The Museum of Beauty

Trillium/Queen Anne's Lace
[Design by KPA]

I am putting together a website called "The Museum of Beauty." Its accompanying book is almost complete.

Here are the beginnings of The Museum of Beauty, and book soon to follow.

Laurel: Reclaiming a Hometown - One Home At A Time

Laurel, Mississippi went on a downward spiral after its pine woods industry went downhill. But, forests grow, and communities rise, especially with dedicated reclaimers, like Erin and Ben Napier.

Nobody knows and loves Laurel, Mississippi, quite like Erin and Ben Napier. After all, the small Southern city is where Home Town is filmed, and the Napiers are the stars of the HGTV show.

Bringing positive attention to their hometown was a major factor in the couple's decision to star in the show, currently airing its second season. In each episode, the husband and wife (and brand new parents!) help Laurel newcomers find and renovate their dream home. Along the way, we get a good look at the quaint town (population 18,756) that the hosts are so very proud of.

Through the series, Erin and Ben have indeed put Laurel on the map. And since it's only a matter of time before people start planning to visit the small town (just look at all the folks trekking to Magnolia Market and Pioneer Woman Mercantile!), here's our guide to the Home Town filming location, complete with Erin and Ben's favorite local spots.

----------
Continue reading here

Ben and Erin: Hometown One Home At A Time

COVID Directions: This Way - That Way

COVID Directions: This Way - That Way
Main entrance to 1 City Centre Drive, Mississauga
[Photo By: KPA]

Here is the interior of 1 City Centre Drive, pre-COVID:


[Image Source]

Lakeshore Lace

Lakeshore Lace
Photo By: KPA

-------------------------------------------------


Trillium and Queen Anne's Lace
[Design by KPA]

The Return of Birds

This is the logo that is now on PM Abiy's Prosperity Party's page.

5 billion trees for a green Ethiopia
#wecontinuetobuild
ourgreenlegacy

May our water sources flow---------------And our birds return

As usual, Abiy has some great graphic designers.



The blue line on which the bird is perched joins flow------our birds.





It originates from ሱ, at the end of the word እንዲፈሱ - flow, which extends into the long blue (water pipe)line for the perching bird, and to ወ, the beginning of the world for ወፍቻችን - birds.

እንዲፈሱ------ወፍቻችን

The blue from the water source flows through and allows the bird to perch on it giving it its water life-line.

Water brings back the birds.

Birds returning start the reinvigoration of nature and of man, and of country.

And a Green Legacy becomes Aiby's legacy for his country.

The GERD (the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam) is not just about water. It is about the greening of Abiy's Ethiopia, the re-birth of Ethiopia, the prosperity of Ethiopia.

And Abiy named his party the Prosperity Party.

It's all tied together.

Ethiopia periodically brings forth brilliant leaders, who use both logic and intuition as they lead and rule. Abiy is one such leader.

The Return of the Birds

This is the logo that is now on PM Abiy's Prosperity Party's page.

5 billion trees for a green Ethiopia
#wecontinuetobuild
ourgreenlegacy

May our water sources flow---------------And our birds return

As usual, Abiy has some great graphic designers.



The blue line on which the bird is perched joins flow------our birds.





It originates from ሱ, at the end of the word እንዲፈሱ - flow, which extends into the long blue (water pipe)line for the perching bird, and to ወ, the beginning of the world for ወፍቻችን - birds.

እንዲፈሱ------ወፍቻችን

The blue from the water source flows through and allows the bird to perch on it giving it its water life-line.

Water brings back the birds.

Birds returning start the reinvigoration of nature and of man, and of country.

And a Green Legacy becomes Aiby's legacy for his country.

The GERD (the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam) is not just about water. It is about the greening of Abiy's Ethiopia, the re-birth of Ethiopia, the prosperity of Ethiopia.

And Abiy named his party the Prosperity Party.

It's all tied together.

Ethiopia periodically brings forth brilliant leaders, who use both logic and intuition as they lead and rule. Abiy is one such leader.

In Defense of Wallpaper

Bold wallpaper in Coronation Street interior


From my Camera Lucida (2005-2013) blog post In Defense of Wallpaper, December 2, 2009.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In Defense of Wallpaper

I hardly watch any series, serials or sitcoms. But, one that I follow is the gritty working class British soap opera (I think the longest standing), Coronation Street, which the CBC obligingly airs six months later than the British schedule. The actors are all excellent, with their Western England accents. All the characters show a resilient cheerfulness, where tragedies never handicap anyone, and a loss is sooner or later forgotten in the pursuit of a possible gain.

