dandelion heads

My (academic) enthusiasm for dandelions will come as no news to many of you: they are a star exhibit in my current work on Victorian close observation of the natural world, its relationship to contemporary ecology, and to critical practice artists who, in adapting Victorian methods/allusions, draw attention to the relevance of C19th natural preoccupations to today's environmental crises.  That's such a mouthful that every time I try to articulate what I'm doing it comes out differently, but I keep practicing my back-of-a-postcard version (at some point, "back-of-a-postcard" became "elevator speech," but I'm old school and still write postcards).

What I've been missing, though, are my own dandelion images - not of the golden, sun-like heads, but of the seeded puffballs.  Not only did I find three in the back yard this afternoon (whilst heading out to put coffee grounds round the young avocado tree ...), but, as I was posing them, a gust of wind made them behave like dandelions ...

If I print these up as a set - which I may well - I shall probably use the first image that I took as a kind of book-end.

close looking

There's nothing that beats teaching a class that involves actually standing in front of the works of art that we're discussing ... today our Victorian Visual Culture class went to the Getty, each member with a work to introduce.  This worked very well, apart from the officious Outside Tour Guide who elbowed us out of our position in front of Alma Tadema's Spring and said that She was going to talk about it to Her group.   Harrumph.  This is Sarah - once she got back in front of Spring - and Dylan, looking at Henry Weekes' Bust of an African Woman - by common critical consensus Mary Seacole, although there's no hard evidence there.  What one can't see in photos of the bust - but what fascinated us all - was the detail with which the snood that held her hair into place is sculpted.  Was this a nod to fashionability, or was it complying with common-sense when it came to hair and nursing?  (I do love this class - I'm going to be bereft when the semester is over ...).

spring on campus

Blossoms, everywhere.  Even though we seem to be having June Gloom in April - the sun comes hazily through by the afternoon - it's unmistakably spring.  Seasonal changes may be much less dramatic here than in so many places, but all the same, they happen, and the longer I live in Southern California, the more appreciative I am of the slow, subtle movement from one month to the next.  (well, ok, truly, I'd still settle for the dramatic jumps from snow and frost to flowers and greenery ...).

bits of art deco

Driving downtown, en route to a job dinner ... whatever else one might say about driving downtown (and I'm not given to saying many good things about it), there's always something interesting to see when one's stopped at lights - despite the urban transformation since I've been here, endless old architectural details ...

mural on sunset

Some fragments of a large, collaborative mural on Sunset (for once, I was stopped at the lights at the right time) - art work by @deityart and @msyellowart.  I can't decide whether I prefer my own mash-up or like it better as it is ...

Trellis

The front wall of our neighbor across the street, in the rather June-gloom light of this morning - and a post that's looking forward to tomorrow's class, where in addition to various other material about interiors (Deborah Cohen; The Spoils of Poynton, etc.), we'll be considering wallpaper and arsenic.  William Morris's Trellis had arsenic in it until the firm stopped using it in 1880 ...

I'll be taking to class my copy of Lucinda Hawksley's wonderful Bitten by Witch Fever.  Wallpaper & Arsenic in the Victorian Home (2016), which in addition to short essays about arsenic has reproductions of 275 samples of C19th wallpaper designs that have all proven positive for arsenic.

bathroom plant

So I go into the master bathroom, and this is hanging from the shower curtain rail (whilst the shower curtain is in the washing machine.  Yes, we know how to have fun at the weekend).  I wouldn't call this my favorite plant in the world - I mean, what are those bobbly things?  Are they leaves, or ... or what?  But it did make me think how much fun it would be to have a line of plants hanging there than a curtain.  Maybe we don't need a curtain at all, just greenery?  And I'm sure that there are plenty of plants, like ferns, that would appreciate a warm tropical bathroom environment?