzsche, Kant, Freud and beyond...

Of course they're mind-bendingly and head-scratchingly brilliant reads in themselves, but the cover art elevates them to a whole new level. i spent half an hour in there just fondling and staring at the covers today. I would have bought a few, but think a whole lot of other people must have the same idea - each one had been handled to death, and i like to get crisp pages for my money when i buy a new book. ok, i bought one.

the covers literally blow me away. it's such a perfect example of how good design and the right typography can make a good thing AMAZING.

here are a few of them. lush.

December snow - an ode to clouds

Happy New Year to all...

Here's hoping the task of making and sticking to new years' resolutions won't be too troublesome...

So to begin 2011, i made a little film set to music (not sure if film is the word to use as it was so basically done). The view on my way home to england from spain was so beautiful that i had to record it. It was originally supposed to be the unedited video uploaded with a song, but i got very carried away and i ended up chopping a few parts up to the music...it's been a really long time since i've gone near any video-editing software though, so it was avery refreshing little exercise.

anyway, here it is, it's a little ode to my love of clouds and the british countryside covered in snow (they sort of blended in together, it was gorgeous) and one of my favourite songs at the moment too - Fuzzy by Radiosofa.

BCN - "sexy beer?"

I love the cerveca men of Barcelona.

a photo i took on las ramblas one mild november evening.

commercial bits - www.la-boca.com

Soo....to catch up! - a very small, edited selection of some more photos I shot for www.la-boca.com - an online guide to what's on in and around Barcelona.

RITA ROUGE - BCN

FANTASTIK shop of world-wide paraphernalia, BCN

www.la-boca.com

commercial work - HOXTON HOTEL

Some commercial work for the Hoxton Urban Lodge Hotel in Shoreditch, London.

LONDON - rain, tourism

BCN - more people watching

lomography - hello LOMO

BCN - people watching

A few snaps taken recently around and about Barcelona. 

flores viejitas

Everything beautiful dies in the end.
The effect of five days on my beautiful dahlias.

“And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.” 

(Milan Kundera - The unbearable lightness of being).

Lomography

This is one of my favourite photos ever, taken with my dearly beloved lomo.

This was taken way back at uni in falmouth of three of the most beautiful souls I have ever known....rachel arguile, libby grace freshwater and adam boon. gorges.

“The surrealists advocated the transformation of human perception and experience through greater contact with the inner world of imagination” (Warner Marien: 2002: 257).

The second photo for some reason came out alot darker and clearer than the first, and that to me is the beauty of lomography...each photo has a beautiful and surreal quality caused by the light-leaks.., one of the many inevitabilities and joys of using a toy camera made mainly of pastic!

CROATIA

LONDON - speakers' corner

Colour - free the imagination

Antique colour wheel.....lush.

“…colour is an integral part of freeing the human imagination from earthly bondage and is attached to a flight of fantasy…interlocking the marvellous and the mystical”. 


Raghubir Singh, River of Colour, Phaidon press

THROUGH LABYRINTHS - exhibition at the CCCB

.....Sooo. Barcelona seems to be always either protesting over ["having to"...] work, or taking a national holiday because someone has the same name as a saint, so i decided to take advantage of their puente (that's bridge, or Bank Holiday to you and I) for the Virgin Pilar and treated myself to a nice cup of tea and a sit-down at one of my favourite cafés in town, the CCCB terrace

It also turned into a rigorous doodling session which coincidentally turned out very similarly to the mazes features in the exhibition. Subliminal advertising must have been at work somewhere along the line. (Doodle: above left).

I digress. The tea was followed by a very casual stroll around an exhibition on the history of mazes at the CCCB in Barcelona - one of my favourite museums in the city.

The idea of the exhibition is to "[...]review the concept and representation of the labyrinth throughout history, making a clear distinction between single-path labyrinths and mazes, labyrinths with a choice of paths, and reflecting on the relevance of this element and different practices and uses today."

I can't say it was the most exhilarating exhibition I've ever been to - I came away with many "but why....?" questions left unanswered, but some of the ideas explored - how maze and labyrinth aesthetics have been used throughout almost every culture as symbols of the human condition....how often the situations we find ourselves in can be very easy to get into, but very difficult to get out of...rings a bell, doesn't it? Still, it left me very dry and I had to return to the café for another cup of tea afterwards.

And what do you do in the grand labyrinth of life without a memory? Get pretty bloody lost, that's what. It reminds me of the excruciatingly tacky catch-phrase I brewed up for an A-Level Textiles exam-piece based on the contours of my mother's face - "My life is a journey.....I need a map". Cringe.

Some of the artwork on display was also beautiful...loved the old line drawings that were reminiscent of the Magnificent Maps exhibition I visited in London a few months ago.

Here is a snippet I wrote as a review for www.la-boca.com:

"The idea of losing yourself in a walled garden of grass, of leaving the free, open space to become immersed in a closed, impenetrable world of endless networks and confusing paths can be both thrilling and terrifying. An account of our timeless fascination with Labyrinths will be hosted by the CCCB until the beginning of January, exploring both the Labyrinth as ancient symbol for the journey of the soul and questioning its validity in the context of today’s vast networks. An exciting journey not to be missed."

Exposició 'Per laberints'

From 28/07/2010 to 09/01/2011

Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona

C/Montalegre, 5

Ciutat Vella