One thing I've noticed, which I don't think occurs in any other sitcom, is the abundance of wallpapers. From gaudy silvery leaves to delicate poppies, and entangled vines and flowers to modern, monochromatic versions of old-fashioned designs, decorative paper covers the walls of almost all the homes in Corrie Street.

I wonder if wallpaper has been relegated to working class homes in Britain? The fanciful and opulent these days prefer their walls stark and bare, showing off their wealth with "less is more" pretentiousness. Yet, they don't know what they're missing. The abundance of pattern that adorns the homes of these modest people surely influences their charitable spirit and cheerful bearing. An empty and sterile home breeds empty and sterile personalities. Wallpaper converts the poor man’s home (any man’s home) into a rich and warm abode. The intricate repeat pattern splendor of shapes and forms highlights generosity and abundance. How can one remain stingy and dissatisfied when the walls are covered with such glory?

Update: Empty Outlines and the Multi-Culti-COVID-Era

The article Empty Outlines and Multi-CUlti-COVID-Era has been slightly updated, with some extra commentary, especially near the end and in relation to art and artists in Canada.

Empty Outlines and the Multi-Culti-COVID Era

I wrote earlier about textile designer Chung-Im Kim, who teaches at the Ontario College of Art and Design:

Kim's designs are a combination of these "deconstructed-reconstructed" works of postmodern art and works that reference her Korean/Asian background.

As an artist, when I embarked on a new, and challenging, art discipline, I took time out from the normal in-class instructions and went out into the outside world to research, and understand, this new discipline.

I had just finished at Ryerson University, not graduating, but completing what I had set out to do: study, understand, and create films and photographs. My films (and videos) were exhibited in various galleries around Toronto, and including in exhibitions in France. And I had compiled a large collection of works based on a variety of photographic methods.

One method that intrigued me was silk screening, or more precisely, working on textiles. I did my first screen prints, which I titled Toronto Gables, in a small silk screen laboratory, with make-shift lights and printing boards, in one of the program's photography labs.

When I left Ryerson, I started looking for ways to advance this knowledge, including taking workshops in a downtown member-run centre Open Studio. And soon after, I started taking courses in the Ontario College of Art and Design's continuing studies program, for textile art, and specifically, repeat pattern techniques. I took the same course for four consecutive sessions, paying the $200/course fee. Kim was the instructor for all, as I describe here.

As I wrote here:

I wondered later why she [Kim] never introduced us to the endless list of "white" designers. All artists, however limited their education, at some point come across some textiles which are too breathtaking to ignore. I don't think she was intellectually limited. Nor can she use the "excuse" that she is an immigrant. She had lived in Canada by then too many years to not even have casually wandered across some of these works.

I believe it was (is) this inherent dislike of whites. Perhaps not individual whites, and certainly not the leftist whites which now make up Canada and America who hate "whites" or white civilization themselves, but the white people as a collective, the white civilization, the white mind.

Kim's designs are a combination of these "deconstructed-reconstructed" works of postmodern art and works that reference her Korean/Asian background.

Kim did leave something behind, though, which became a source of investigation for me.

I had been to visit Kim's exhibition in Toronto, and saw a group of her textile works, including the two below.


'meditating'
1998
78" x 31"
industrial felt, silk dupioni,
fibre reactive dye,
silkscreen printing,
machine & hand stitching


'following tradition'
1999
78" x 23"
industrial felt, handmade felt, fibre reactive dye,
machine & hand stitching

I think the one that initially struck me was Meditating. It looked like the waxing and waning of a moon, but rather than depict an actual waxing and waning, Kim flattened this moon-like structure. And rather than flip the "reflective" image - the orange moon-structure, starting with the "flattened" first and ending with the full round one, to give the image a more interesting dynamic - Kim left each side of the "progression" of the structure the same.

The second image that struck me was Following Tradition. It looks like a take on the maple leaf, or some kind of leaf, once again with a mirror image that is not quite a mirror image, of shapes that are not quite leaves. Perhaps "tradition" means the Canadian "tradition" of maple leaves.

I thought seriously about why a skilled textile designer could not make clear and concrete images.

As I write here:

Their [Kim's] ethnic references are too far away, and they are too alienated from their current country [Canada], and all that is left is the "structure" of the image: its shape, its empty outline.

