artnlight

Some colour happiness and sea brightness to make your day happier :)

Coastal Living sent me a link of some really refreshing colours and the coastal life in style

My idea of a vacation

Pillows and the sea

check the mappy bed spread

I love how smart stripes look

How cheerful is this room- it would be impossible to sit here & be glum :)

These white walls against the tropical lush is a great contrast!
All images from Coastal Living

Isabella from Germany is a regular reader and a blogger friend. So as usual I hopped across her to her interesting blog Anarkali & was struck by these pictures & how could I not share this! Calligraphy and that too Islamic - I had to find out more. These photographs are part of a solo exhibition at the DeCordova Musuem [close to Boston] by Lalla Essaydi, a New York-based, Moroccan-born photographer, painter, and installation artist. Over the past decade, she has risen to international prominence with her timely and beautiful work that deals with the condition of women in Islamic society, cross-cultural identity, Orientalism, and the history of art.

Almost all the photographs in Les Femmes du Maroc are based on specific nineteenth-century European and American Orientalist paintings. Essaydi has, however, radically transformed the antecedents. While she retains the compositions, gestures, and general costume of the original paintings, she strips them of their opulent colors, removes male figures (or transforms them into women), erases any cues to social status, clothes all nudity, and simplifies the settings by eliminating props and attributes while introducing all-over draperies, and of course her ubiquitous calligraphy.

"In Islamic cultures, until very recently, calligraphy was an art form practiced exclusively by men for the transcription of sacred texts from the Qur’an, the Hadith, and other sacred writings. Henna is traditionally a women’s art—domestic, decorative, ritual, and erotic. And Essaydi’s text is her own, taken from her journals."

Les Femmes du Maroc also involves a changed approach to text. In earlier photographs, Essaydi’s calligraphy was legible, and communicated her own ideas about cultural identity, memory, communication, and artistic and intellectual freedom. In the recent work, the text is obscured by its presentation—loosely applied, obscured by shifts in scale and the overlapping of figures and draperies, at pitched angles, with words applied atop words like a palimpsest. Even readers of Arabic cannot fully make out its meanings, which are deeply personal and intentionally kept that way.

There is also a book called Les Femmes du Maroc by Fatima Mernissi & Lalla Essaydi. You can buy it here.
You can read the entire pdf of the exhibition & the artist here. Or an an article here.

This message is for me. Cause guess who got briefed on a completely brilliant project recently & guess who has not moved ass on it? Yours truly has been doing everything else with great efficiency except this one thing which she knows will probably change everything for her. Does this happen to you as well? That something is so important for you & you don't do anything about it? So I sat to work with "Do it NOW" firmly in my head & thought of making a quick design & sharing it with all of you. Who knows who might see this today & who it might help. If there's something you've wanted to do badly, but pushed it under the carpet & you feel sick even thinking about it. This is for you. Save it on your comp. Print it out- stick it on your softboard- whatever works for you. See you guys soon- after I've started work on my project :)

Introducing Etsy best-seller, Yellena James' beautiful floral world, with intricate lines undulating, flaring, jammed thick and twisted together to form inimitable flora. I can just imagine Yellena at her canvas filling in line after line meditatively, compulsively. There is something so organic and lush about her work.

Yellena says on her Etsy Profile : "I'm an artist/illustrator residing in beautiful Portland, OR.
My work has been described as "colorful arrangements of organic shapes and tangled lines (which) are at once floral and alien, organic and sci-fi, crafty and fantastic." Within each piece I try to create an intimate world that posesses its own ethos and its own emotional range.

Yellena in collaboration with Schoolhouse Electric for these pretty lamps

I love the white print!

The 2010 calender Yellena version

And some yummy resin coated prints- Yellena says the application was tricky - you bet. I tried it on one of my trays & I thought I almost ruined it! But the glossy effect is totally worth the angst.

I'm on a blog unearthing spree and loving the treasures that are popping up. Today is Turquoise- what I mean is 'House of Turquoise' a one stop shop for all turquoise references- surfaces, walls, furniture, accessories, you name it & this blog has it in this gorgeous shade of blue.

Turquoise with silver

for quiet elegance

throw in a bit of black for drama

and white for peace

And red for effect

Isn't this pretty blue ceramic basic the cutest thing you've seen?

love the prints in this frame

Throw in a bit of lime and life really starts getting interesting

crank the lime up for stunning results

Sober the same palette down & you have sombre elegance

and deepen the palette and add carved wood for some oriental mystery
All images from House of Turquoise