Today's blog comes from Candace Weir, Central Library staff:

There are many reasons to love UPPERCASE, one of our newest magazine additions. Let’s name two for starters. The magazine is Calgary based with its head office two blocks away from the Central Library in Arts Central. It’s great to support local initiative while celebrating creativity on a global level which for me is reason number two. Contributors to UPPERCASE come from all parts of the globe.

Its mission statement calls it “a magazine for the creative and curious”. What a mission! They have produced 13 editions and to judge from the issue that I have in hand, it is mission accomplished.

I am reading issue 12 where the theme is the love of paper. The articles tend to be quick reads with web links so that you can further explore anything that catches your fancy. You may find, like me, that a great deal of the content does.

The layout is very catchy, with loads of pictures interspersed with text set with various types, from standard computer font to old fashioned typewriter font. Much of the content pays homage to the fast-vanishing world of print.

While it may surprise some people, I find that paper appears to be going nowhere fast. A world of paper worshippers exists. Institutions discard their print and artists make igloos, home decorations and sculpture out of it. Take a look at this link for a smattering of possibilities.

Pages 54 – 56 have a great little article by an urban-sketcher, Sigrid Albert, who lives in Vancouver. Interested? See my last blog on the Art of Urban Sketching for a great new book and website.

An ever-so-short article on the NYC Library is full of images and an impressionist snippet that ends, “Although we didn’t leave with any borrowed books, we left with an excess of inspiration.” I always feel this way about libraries. They have been a source of inspiration since I was a kid and that was a while ago.

This is not a magazine that circulates (yet), so have a look, make notes or get your own subscription. I probably will. While you decide, grab a chair and immerse yourself in a world of ideas.

-Candace

Jane's Two Cents: Don't you just love that fabulous pigeon on the cover? The UPPERCASE website makes a visit to the studio of the artist, Anne Smith, who drew the illustration.

This week I have been watching the trees nearby my apartment fill in with fresh green leaves and flower buds. In contrast, everything on my balcony is coated with a heavy layer of winter dust. Magpies have been tossing around the wood chips from the surface of the planters.

So far, my only nod to spring has been filling large plant saucers with water for the birds. Robins, sparrows, and messy magpies are regular visitors. Flickers, house finches and waxwings drop by when they’re in the neighbourhood.

Now that it’s time to clean up my little Eden, it’s also time to have a peak at new books on small-space gardening.

Small Space Gardening for Canada by Laura Peters comes from Lone Pine Publishing in Edmonton. Peters explores the many gardening possibilities open to city dwellers, including common property for the building, roof gardens, walkways and community gardens.

She offers instructions for making your own self-watering container and a generous section on edible plants (my favourite).

If you are looking for container planting with pizzazz, check out Pot it Up: 150 Fresh Ideas for Beautiful, Easy-to-grow Containers by Frankie Flowers, the oh-so appropriate moniker for gardening expert, Frank Ferragine. He has a flair for artistic combinations of plant materials and the results are stunning.

He organizes the planters by season and groups the plants into three categories: thrillers, fillers and spillers. For each planter, there is information about watering and light requirements. His creations are composed with a painterly approach to colour.

For the Birds is a planter filled with marigolds, lamium, coleus, petunia and nicotiana. Here, he has selected varieties that offer a palette of cream and spring green. The arrangement is topped with a rustic birdhouse to add height to the composition.

I think my birds might like that.

Today's blog comes from Candace Weir, Central Library staff:

I have just been reminded that the pencil is a wonderful travel companion. Gabriel Campanario takes it on tour in The Art of Urban Sketching: drawing on location around the world. Funny how with so many apps and tablets with instant web links, artists still want to record their impressions on paper, using techniques that have been around for centuries.

Campanario is the founder of Urban Sketchers website which connects an international following of artists who record their travels and communities. Their motto is “see the world one drawing at a time.”

While most of the book consists of sketches of unique locales, there is also a section called Drawing Inspiration. It deals with typical urban features that offer inspiration to the artist, from skylines, streetscapes, and panoramas to monuments, cars and furniture.