I think this population, responding to false and exaggerated reports on a virus that hardly can be called a pandemic, is the result of an incredible, alienated, "multicultural" legacy, where cultures have no language with which to speak to each other, to denounce falshoods, and attacks on their well-being.

And how do you dare say the government is a liar if your existence depends on the government, and did so prior to such a societal event? Even as they suffer, these good "Canadians" still believe the government WILL save them, and those that have any inklings of a doubt are told by everyone and everything around them to just keep quiet.

But I believe a third group is the opportunistic ones, who have come to depend on grants and funds for their art projects which otherwise not see the light of day.

They cannot tell the truth, otherwise they incur the wrath of this government, which gives them the easy money they have become experts at acquiring, and are on various committees and organizations which look out for them, and for each other. These same people could "snitch" on them. Truth-telling becomes a dangerous sport (and art).

For all their fervent "anti-establishment" and "anti-[Canadian]tradition work," they are dependent on "government," and carefully glean what art will displease this government and what will not, and work accordingly.

It takes courage, and independent thinking, to go against this grain, including to say "I don't want your money."

Or, "I don't believe your story."

Welcome to the Multi-Culti-COVID-Era.


Steve Heinemann, Chung-Im Kim's "partner," contemplating eternity while self isolating,
from a post I wrote here

Invocation of the Spirits

Firstly, a correction.

I wrote earlier that textile artists Chung-Im Kim is married to potter Steven Heinemann. It appears not so. A recent profile states him acknowledging: "...my remarkable partner and fellow artist Chung-Im Kim, my profound gratitude." [Source: Steven Heinemann Culture and Nature catalog for his exhibition at the Gardiner Museum, in Toronto]. Married folk don't call each other "partners."

In the same reference as above, during an interview for his retrospective exhibition at the Gardiner Museum, Heinemann discuses his pottery:

In 1979, the start of my last year at Sheridan College, we were all asked to make work for a fundraising mug and bowl sale...it was like I sat down at the wheel to work, and never looked up. This humble and almost inconsequential form became utterly absorbing, and I literally spent the rest of that year making bowls. And uncannily, the more I narrowed down the more it would open up in possibility. Inadvertently and unconsciously, I had found my life’s work.

[...]

Out of that early obsession came an abiding interest in volume and contained space, which has informed everything
I’ve done.

[...]

It’s also connected to my interest in “the meditative image,” which you find in things like Tantric art [Link by KPA]. And like those paintings, they have a function: to gather and transform the attention of the viewer...

Transform the attention of the viewer to what? Clearly to the invocation of spirits and gods.

Heinemann works from a rural region in central/northern Ontario, near Cookstown, where he has converted a barn into his studio.



This gives him ample space and time to meditate the image, to transform the attention of the viewer.



And assist in ancestral bowing with his Korean "partner" Kim.


Chung-Im Kim
Bow
2005
8" x 9.5"
Ramie, Hemp, Natural Dyes, Silkscreen Printing, Machine & Hand Stitching
[Source]

On a related note: Where do such artists acquire enough funds to live in such places, and practice "meditative imaging," i.e. looking out into space, by selling their works at $8-10,000 apiece? A converted barn?! How much did that cost? And how much does it cost to heat, ventilate, etc, especially during those cold, frozen, Ontario winters?

The only conclusion I could come up with is the art's welfare, otherwise known as The Canada Council for the Arts, and The Ontario Arts Council. This information is not readily available (I found two resources under the Canada Council for the Arts from 2006-2007 and 2002-2003, for $500 and $2500 for Heinemann), but more searching showed nothing more. But those are early days. 2020 must be much more lucrative, with numerous shows, including a recent, 2018, retrospective under his belt. Heinemann doesn't teach, at least according to his CV, but his partner, Kim, is associate professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design. That should add to the couple's finances.


From: Watching the Invocation


Lot with house and barn for sale:

$689,000
Listed Since: March 20th 2020
Great Opportunity. Many Uses Allowed For Present Zoning On This 2 Acre Lot Located Minutes To Cookstown. The Area Is Experiencing Rapid Development Which Will Provide Many Amenities For The Future Residents. Present Amenities Include Close Proximity To Hwy, Shopping Centre, Grocers, Schools, Parks And More As The Area Continues To Grow. Property Boasts Clear Views, Level Terrain. The Property Has A Two Storey Bank Barn And An Oversized Drive Shed.**** EXTRAS **** Newer Septic System (Large Capacity), Newer Drilled Well (Exceptional Flow Rate). Natural Gas At The Roadside. Topographical Map And Architectural Drawings Available. Build A Custom Home, Start Your Business, Hold For Future Investment. (id:23309)

Address: 4630 HWY 89
Location: INNISFIL
Ownership: FREEHOLD
MLS: N4727745
This land is located in Cookstown Ontario.

