Re-watching Zatoichi and marvelling all over again at the design brilliance; or more accurately marvelling for the first time as I had time to concentrate on the curtains instead of watching the swords... They have some excellent curtains as well as a great line in textiles in general; early last year I was sketching a houndstooth kimono - thought I was really clever crossing cultures with my textiles. Naturally; watching the film tonight, what panned past the camera but a perfect version of my clunky sketch. Damn that Yamamoto! Seriously clever guy - the patterns and prints he uses are just amazing and the colours all very muted but 'pitch perfect' as it were. Japanese design is so great in its minimalism and functionality; I love the idea of living in the perfect wooden house with polished floors and roll-up beds, eating off perfect little dishes which slot away in a virtually non existant kitchen. Kind of dovetailed with some thinking I was doing today about the bit fat things in life - like the immense wastage we (meaning humans) really are guilty of. I'm not even meaning in an 'oh lordy what a lot of packaging seems to be floating in the Pacific' kind of way, but a fundamental way that touches everything we do. And yes I know that's probably a heavy thing to be thinking but it is in front of my eyes all the time at work; people spending money on things of no importance that they have no need for, in terrifying amounts. I've never been big on Halloween as it is 'celebrated' in the west; it has turned into one of the tackiest of the tacky festivals, all orange plastic pumpkin heads and sparkly black plastic houses. Spend part of the day wondering why it all has to be there and why anyone would wish to part with hard earned money to buy a bag of plastic encased crap chocolate balls wrapped in spiders web print foil. It just really pains me.If only we could stop and think for that crucial second before purchasing this kind of shit the demand would dry up and people would stop manufacturing it in the first place. Is it too much to ask? I have a horrible feeling that it is.
I also thought about new directions and techniques I can investigate in painting, read an interesting article on chaos theory in relation to evolution, got a couple of smiles out of one of my determinedly non-smiley cutomers and discovered that there is a flower called Paris Japonica, which is a particularly good name for a flower.
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