The door in the wall

Lovely little door at Brick Lane. Where does it lead? Is it a door for Borrowers?

NB: the Boy's Aliens sneaker included for scale

Graffiti, Manchester

Was the cat part of the graffiti originally, or was he added later by someone else?

Northumbria holiday in pictures

We've been to the North-East for a little holiday at The Boy's mum's house.

We exercised our inner junkaholic, scrutinising car boot finds and doing a little antique-ing ourselves.

We found this sweet vintage camera in a thrift shop - and searched in vain online for a UK source of Kodak 126 film.

We looked up in Newcastle - isn't it great what you notice when you look up?

We admired art - on walls ...

and in these beautiful surroundings at Belsay Hall - a ruined castle ...

and a quarry garden!

We were startled and fascinated in equal measure by Mat Collishaw's 'The Garden of Unearthly Delights' zoetrope of creepy cupids smashing robins' eggs and spearing snails.

We ate a lot. From tapas to curry to birthday cake.

We chilled out, and enjoyed the last of summer.

(Thanks Carol!)

http://thisbutterflymind.blogspot.com/

Inspiring art

Here's two great art projects I read about recently:

Knit A Poem
Conceived to celebrate the Poetry Society's centenary and inspired by National Poet for Wales Gwyneth Lewis's lovely piece "How to knit a poem", crafters the world over are creating individual letters of a mystery poem to be revealed in October.

The Photographic Dictionary
A collection of evocative, atmospheric, haunting images, which define word through figurative, literal and personally infused representations. Beautiful. Like seeing life through another's gaze.

I may not know about art, but I know what I like!

Also this week, a visit to Tate Modern with Mother. At random, we see Roni Horn 'AKA Roni Horn' where we like rough cast cubes of opaque and translucent glass in pinks and reds, black and white over-exposed photos of the river with lyrical, funny, quirky, gruesome footnotes about the Thames, and photos of empty houses and faces in Iceland.

We paid a quick visit on the way out to Cornelia Parker's installation 'Thirty Pieces of Silver', a gloriously delicate yet resilient mobile of steam-rollered silverware, which left me strangely uplifted.

Art and Artists 2 - sketchbooks

Some interesting artists' sketchbooks on Design Sponge today, reminding me I haven't touched my sketchbook in a while ...

More over on Book By It's Cover: I especially like Claudia Pearson's dainty observational sketches, Katy Horan's folksy babushka types and Chad Kouri's hand-drawn typography.