Steven Heinemann and Scorched Earth

Steven Heinemann
Ceramics
Terra Ruba, 2004
Boijmans Museum, Rotterdam
69cmX42X34

For a potter working with pots, Steven Heinemann seems obsessed with closing them off. No flower will adorn his creations, nor will water pour from his jugs. Heinemann is not interested in function, but

prioritizes process, material, and the non-functionalobject to create autonomous sculpture

writes Rachel Gotlieb in Steven Heinemann: Culture and Nature, an exhibition he held in 2017 at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art in Toronto. And a footnote to this phrase, Gotlieb directs us:

For discussions on the autonomy of the art object within the realm of craft see Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone Press, 1997); Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through Craft (Oxford: Berg, 2007); and Bruce Metcalf, “Replacing the Myth of Modernism,” First published in American Craft, February/
March 1993, 53, no. 1, accessed March 1, 2017, http://lib.znate.ru/docs/ index-53911.html.

I discuss Adolf Loos, the anti-ornament modernist here in Throwing Out Ornament, asking (rhetorically) if

architecture hadn't regressed. "Think about the medieval cathedrals, or the renaissance palaces. All we do now is glass boxes. Lego for grown ups. We're back to simple squares and circle, just a little above the line in the sand drawn with a piece of stick."

I could add for pottery: simple curved shapes.

And simple curved shapes is what Heinemann produces, however asymmetrical, and therefore (falsely) complex shapes they may be. Although asymmetry is a more natural, inartistic, tendency, and a circle far harder to reproduce. Heinemann thus desires to work with asymmetry, imperfection, and ultimately, the non-aesthetic.

And this leads to my final point. Heinemann's vessels. An article on Heinemann at the Canadian Encyclopedia describes one of Heinemann's techniques as:

"controlled crazing" (fine cracks on the surface of a glaze layer) during firing as his primary method to investigate issues of containment, volume and decoration.

Thermal stress weathering, in nature,

...results from the expansion and contraction of rock, caused by temperature changes. For example, heating of rocks by sunlight or fires can cause expansion of their constituent minerals. As some minerals expand more than others, temperature changes set up differential stresses that eventually cause the rock to crack apart.

This is the impression I got when viewing his ceramic objects, with their cracked interiors, and which clearly will not be vessels for water. The first word that came to mind was "scorched." And indeed they are scorched, resembling the barren, empty, and lifeless desert regions which bear this description.

For an art form which has functionality as its primary goal, these objects close themselves off to any form of human use, and instead become aesthetic objects. And they don't succeed even in that goal, their aesthetics having been compromised by Heinemann's relentless pursuit of the anti-aesthetic.

Heinemann's intent all along is to give us a dystopian scorched earth, where we will live in the extremes of "Climate Change" as we are destined to according to our postmodern spiritual guides - our scientists, activists, and artists - as we struggle with pots that wont even carry the droplets of water we may find.

Heinemaan, who lives in this current world, and who needs to pay his bills (ask Van Gogh how living for "art" alone worked out for him), sells his pieces ranging from $7,000 to the $11,000. And people are ready to buy dystopia and hang it in their living rooms. Wealthy art collectors, that is. And his works are available in museum collections across the globe, who purchase his scorched clay, and as no acts of charity.

Art and dytopia generate money!

Heinemann is the husband of textile designer, Chung-Im Kim, about whom I wrote here:

Here are her fungal-like growths which she designs with felt, and which she sells for over $6,000 each. She categorizes them on her website as: Living Geometry.

Crawling fungi might be the only vegetation that grows on scorched earth.

Chung-Im Kim and Her Textile Designs' Korean Ancestral Loyalties

Here are the most current designs from Chung-Im Kim, textile designer, and associate professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design.

I believe that Kim has nothing to emulate, nothing to draw inspiration from, in the Canadian landscape, but rather looks back thousands of miles, and cultures, away to her Korean background.

As I wrote in my August 2018 article:

Kim's designs are a combination of..."deconstructed-reconstructed" works of postmodern art and works that reference her Korean/Asian background.

