Cali Rezo
30 Oct 07
Cali Rezo is a French graphic artist who does digital paintings with a tablet and a pen. I find the work luscious, warm, and sensual. (I hadn’t planned to write about it here, but del.icio.us wouldn’t let me leave a long enough note!)
In particular, I wanted to make note of five images:
59
disparition05
curieuses
fleurs
chut
Rezo’s portfolio page is a little hard to navigate—scads of tiny thumbnails. There are some things I find a little unsatisfying about the work. It’s perhaps a little too precious at times, and other times just silly. Many of her portraits have absurdly huge eyes, and I find this both a little off-putting and compelling. A number of the images are consciously evocative of Gustav Klimt, and although I had to think about it for a while, I’ve decided I rather like them.
So stop reading words and go look at pictures!
Posted by pzed on October 30, 2007 at 6.44pm
garbage day
25 Oct 07
I’m in London, sitting in a Williams, looking out the window at a Michaels that’s partially obscured by an LCBO. None of these were here even ten years ago; I seem to remember corn fields being here for most of my life, and now it’s a suburban cartoonland. Funny thing is, I’m fairly certain I’ll be able to come back later in life and see that all these shiny buildings will have been trashed and replaced with something else.
In about ten minutes I have to go back to my mom’s house and get back to the work of pitching most of her life in the trash. It’s tempting to get maudlin, but I keep getting distracted every time anybody young and cute (which, the older I get, seem to become synonymous) walks by.
Posted by pzed on October 25, 2007 at 1.06pm
big excitement
22 Oct 07
Such an exciting day! Got groceries, changed the filter on the furnace, even tidied up the dining room table (kinda). Oh, and this happened up the street:
I could have sworn there was a house here this morning. This lot is on the north east corner of Pierre and Assumption. Note that the local pronunciation of “Pierre” rhymes with “beery”. Like a bad SCA event, eh? “Golly, yer Excellency, this event sure is peery. Er, sorry, your Grace.”
There goes the neighbourhood!
Posted by pzed on October 22, 2007 at 8.49pm
third time’s a charm
10 Oct 07
Summer, 2003, and Jodi and I have just moved into our new house. Our neighbours to the south have just put up a new fence between our properties, quite recently before we moved in. Our property has a fence along the back which is a little bit dilapidated and the gate hangs open all the time and can’t be closed properly because it rubs on the ground. So one of my first fixer-upper jobs after moving in, on a hot day in late July, is to take the gate off, drill some holes, and remount it with a simply latch. Suddenly we have a working gate, and the guys who live in the crack house out back no longer have an open invitation to cut through our back yard on the way to the variety store to buy pepperoni and smokes.
Unfortunately, it turns out our neighbour is one of those guys who gets almost done a job and then leaves the last little bit undone for a while. Jodi and I have NO idea what that’s like. So in August we went away on vacation and asked a friend to come by and feed the cats. Our friend dutifully comes by and finds that he can’t get the gate open. It just so happens he used to work as a mover, so in fact he CAN get the gate open, but it won’t properly close again. Our neighbour had finally finished bracing his new fence, and in the process has fucked up my gate. We find we can force the gate shut and that friction will keep it there, but this only works for August humidity. Once January rolls around, either the gate or the ground or both shrink in such away that, once again the gate hangs open and the crack dudes have an open invitation to cut through.
Finally, after a year or so of thinking about doing something about it, I figured out a new solution that involved cutting off a piece of the gate and putting on a bolt latch that fits into a whole drilled into the fence. This works well in dry weather, but once things get humid again, the gate sticks mightily, and over the past summer just seems to get worse. Perhaps the ground is shifting, or perhaps it’s because I keep backing into the fence when parking the car.
At any rate, over the past couple days I’ve attempted a third solution. With the help of a saw, a chisel, and my newly purchased 8″ rasp, I’ve removed a few hunks of wood from the gate and repositioned the bolt.
If you knew what to look for, you could see evidence of all the previous attempts to fix this thing, along with the various erosion effects of slamming this rickety thing shut. Hopefully this one will last for a while. Meanwhile, you can fantasize along with Jodi and me about the day when our fence looks like this:
Posted by pzed on October 10, 2007 at 8.34pm
elements
9 Oct 07
Back in September, Jodi and I went to a print show at Blue Tower Gallery, in Atlanta.
The gallery is in a crazy, gated warehouse community, right next door to a recycling centre. The show was called Elements, and feature Cannonball Press, whose work didn’t particularly thrill me, and a wide array of printmaking faculty and students from the various art schools in the Atlanta area. Faculty from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCADs of ‘em) curated the show. I had the great privilege of riding in the car with printmakers Jodi Green, Jessica Mills, and Samantha Mosby, all of whom had work in the show.
More pics here – http://www.flickr.com/photos/pzed/tags/bluetower/
Posted by pzed on October 9, 2007 at 10.08pm
endless summer
8 Oct 07
Jodi and I had Thanksgiving dinner yesterday at her Grandma’s in Exeter, Ontario.
Exeter is famous for its white squirrels, which are unquestionably not albino. What Exeter is not famous for is 30°C heat on Thanksgiving weekend. Normal would probably be around 10-15.
There’s a small river that runs through Exeter. I feel like a bad librarian, ’cause I can’t find out what it’s called, but it’s a tributary in the Ausable River watershed. It’s been dry in Huron County this year, and the river is low. It also looks rather like a putting green.
There’s a small damn that creates a wide, slow section of river next to a lovely little park. But because this thick layer of algae has formed on the river, you can sit with your picnic lunch under the pavilion1 and watch the river sit there. Water is flowing, slowly, but there’s no way to tell. I’ve a few more pictures of Pea Soup River here – http://www.flickr.com/photos/pzed/tags/unknownausabletributary/
updates: The park is called McNaughton Park, and Jodi and I are fairly certain the river is actually the Ausable, though not the main branch.
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1 – feel free to ask Jodi her pavilion story, and why she has that scar on her back.
Posted by pzed on October 8, 2007 at 7.58pm
