I've finally got round to practising the incredibly simple and effective idea of snapping a photo of a magazine or book open at a page that I find interesting and want to refer to another time. The high res photo actually allows me to blow up the page and read what it says. I had completely forgotten the name of the owner of the house in the photo on the left but on closer examination- it reveals that it belongs to Clarence Bicknell, vicar archeologist and botanist. The murals in his house-were painted when bad weather put a stop to his outdoor excursions. I really like the actual artwork- simplistic but artful and apparently botanically correct. I love the soothing color palette and the idea of bringing the garden inside.
The photo on the right, also from Interiors magazine is one of the interior of Monet's house in Giverny. I've seen countless photos of the famous garden but I don't recall ever seeing photos of the interior. My eye was drawn to one thing in particular. The framed artwork on the wall is an assortment of Japanese prints- these were very influential on the impressionists and its interesting to see proof that Monet obviously had a close look at them but I'm even more fascinated by this- the choice of color for the matting, and the proportion of the landscape views (on the bottom row).
This seems like a small detail to obsess over, and we're going to veer off on a tangent here, but when I first worked on the design of this blog I agonized about the actual size of the post photos that are now the default size and one thing I kept going back to was the size of Japanese prints. The exact size of the prints were determined by the size of the available paper or its exact torn half. Ultimately my choice was also determined by the confines of the technological construct of my medium, I chose the dimension of a widsecreen video format, I thought it echoed the landscape views of series like Hokusais 24 views. Strange to see that proportion and also that green matting not too dissimilar from this blog's background. And the wall color- that limey yellow, its my link hover color. Spooky.