Kim writes about her textiles and her inspirations:

...the familiar Korean textile never fail to encourage my search --- perhaps it is a consolation that I look for unconsciously living so far away from Korea.

Chung-Im Kim
Bow
2005
8" x 9.5"
Ramie, Hemp, Natural Dyes, Silkscreen Printing, Machine & Hand Stitching
[Source]

About her felt work, she writes:

Searching for a personal vocabulary of images that can speak as a universal language was my core concern when I resumed my art career in Canada after a long break since arrival. This often took the form of a repetition of a few basic essential shapes, adding interest through the use of relief, appliqué, inherent dyed colour and many related techniques. At the same time, I continued to be inspired by traditional Korean textiles --- in both a technical and spiritual sense.

Here are her fungal-like growths which she designs with felt, and which she sells for over $6,000 each. She categorizes them on her website as: Living Geometry


Chung-Im Kim
Mutation III
From the Living Geometry series: No. 5
2015
23.5" x 12" x 3"
Industrial felt, thread, dyed with (Natural Dye) lac, hand stitched
David Kaye Gallery

Post-modern, abstract textile design is a lucrative business, along with associate professorship in leading universities.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Below is my post, from August 2018 on Kim, her designs, and her loyalties:

At the end of the article, I write;

Their ethnic references are too far away, and they are too alienated from their current country, and all that is left is the "structure" of the image: its shape, its empty outline.

I should add to that:

...its empty outline, ready to fill up with foreign, alien forces.

After all, Kim's fungal protrusions are titled" Mutations."

---------------------------------------------------------------------

I've always, since my Ontario College of Art Design days, tried to master textile art and design. My instructor was a Korean woman. It was then that I intuitively realized that "Asians" had an inherent dislike of whites. I went to "night school" and took only one course for four consecutive sessions. This course was open to the public and not just OCAD students. It became an issue for her after the second course, but I was paying the $200/course fee. If she had any sympathy for me and my ideas, I would have told her that I was there to use the equipment.

By the third session I had developed many of my ideas. I had briefly started doing the geometric border patterns found in Ethiopian dress, but my models for my work were the historical textiles of the Western World up to the early 20th century. Anything beyond that took on the modernists' "destruction of the image" ideology.

The textile instructor, Chung-Im Kim, who I believe didn't have the rigorous "image-making" background required of textile design - including drawing and painting - vociferously pushed me to "design something Ethiopian." Eventually I came to the course randomly and spent my time - evenings and weekends - in the textile workroom, mixing paints, cutting cloth and printing. I did the blueprints at home on a makeshift IKEA work table.

I wondered later why she never introduced us to the endless list of "white" designers. All artists, however limited their education, at some point come across some textiles which are too breathtaking to ignore. I don't think she was intellectually limited. Nor can she use the "excuse" that she is an immigrant. She had lived in Canada by then too many years to not even have casually wandered across some of these works.

I believe it was (is) this inherent dislike of whites. Perhaps not individual whites, and certainly not the leftist whites which now make up Canada and America who hate "whites" or white civilization themselves, but the white people as a collective, the white civilization, the white mind.

Kim's designs are a combination of these "deconstructed-reconstructed" works of postmodern art and works that reference her Korean/Asian background.

ALL non-whites at some point begin to refer to their ancestral lands for inspiration, artistic or otherwise. And the constant, daily reminder that art created by whites has always been SUPERIOR to their art, from their specific non-European or North American region or country (Asia, South America, Africa, the Caribbeans) must ignite their fury.

I believe, though, that I am the exception.

As I write in an unpublished article:

My family and I left Ethiopia in 1973, a year before the “Ethiopian Revolution” which occurred in 1974, when Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed and a communist regime ran the country for almost two decades. I was ten years old. My father secured a post in UNESCO in Paris. My brothers and I initially attended school in Paris, but our parents sent us to England to boarding school a year later.

That dramatic, but fortuitous exit sent me across the globe from France to England and America to Canada. Our first landing point in Paris separated us from the usual flow of Ethiopian emigrants and refugees who set sail for America (and fewer to Canada). We were alone in our havens. My eleven years in France and as a student in boarding schools in England gave me the unique vantage point of discovering the West without the biases and interpretations of other Ethiopians and Africans. I was able to discover them on my own terms. I learned to love the West through the beautiful city of Paris and the paradisaical countryside of southern Kent.