The sketchbooks themselves are interesting. One urban sketcher repurposed old accounting ledgers for his drawings.

I had a lot of fun looking through this book and it reminded me of an older book from the collection, one of our gems. Holy China by Feliks Topolski was published in 1968. With loose and expressive pencil sketches, Topolski recorded the changing landscape of people and places in China in the early days of the Cultural Revolution.

- Candace

Today's blog comes from Candace Weir, Central Library staff:

We just received a new copy of an old favourite, The Artist’s Way: a spiritual path to higher creativity, by Julia Cameron. There are so many ways in which this book works for anyone seeking to explore their creativity. It has remained a perennial favourite with CPL cardholders since it was first published in 1992.

When I first found this book and started out with the exercises, there wasn’t a web presence or iPhone/iPad apps. Today, Cameron has a website and an international community of artists who look to her for guidance.

Starting things is a habit with me, finishing is quite another story; so the second coming of the book is a chance to revisit what could turn out to be a very good habit. It came as a surprise to find that the book is part of a trilogy with the other two titles being Walking in this World: the practical art of creativity and Finding Water: the art of perseverance.

Curiosity getting the better of me, I browsed Finding Water. I discovered that it builds upon the first book’s exercises and clarifies the process. I was surprised to find this helpful and worthwhile and not simply a rehash of the first book.

Let me share a quotation from “Finding Water” that struck a responsive chord. It is by novelist William Styron: “I’ve always had a very comfortable relationship with No. 2 pencils.” Now, there is one of the great truths; he has identified my favourite tool for expressing whatever is on my mind.

Keep your pencil handy. It goes travelling in my next blog.

- Candace

If you are seeking a generous dose of relaxation and serenity, have a look at Coastal Modern by Tim Clarke. Clarke is a celebrity decorator with clientele lucky enough to own beautiful seaside properties and rich enough to get Tim to do them up.

“The beach house is more than just a place to live – it is a symbol of a life well lived,” says Clarke. It’s hard to argue with the philosophy.

Happily, you don’t need an ocean outside your sliding-glass doors to have a beach-inspired house.

He organizes the interiors in his book into five styles of design and the book flows according to the changing light of a day, from morning to evening. His different styles are associated with different qualities of light.

All of the styles share the same foundations: a balance between man-made and natural, old and new. Colour schemes are taken from coastal elements: sand, sky, water and soil. It’s a very summery look.

He favours simple, pared-down interiors with furniture and objects from local sources. Opulent vistas and houses are juxtaposed with some intimate interiors that could be achieved with a modest budget.

Can you judge a book by its cover? Not this one. The best decor is found between the covers, not on it.

Today's blog comes from Candace Weir, Central Library staff:

My friend Bob, who is a wonderful musician, hangs some of his instruments on the living room wall – and very nice they look there. I think that personal collections have tremendous decorative power because they reveal the passion and interests of the homeowner. Recently, he added a ukulele to his collection of guitars, banjo and violin.

The ukulele is an instrument that I have not always respected. I suppose watching Tiny Tim on television as a younger person prejudiced me somewhat. When Bob plays the ukulele for his mother-in-law in the nursing home, he finds an appreciative audience.

This week we got a brand new book, Make your Own Ukulele by Bill Plant, and it made me think about Bob and the happy music he makes for himself and others.

The Ukulele gallery beginning on page 12 shows shapes of a very cheerful persuasion – hearts and cupcakes – as well as other quirky and unusual models. Who knew that there were four different types of the instrument? Also, who knew that they could be made from recycled materials?

Instructions begin with the basic “boxer” instrument. The last section shows how to construct a professional-grade ukulele. One way or the other, there is the promise of great fun in this little book.

- Candace

When art and craft are a big part of your life, you need space for the materials and equipment that go with it. Creative people apply their gifts not only to the work they produce, but to the spaces where they produce it.

