Canada & Georgia

I stand corrected, the last of yesterday's shots was Pshavi, not Khevsureti. Today:

Terry relaxing on a camping trip, Miette, BC, Canada

Dewdrop on leaf

Ice doing cool things, Mtskheta, Georgia (the old capital, from c. 500 BC-500 AD)

Georgia

Top: a hand-stitched panorama from the Imereti province of Georgia, near Tqibuli

2nd: near Stepantsminda (Kazbegi)

Bottom 2: Khevsureti in the fall a few years ago

More Blast from the Past

More of my early art, late 1980s.

Detail of an abstract watercolour painting. I wet the paper, squeezed paint from tubes onto it, let it sit for a few minutes, then hung it up to dry, allowing the paint to run. Turned into a terrifyingly accurate portrait of my inner turmoil at the time, as I later realised.

"Unmasked" - a screen print made from a photo of a sculpture of porcelain masks which people had ripped off and discarded, deciding to become real. The sculpture later fell off the wall and broke up, leaving only the screen prints.

Another screen print, also abstract. I decided that it represented one of the plagues from the Bible's book of revelation - a monstrous creature of the Apocalypse bending over a prone human figure to torture him. The monster's head is at top right, directly above the man's head. Scary stuff.

Blast from the Past

Back in Tbilisi. I spent all day travelling in a marshroutka - public minivan with a set route, this one starting out from Mestia at 06:30 and dropping me off close to where I'm staying in Tbilisi, late at nearly 20:00. LONG day - why do Georgian intercity marshroutka drivers favour bad Russian pop as their loud music of choice?! One of Life's Big Mysteries.

Below, before I return to the regular programmnig of Svaneti photos, are some samples of my art from many years ago.

Top: Madonna and Child, before I fired it. This and #3, Japanese Piece, are from lumps of porcelain which I rolled around and threw from one hand to the other on my canvas clay table, until they told me to STOP because they were finished. M&C, unfortunately, cracked in the low-temberature 1st (bisque) firing, even though I'd hollowed it out and dried it as carefully as I could; it's quite a large piece, with walls too thick. So it was never high-fired. Japanese Piece did make it to the high firing. In both cases, the canvas of the table slowly dried the surface of the porcelain in a chaotic way, causing it to wrinkle and crack naturally. This was a favourite technique of mine when I was active in clay more than 20 years ago in western Canada.

2nd: Embracing Technology. This originated as a liquid porcelain slip casting from the first face I cast in plaster, in my last year of high school, also in Western Canada, 1985-86. Here, half of the face's skin has peeled away as it sleeps, revealing circuitry underneath; an electronic "bug" has crawled to the human side on reconnaissance. Wires sprout straight from its brain instead of hair from its scalp. What was I thinking.

3rd: I called it Japanese Piece because it seemed to have a form which could have originated in that country, whose pottery - and many other art forms - I revere.

Bottom - My younger sister Angela and I at an exhibition of mine - screen prints from primitive monochrome computer art originals, 1986, western Canada. Back then, I had hair.

BlogBlock

I was very pleased to be able to blog daily from the difficult location of Ushguli on this last visit, even though this sometimes required multiple posts with dates successive days in the future due to the problematic electricity. One issue for which I had no easy fix, though, was the crashing of the 2nd hand laptop I was using, a gift from an uncle in the UK last summer. This machine was probably doing more than it was capable of - I tend to push computers hard. It often restarted without warning. But I knew I was beaten when "Error loading operating system" flashed up in white on an otherwise black screen. Time for a boot from CD - which I couldn't provide, not having made one in advance. The big crash happend only hours after I'd posted 5 future-dated blog entries, though, so everything LOOKS nice and seamless.
I'm now in Mestia, capital town of Svaneti, and will return to Tbilisi tomorrow, dead laptop in tow, to have it looked at by the experts. I'll still try to post something to the blog tomorrow late afternoon, though, once I reach the city.
Stay tuned, faithful followers!

Ushguli, Svaneti, Georgia

You might not notice the difference, but these are small versions of scanned negatives from November 2007, my first winter in Ushguli, soon after I'd arrived.  I brought the scans with me on a portable hard drive, and recently began editing them.  Too much work compared with digital!

Top:  View down the village from near Jgurag (St George's) Church

The church door, of carved wood.  Note the effect of strong sunlight on the lower part of the door, bleaching the wood over time, versus its more natural colour shaded from the sun

Sheep at the base of the church

Window at home, morning, before the heat of the wood stove has had time to melt its frost