Month: April 2020

Grace note for a cement mixer

April 26, 2020

This is a hood ornament I saw on a cement mixing truck in Lonsdale Street, before the C Virus arrived.  I believe the manufacturer of these trucks imaginatively named him “Mack the Bulldog”.  Apparently he functions as a handle to lower the hood, which may make him the most decorative handle in motoring, and certainly in trucking.

Regular readers will recall that I have a fondness for vehicle mascots, and Mack now joins a painting series of these comprising a total of two: see here

Mack Truck mascot

 

 

You cannot own a flower

April 19, 2020

Morning glory is beautiful, but invasive and difficult to control. Sen no Rikyu, the tea master to warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, had a garden that was famed for its morning glories. Hideyoshi made it known that he sought an invitation to see this garden, and an invitation was duly issued.

On the appointed day when Hideyoshi entered the garden, there was not a flower left. Rikyu had torn them all out. Puzzled, Hideyoshi clanked through the garden to a small, rough hut in the corner where Rikyu had built a tea room. The door to the room was built low, so low that even Hideyoshi had to remove his swords and leave them at the entrance. Crawling into the room on his hands and knees, Hideyoshi looked up and saw in the alcove a single morning glory in a simple bamboo tube, with a drop of dew glistening on a petal.

Hideyoshi nodded his head and sighed: “I understand”.

tea cups

On painting a costume earring

April 4, 2020

“Ephraim was a middle son, not brilliant or stupid, not good or bad. He was nothing in particular. His brothers became diamond merchants, but Ephraim was not cut out for anything immediately obvious, and so at last he was apprenticed to an uncle to learn the trade of diamond cutting.

To cut a diamond perfectly is an act like a samurai’s sword thrust, or a master archer’s centred arrow. When an important diamond is shaped, a man may spend a week, or even weeks, studying it, accumulating powers of attention, memory and intuition, till he has reached that moment when he finally knows that a tap, no more, at just that point of tension in the stone will split it exactly so.”

Doris Lessing

Costume earring