PEAK HOUR

Friday evening in Autumn; cold and rainy, with many drivers short-tempered on their way home...

This post is part of the Skywatch Friday meme

and also part of the My Sunday Best meme

BRICK VENEER

A typical 1950s suburban blond brick veneer home in Thornbury, a northern Melbourne suburb. Many of these have been lovingly restored, and if one is lucky looking inside is like entering into a time machine, with period furniture, furnishings, appliances and wall decoration art.

The veneer part refers to the bricks that are built outside, onto a hardwood timber frame. Inside, plasterboards are attached to the timber and are then painted. The roof is of terracotta tiles. The windows typically are metal framed onto which glass is attached with putty.

This post is part of the My Sunday Best meme

WINDOW VIEW

View from my window through a crystal ball. Note that the photo is rotated 180˚ as the image through a glass ball is normally seen upside down.

This post is part of the My Sunday Best meme,
and also part of the Photo Sunday meme.

AT HOME

It's 6:31 p.m. in Southbank on a cold, dark, Autumn evening. Social distancing and stay at home directives are still in force and most people choose to be at home. These are tall residential apartment buildings viewed from another across the way. Yes, almost everyone seems to be at home...

This post is part of the Wordless Wednesday meme,
and also part of the My Corner of the World meme.

IN OUR GARDEN

"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need." - Marcus Tullius Cicero

We are now well entrenched in the Coronavirus pandemic restrictions that have been imposed in order to curb the spread fo the virus. Most people are confined to their homes (and gardens if they are lucky like us) and only venture out for essentials and some exercise, provided they adhere to social distancing rules. It seems appropriate that my travel Tuesday entry be a short excursion into our back yard, which thankfully is still replete with flowers even if Autumn is showing signs of its approach...

This post is part of the Our World Tuesday meme,

and also part of the Ruby Tuesday meme,

and also part of the Travel Tuesday meme,

and also part of the Wordless Wednesday meme.

KLIMT

We have a multitude of paintings hanging at home, nearly all of them originals, either painted by us or by friends (a few of them who are professional artists). We only have a couple of reproductions of works by famous painters hanging on a wall, Of the thousands of paintings that we like, one may ask why choose those particular ones to buy and hang up on the wall?

First, these artists are great favourites, and to have something of theirs on a wall to see daily and admire gives us great satisfaction. Second, the reproductions are facsimile paintings that are done by professional copiers who have great skill in copying faithfully the art work. They work in oils and the colours are brilliant and reproduce wonderfully the spirit of the original. This is something admirable in itself. Third, by viewing such a work in its original dimensions and skilfully painted in the same medium as the original one gets a much better idea of the artist's vision (compared say to a print or a photon in an art book, or a picture on Google).

One of the reproduction paintings we have is Gustav Klimt's "The Kiss". Gustav Klimt (July 14, 1862 – February 6, 1918) was an Austrian symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. Klimt is noted for his paintings, murals, sketches, and other objets d'art. Klimt's primary subject was the female body, and his works are marked by a frank eroticism. In addition to his figurative works, which include allegories and portraits, he painted landscapes.

Among the artists of the Vienna Secession, Klimt was the most influenced by Japanese art and its methods. Early in his artistic career, he was a successful painter of architectural decorations in a conventional manner. As he developed a more personal style, his work was the subject of controversy that culminated when the paintings he completed around 1900 for the ceiling of the Great Hall of the University of Vienna were criticized as pornographic. He subsequently accepted no more public commissions, but achieved a new success with the paintings of his "golden phase", many of which include gold leaf. Klimt's work was an important influence on his younger contemporary Egon Schiele.

This post is part of the Wordless Wednesday meme,

and also part of the ABC Wednesday meme.

HOME

A wintry night in Melbourne tonight, with cold, rain and darkness. If you're on your way to your cosy home, spare a thought for the homeless out there...

This post is part of the My Sunday Best meme.

CURIO BOX

Cabinets of curiosities (also known in German loanwords as Kunstkabinett, Kunstkammer or Wunderkammer; also Cabinets of Wonder, and wonder-rooms) were notable collections of objects. The term cabinet originally described a room rather than a piece of furniture. Modern terminology would categorise the objects included as belonging to natural history (sometimes faked), geology, ethnography, archaeology, religious or historical relics, works of art (including cabinet paintings), and antiquities.

The classic cabinet of curiosities emerged in the sixteenth century, although more rudimentary collections had existed earlier. In addition to the most famous and best documented cabinets of rulers and aristocrats, members of the merchant class and early practitioners of science in Europe formed collections that were precursors to museums.

Here is my little version of a cabinet of curiosities, one of several curio boxes I have and in which I have various objects, some precious, others remarkable, yet others quite ordinary but connected with some event or person, and which therefore bring back some memory. In this one you can see a mosaic of all manner of things including: Antique miniature toys, tropical tree dried seeds, mineral specimens, carved oriental bone figures, cloisonné miniatures, fossils and shells.

This post is part of the Mosaic Monday meme,

and also part of the Through my Lens meme,

and also part of the Seasons meme,

and also part of the Blue Monday meme.

PRISM GARDEN

I took a few photos of our garden through a glass prism and managed to get the optics right with a couple of them to get images like this. This was quite an amateurish attempt as I was holding the camera lens right up against one of the glass faces of the prism, trying to focus through the thick glass. The focal lengths and the optics would only allow one broken up image to be in sharp focus. Somehow, I think that the out of focus images around the main one enhance the composition. What do you think?

This post is part of the Mosaic Monday meme,
and also part of the Through my Lens meme,
and also part of the Seasons meme,
and also part of the Blue Monday meme.

ZEN

A corner of our garden where a meditating Buddha encourages us to be calm and relaxed, taking city life in our stride.

Zen (also Zen Buddhism) noun [mass noun] is a Japanese school of Mahayana Buddhism emphasising the value of meditation and intuition rather than ritual worship or study of scriptures.

Zen Buddhism was introduced to Japan from China in the 12th century, and has had a profound cultural influence. The aim of Zen is to achieve sudden enlightenment (satori) through meditation in a seated posture (zazen), usually under the guidance of a teacher and often using paradoxical statements (koans) to transcend rational thought.

ORIGIN Japanese, literally ‘meditation’, from Chinese chán ‘quietude’, from Sanskrit dhyāna ‘meditation’.

This post is part of the Wordless Wednesday meme,

and also part of the ABC Wednesday meme,

and also part of the Nature Notes meme.