My informal education had taken a Western orientation, but...I eventually obtained Bachelor and Masters degrees in the Biological and Health sciences in the United States. While pursuing my PhD, I lived in Mexico for two years working on my research work in clinical nutrition. The results of my PhD research eventually produced a unique testing method which was published in various academic science and medical journals.

By the end of my doctoral studies [we] obtained residency...in Canada [where] I was finally stable and able to make decisions about my activities without affecting my residency status. In Toronto, I obtained various certificates and qualifications in film and photography. I also studied textile design, and painting and drawing. I was determined to become an artist.

My constant displacement, my rigorous science education, and my artistic training allows me to ask: What is art? What is beauty? And why is Western beauty and art so singular? I have tried to answer these questions over the years.

---------------------------------------------------------------------


Trillium and Queen Anne's Lace
Textile Design
Kidist Paulos Asrat

Double Country

I made it to the Art Gallery of Mississauga on Saturday, ignoring the forecast of a snowstorm. The storm was worse than I had expected, the falling snow was a snow/ice mixture, with a blowing wind that made these pellets feel like mini pine needles.

The AGM hosted its the annual juried show presented by Visual Arts Mississauga the night before. I prefered to see the exhibition at a quieter time, at my own pace. The VAM Facebook page has uploaded photos of the event, including some of the paintings (there were 40 entries).

Here are two that caught my eye in the exhibition, and which I took snapshots of:


Left: Hannah Veiga: You Used to be My Favourite Colour
Right: Stuart Godfrey: 4th Line Backside

Albeit, they are both a little bleak in concept.

Veiga writes on her website that her fabric piece is: "a contemplation of what constitutes a home, and what remains when something loses its meaning of a home." Is is not clear what she means by that. Perhaps her curtains don't have any place to hang, other than in galleries and design shows. Her floral design is a complicated process with seven color scheme (red, light red, green, light green, grey, yellow, white), and its mockup on (Japanese) Kozuke paper - no less! I assume the fabric was printed through the digital fabric printing processes now readily available, probably more so than silkscreen studios. Manual printing, the method I used to print on fabric, prepares each color separately on a silk screen, and in this case, seven separate screens, to produce the whole pattern.

And Godfrey's barn has no front, and the items within it, or surrounding it, look like old fences, sacks and what look like mattresses. But it is still standing, as are many old and non-functional barns throughout the countryside, waiting to be rediscovered, remodeled, and to be put to use again. Godfrey is a talented painter, whose oil panel is meticulously painted, to the last blade of grass.

Both pieces allude to a surer time, when no-one questioned the "favourtism" of a home's choice of colors. When curtains WERE colorful, and the black/white/gray/beige variety that line "designer" stores these days (for color and variety, go to Walmart!) And both have solid structures: the barn still has an upright frame, and all a farmer need do is restore the floors and facade; the pattern promises of a home of florals. And both reference a time in the recent past when we had such things in our landscapes, both internal and external, and lived better lives through them.

Beautiful Logo

The beautifully designed "tail wing" logo of the Ethiopian Airlines

Tiffany Art Deco Panel

Square One Mississauga Tiffany & Co.
Magnolia Flowers Glass Panel
[Photo By: KPA]

Hate Crimes

Via Kevin Michael Grace:


Source

I've always, since my Ontario College of Art Design days, tried to master textile art and design. My instructor was a Korean woman. It was then that I intuitively realized that "Asians" had an inherent dislike of whites. I went to "night school" and took only one course for four consecutive sessions. This course was open to the public and not just OCAD students. It became an issue for her after the second course, but I was paying the $200/course fee. If she had any sympathy for me and my ideas, I would have told her that I was there to use the equipment.

By the third session I had developed many of my ideas. I had briefly started doing the geometric border patterns found in Ethiopian dress, but my models for my work were the historical textiles of the Western World up to the early 20th century. Anything beyond that took on the modernists' "destruction of the image" ideology.

The textile instructor, Chung-Im Kim, who I believe didn't have the rigorous "image-making" background required of textile design - including drawing and painting - vociferously pushed me to "design something Ethiopian." Eventually I came to the course randomly and spent my time - evenings and weekends - in the textile workroom, mixing paints, cutting cloth and printing. I did the blueprints at home on a makeshift IKEA work table.

I wondered later why she never introduced us to the endless list of "white" designers. All artists, however limited their education, at some point come across some textiles which are too breathtaking to ignore. I don't think she was intellectually limited. Nor can she use the "excuse" that she is an immigrant. She had lived in Canada by then too many years to not even have casually wandered across some of these works.

