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

Ushguli, Svaneti, Georgia

(Hmmm, 5 minutes ago, when I wrote yesterday's post, the snowfall was hiding Ushguli's surrounding mountains.  1 minute ago, the sun came out.  Going to be interesting weather today.)

Anzor and Lile, 2 members of the family I stay with in Ushguli, and also both my English students at home and school

Edge of snow

My theory is:  If you haven't seen it go from live animal to meat ready for the kitchen, you're not a real carnivore.  Supermarket meat is only half the story.  This is our neighbour and my host's first cousin, Zakro, at work on a calf

Ushguli, Svaneti, Georgia

(I'm posting this in advance, on March 10, watching the snow come down thick enough to obscure the mountains around Ushguli totally.  Which more than likely means a power failure is imminent.  It also means that my trip to Tbilisi to arrive before Saturday (Mar. 14) is in serious jeopardy, as the road out of Ushguli is curently undriveable.  But there's more than one way to leave this place - more than one mode of transport, I mean...)

Top:  Don't look so surprised!

Snow and ice

Lirhi3, Ushguli, Svaneti, Georgia

Final set from the late-winter festival.

Once the solemnities of prayer for each other were over, the singing and dancing began, snowfall notwithstanding!  I kept my camera around my neck on its strap, covered with a plastic bag, lens hood shielding the lens from the snow - it was almost as cold as the air by now, so little if any snow was melting onto it.  And it performed flawlessly, as it always has in my experience.

"A good time was had by all."

Lirhi2, Ushguli, Svaneti, Georgia

More from this late-winter Ushuli festival.

Prayers with offerings of moonshine or wine and bread; the guy holding the bottle, centre, is doing the praying in a nice loud voice, for each family as they bring their food

A group prayer to start things off

Then a walk around the snow tower, singing Svan songs in harmony

Finally, some young boys ascend the tower, cling to the cross, and try to stay there while they're being bombarded with snow, as it was at the beginning

More photos from Lirhi tomorrow.  The best is yet to come.

Lirhi, Ushguli, Svaneti, Georgia

Lirhi is a late-winter festival which I've now attended twice in a row.  First, a "tower" of snow is built.  Then one of the young men who was involved in this must plant a cross on its top, all the while getting pelted with shovelfuls of snow.  There's more to come from the cold, windy and snowy day which Lirhi gave us this year - lots of good fun, it was, in spite of the weather.

Ushguli, Svaneti, Georgia

Lion or panther emblem on the school - the building used to be a hotel

Chazhashi, the hamlet of Ushguli to which the school is attached; the exceptionally fat tower just left of centre is the village's main museum

Ice formations on the Enguri near the school - I'm watching them to see how they develop as temperatures rise and fall

Few things beat a handmade wooden fence on the snow as a subject for me

MorePower2Ya, Ushguli, Svaneti, Georgia

OK,  it's time to post the story about the electricity in the upper part of the village.

Our transformer, pictured here in all its antique glory,  got overloaded and failed.  Mikho (top) and some experts from Mestia took a look last week and, among other things, installed some new ceramic insulators - I hardly know anything about electricity, except that it shocks you and runs things, and what insulators look like.  But I had to be on hand to see what they'd do, and how slender is our hope.  This is a second-hand beast, this transformer, and not powerful enough for the winter load on it.  So we're forbidden from using electric heaters; yesterday it was -17 C in the morning, and -2 in my bedroom.  Under my 4 blankets, I sleep very well, thank you, thank God too.  We're now waiting for a rumoured new transformer of greater capacity to arrive this month, transforming our lives along with the electricity...

Ushguli, Svaneti, Georgia

This is the area whose barns I visit each morning and early evening, to shovel cow poo and pitchfork hay down to the bovines

Nice old house, left, looking down the village

Four towers including, in the distance, Tamar's Summer and Winter ones, the former above, latter below

Lamaria Church in front of Shkhara, Georgia's highest mountain