Inside the creative studio shows the work places of painters, jewelry makers, textile and mixed-media artists and more. The studios are as individual as the work.

Some have integrated studios into their living rooms or attics; others have appropriated barns and sheds. All have applied ingenuity to organizing the materials they work with so that the materials are at hand and also a source of inspiration.

The tools of organization come from many sources like restaurant suppliers, flea markets and home improvement centres. Every manner of container is used to sort supplies, including plastic bins, baskets and buckets. They make use of dowels, garden trellis, and pegboard, as well as repurposed furniture.

Each example includes a floor plan for the space and an essay by the artist describing what works for them best.

Untamed clutter can defeat the creative process. These creative types have found ingenious ways to conquer the monster and make a space that inspires their work.

Today's blog comes from Candace Weir, Central Library staff:

Words fade away,

Like hills in fog.

(from a Netsilik Inuit song)

To me, small and precious link together naturally. They also describe the objects from a new book, Upside down: arctic realities, by Edmund Carpenter.

Imagine the carver hunched over a small piece of ivory with a piece of bone or sharp stone teasing the image of a seal or a bear from the material. The tool follows the curves of the form and incises lines: stories in bone or ivory or wood.

Some of the wonderful little objects were made and discarded by peoples long since vanished. They were not made to be kept; they were made to be magical.

What we can put into a curio cabinet, they drew from their imaginations to serve some long forgotten purpose, dreamed of in a land where the sky was the same colour as the land or the sea. The carver “…must reveal form in order to protest against a universe that is formless, and the form he reveals should be beautiful.”

Small in size but monumental in content, most of these objects would fit into a hand. There are delicate little animals, an Ekven ivory carving that looks like a spaceship, masks, heads and little females with steatopygic hips. They served a purpose and fell away, like the cultures that produced them.

Canadian poet Al Purdy wrote the beautiful and evocative Lament for the Dorsets which celebrates the richness of lost cultures.

If you are intrigued with these stories, I also recommend A Dream in Polar Fog by Yuri Rytkheu. The novel gives clear and moving insight into traditional Siberian Yupik life as seen through the eyes of a marooned Canadian sailor in the late 1800s. Rytkheu wrote in both Chukchi and Russian and is considered the father of Chukchi literature.

- Candace

Today is Earth Day, a time to celebrate all things green. I just wish the lawns in my neighbourhood would get into the spirit of it.

Our homes and way of living are depleting the planet. We all know this and most of us try to do better in little day-to-day ways: adopting reusable shopping bags, recycling, choosing CF light bulbs and low VOC paint.

If you are planning major changes to your home, there are many books in the collection to help you choose eco-friendly materials and building processes. Here’s one that I like.

The Green Home: a Sunset Design Guide talks about ways to improve the home you live in, as well as how to build green. They compare and materials for walls, flooring and counters. They talk about fabrics for bedding and furniture and appliances that save water and energy.

It’s all put together with eye-candy interiors that reflect the latest in design and style. I like that. Shallow creature that I am, if the design is banal and boring, I am less likely to absorb the information.

There is also a section that covers the basics of xeriscaping. Perhaps the lawn that won’t green up shouldn’t be there in the first place.

If you are pursuing a career in fashion design or just curious about the industry, check out the new edition of Research and Design. The book promises to lead you through the essential stages of fashion research and how to translate the research into fashion design ideas.

What we are talking about here is the creative investigation that precedes the development of a collection. It includes visual inspiration for the concept, gathering information about materials for the collection as well as consumer or market research.

You learn that sources of inspiration may be found in many places: museum and art galleries, architecture, flea markets, film and theatre and street culture. The author provides sketch-book examples to demonstrate.

New technologies produce new synthetic fabrics. For example, E-textiles embed computing and digital components into everyday garments. In addition, materials investigation includes the exploration of ethical issues and sustainability.

The author explores methods to compile the information gathered and offers exercises to translate the research into design.

Throughout the book, interviews with established designers provide examples of how the process works for them in creating a new collection.