I believe it was (is) this inherent dislike of whites. Perhaps not individual whites, and certainly not the leftist whites which now make up Canada and America who hate "whites" or white civilization themselves, but the white people as a collective, the white civilization, the white mind.

Kim's designs are a combination of these "deconstructed-reconstructed" works of postmodern art and works that reference her Korean/Asian background.

ALL non-whites at some point begin to refer to their ancestral lands for inspiration, artistic or otherwise. And the constant, daily reminder that art created by whites has always been SUPERIOR to their art, from their specific non-European or North American region or country (Asia, South America, Africa, the Caribbeans) must ignite their fury.

And as an antidote to continue "creating" they start to refer to abstractions - geometry, shape and some color (although very few use color and often bland and muted colors) to produce works. Their ethnic references are too far away, and they are too alienated from their current country, and all that is left is the "structure" of the image: its shape, its empty outline.

The Gay Gay Gay Shades of Summer

It's a gay gay gay summer, tell us those stacked chairs where the original four muskokas had more poetry and better design.


The previous Muskoka chairs in summer version of the Holt window display,
removed and replaced when "Pride" started to take over

[All Photos By: KPA]

Now all we see is the promiscuity.

But it is Pride Week after all, and we must CELEBRATE!



About a week ago, I posted the above image as a prelude to summer.

A couple of days ago, I went into the Holt department store and asked about the store designer who put together the window display.

A young woman told me that she did it, although she was following directions from "head office."

"You still have to interpret the guidelines. It looks great!" I encouraged her.

Then I had some kind of brainwave and asked if I could see the store's managers. I wanted to ask if I could somehow be involved in window display designs. That way, I can ask about this particular one without being too "inquisitive."

I went to the "customer service" post and asked the staff there to see a manager, who asked if he could help me.

"Well, I have some questions."

"Could you give me some idea of your question?" persisted the customer service assistant (a Chinese man with bleached blonde hair with dark roots showing - that is the pseudo-appropriation of white identity that is now common amongst non-white youth).

"Well, I have a design background. I would like to know if I could be involved in helping the design of future window displays."

"You can apply online and post your resume."

That was exactly what I was trying to avoid. I didn't want to work at Holt at all. Imagine my altercations with "rich" "foreigners" who have no real idea of the value, cultural specifically, of the goods they're buying.

"Oh yes. But could I still see a manager? It makes it easier to see if I qualify."

The man tapped his fingers somewhat aggressively on the counter. He thought a little. Then dialed a number.

Eventually a woman came down. She was short and stout and in her mid-forties. She also looked half black and half white. She was dressed in a black baggy get-up which did not fit with the colorful designer clothes she walked by.

To make a longer story short(er), the woman was just about to give me the email address of the Head Office honchos who direct the "visual look" of the store. Perhaps my insistence threw her off and she said: "It is better if you give me your phone number." I don't blame her. I would have done the same.

"Oh. OK. But I will give you my email. That is easier for me to communicate." (And I will also have a record of the transactions (or not) - although I didn't say this).

I added: "I have a design and photography background, graphic design, websites. But I also have textile design training and I can visualize things three dimensionally. I think that is helpful for window displays."

"Oh. Yes."

Me: "But could you show me if the theme of bright summer colors are a Canadiana theme with the Muskoka chairs?"

Manageress: "Well you know this has to do wth pride don't you?"

Me: "The whole display concept?"

Manageress: "Well it started off as a prelude to summer. But now it is merging with Pride Week."

Me: "Oh. I see!"

I didn't see that coming!!!

Me: "What exactly is "Pride? Is it to do with Multiculturalism?" I played the innocent.

Manageress: "No. It is Pride Week. There is a big Pride Month going on in Toronto and we wanted to be a part of it."

"Of course! The homosexual parades. Harry Rosen is also doing the same thing with their windows! And Simons too! I asked the young man at Harry Rosen what "Pride" meant and he said he didn't know!"

(I really did ask and he really did say "I don't know," as in "I have nothing to do with this!!!")

Then something clicked. This woman is a lesbian!!! The scorn for feminine beauty was apparent in her dark and shapeless garb; her obesity; her lack of any kind of decoration - no makeup, no jewelry.

And she had a long-developed instinct for potential "homophobia." And was intelligent too, able to gauge things in an instant. I could see why she was a manager.

She laughed at my anecdote. "We have nothing to do with the other stores."

