Snapshots II

Battersea Power House (appears on the cover of the 1977 Pink Floyd album "Animals") 

 Peace Pagoda, Battersea Park, London

Putney footbridge

In Wandsworth Park

Amazingly up to date!

"People caught by suddenly pouring skies:
What ingenuous hats they improvise!"


Nakagawa Otsuyu (1675-1739)

At a single glance

For those who don't know the immense talent of Stephen Wiltshire yet. This man, because of his spectacular visual memory (I refrained myself from using the expression 'eidetic' because I include the five senses' experience into this word) is called an 'autistic savant'. Why not simply calling him a genius, without any reference to what people will immediately think of as a handicap? This man reminds me of Da Vinci at times. Go get a look if you're on London, it is stunning. Tomorrow, I'll go again to the gallery he opened in the Royal Opera Arcades, I haven't been there in a while.

Snapshots

 Victoria and Albert Museum, plaster casts court (casts of the Trajan column in Rome).

V&A, lidded vase (enamel), unsigned, Nagoya, Japan (1880-90) - the technique of producing mirror-black enamel ground was developed through collaborative research between Namikawa Yasuyuki and the German chemist Gottfried Wagener

V&A, vase, mark of Hayashi Kodenji (1880-85) - the use of fine silver wires combined with large expanses of dark blue-black enamel ground is typical of Hayashi Kodenji's work

V&A, vase (covered with a transparent red enamel (akasuke), believed to have been invented around 1880 by Ota Jinnoei and Honda Yosaburo, signed 'Nagoya Hayashi Ko[denji]' (1880-90)

The three vases above are on display for the 'Japanese Enamels: the Seven Treasures' in the Toshiba Gallery of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

V&A, 'China - China bust 19' (1999), Ah Xian (born 1960) - Porcelain, painted in underglaze cobalt blue with landscape design

V&A, somewhere.

Detail of embroidered shawl (picture 1) and cape (picture 2) made from the silk of more than one million female golden orb-weaver spiders collected in the highlands of Madagascar (Golden Spider Silk display, room 17a, V&A Museum)

The Lady Chapel, Westminster Cathedral

Westminster Cathedral, somewhere

Une bonne partie de la littérature japonaise tient dans cette unique phrase...

"Mais, croyez-moi : une fois pris dans les rets de longs cheveux noirs, de quels troubles ne serez-vous la proie !"


Natsume Soseki, Kokoro (Le pauvre cœur des hommes)

passing thoughts

kites like rainbow dragonflies
hover furlongs above the
smell of the sand


lovers in the setting sun
halting to kiss
one shadow on the shore

seagulls reeling all
afternoon in the warm air
cold sobered them up

I owe this sunset everything.

One of these days when everything is different

It all started with a thick, white band of fog looming up from the horizon

 Within half an hour, the entire bay was blanketed from end to end

Here is what it looked like before sunset.

 The lone soldiers stood their ground

 Eerie seascape, where the waves were heard, rather than seen, crashing on the shore

The eye and low of the sun

Yesterday's sun