teabowl

Picture by Leo Reynolds

I’ve been listening to Van Morrison for days now. He’s someone I had somehow ignored so far in my 25 years of listening and collecting music. In the 80s, when my listening habits were formed, Van was on a path that wasn’t very likable musically - his voice losing its elasticity, his music harsher and more judgmental of an incomprehending audience than ever before.

Only I didn’t know the ‘before.’ Having no older siblings, Van Morrison wasn’t really someone I knew about or chose to discover for myself.

Now I’m 38 and a conversation related to Kevin Rowland & Dexys Midnight Runners (a band I like very much and who, I realize now, tried to channel Morrison’s 70s blue-eyed soul magic) led me to take another look.

And what a great discovery he is. I’m listening to the first 5 or 6 records, and they’re all great - revelatory, powerful, focused, subtle, elegant and, above all, deeply musical.

The Don Valley Brick Works consists of 16 heritage buildings and an adjacent 16-hectaire public park that includes the Weston Quarry Garden, wetlands, hiking trails, and wildflower meadows. From 1889 to 1984, the site was one of Canada’s pre-eminent brickyards. The Don Valley Pressed Brick Works Company produced a wide variety of bricks and kiln-fired clay products that built much of Toronto’s heritage buildings and many of Canada’s national landmarks including Winnipeg’s T. Eaton Building, Toronto’s Massey Hall and Casa Loma, Montreal’s Acadia Apartments and Moncton’s T. Eaton Building. (From: http://www.evergreen.ca/rethinkspace/)

Pictures from a weekend outing. I had to shoot around all the Japanese tourists and their tripods. Clearly, it’s a hot tip for tourists.

What a beautiful bowl from Peru. Creative Commons licensed photo by Dozenist.

Okay, these aren’t really graffiti. They’re mural copies of famous Group of Seven artworks in downtown Huntsville, Ontario.

Here’s some graffiti on a construction wall in Richmond Hill:

(Thanks for the quick drive-by shooting, Jen :)

So it’s become a bit of a thing - I spent another hour or two today exploring wall art around the Annex and Dupont/Bathurst. Here’s a great Halloween mural:

Right next to it is an upstairs piece that was a little more difficult to capture:

Finally, here’s one from the Dupont & Bathurst area (right on the railway line):

Seen behind Stevenson Art Supplies in Scarborough, here’s some great graffiti. I don’t know if Stevenson’s is complicit in this or not, but since only the rear of the warehouse has been decorated I think it’s just a nice, unprotected, secluded location for urban art.

It’s at Warden & Ellesmere, just south of Ellesmere, if you want to go see for yourself.

Entire (small) collection of snaps on my Flickr.

I was in New York in October and ran into these sculptures in Madison Square Park. They’re quite beautiful: life-sized shiny metal trees that oddly blend into the surroundings. I had no idea they were there… it had been one of those long walking days in the city and I sat down on a bench on the North side of the park to give my tired legs a rest.

Through the trees I saw something shiny, so I decided to check it out. It was an interesting moment - ‘discovering’ these sculptures quite innocently, and being genuinely surprised to find them. I wonder if that was the artist’s intention.

The work is called ‘Conjoined’ (one of three - the others are another, bigger tree, and a pile of rocks) and will be there until the end of December, 2007. Although I can’t imagine that it’s as nice in the middle of winter as it is in my picture. Link to the park’s site here.