She understood that people don't want to be associated with all this. And hence the clever and subversive ways in which she (they) lure the public.

I thanked her and left. I had given her my full name and my Reclaiming Beauty email address. I do that because it takes too much energy to sort out all my various pseudonyms. And plus my battle is now out in the open.

I haven't heard from anyone at Holts, head office or otherwise. I am sure this manager looked me up and saw my various profiles and my many blog posts, and never sent the communication.

Good!!! I am at least as clever as she is! I found out something I wouldn't have known, which is:

The Canadian landscape, which I blogged about here, was readily converted into a "Pride" canvass. " We're Proud to be Canadian!" they tell us.

And "We're all in it together!"

But no, we're not, all in this together!"

Truth in Images

From an unpublished post in January 2012:

The indomitable Kristor, frequent correspondent at the View From the Right, and now at Laura Wood's The Thinking Housewife, makes the no-nonsense response to her post Would Protectionism Have Saved Kodak?:

Film is like buggy whips. Let’s just move on, shall we?

To this comment by Roger G.:

Donald Trump said on the Sean Hannity Show yesterday that the once mighty Kodak has gone bankrupt because they didn’t get the U.S. government to protect them from Fuji. Trump argued that Fuji destroyed Kodak by selling below manufacturing costs.

I studied photography and film for four years (about 1/3 of those years were part-time, while I worked in a completely unrelated job to fund for my school).

The program was wonderfully technical. I avoided the Leftist/Marxist/Third World/Anti-Art/Anti-Beauty/Anti-west bias of many of the "art" teachers (well it was more like a bulldozer-level bias) by disappearing into the photography dark rooms, and the film editing suites, where no-one bothered me, and I could simply work on those machines (which surprisingly, few students used until the marathon rush of due assignments). This "experimentation" was vital for my education, since most of the teachers wanted us to produce some self-expression drivel, screw technique and art!

Part of the wonder for me in the dark room and while editing was the tactile aspect of working with the celluloid (film or photography). Another was seeing the chemicals magically produce an image from nothing (a blank, white piece of paper). And yet another was the challenge of fitting a puzzle, trying to put a coherent set of images together in the editing room.

Of course, some of these pleasures are possible in digital media since the digital images are is still a puzzle to fit together, but here, we are several steps away from the original images. In film, we see them viscerally on the film strip. We can touch the strip, turn it upside down, pass it through the editing board, cut it here or there, and attache various sections together to make a coherent piece. This visceral experience was especially clear around my work area, where film strips were flying everywhere, pieces were misplaced, then found, cutting boards were sometime faulty, sometimes ruining a special frame, for which I would have to improvise another. And it took time to physically maneuver all those strips around.

In the photography dark room, it was liquid (and the smell of the chemicals) that were the messy components.

Near the end of my studies, I actually developed my own films, after having learned to do the same in photography. One more step closer to the "images."

Film editing used to remind me of sewing, or embroidery, which is probably why I went into the archaic field of textile design.

So, this is what Kodak is forfeiting (well, its been going on for a while now). I don't think it is just cheap Fuji films which destroyed photography, but the attitude that the intricate, time-consuming, artistic endeavor of making films can be replaced by fast, impersonal digital technology.

I am not completely against digital technology. I think the internet, blogs, online sources, have provided incredible services. Yet, at the same time, this digital world needs to come second to the real world. What good is a "digital" relationship unless we've given up on the real one?

Fitting Puzzles
The mage in the background is a print of this

Muskoka Chairs in the Jubilee Garden

The lovely Jubilee Garden, behind the City Hall in Mississauga, has benches which are designed after the summer Muskoka chair. But rather than a single seat they are double seated.

Some of the chairs were recently grouped at one end of the garden rather than scattered around. I'm not sure why, although I think it is just bad planning. I asked one of the summer student gardeners why this happened.

"I agree with you. They were better before."

"Could you ask your bosses to return them to their original places? But don't make an issue out of it..."

I didn't want him to get into trouble.



The sturdy wood and metal park bench has replaced a Muskoka chair (there are about four of five of these wood/metal benches along this pathway). Perhaps they took the Muskoka benches away for maintenance. I hope so.

Barrie's New Logo

“Barrie is youthful and bold,” marketing and communications manager Cheri Harris said. “It is a community deeply connected to its past, the parkland and the adventures it provides. The city is innovative and entrepreneurial. With borrowed elements from the past, and the strength of the corporate colour preserved, Barrie looks forward to its future.” [Source]