My dining room is also my studio for drawing and painting. This week, it was a mess of paint tubes, brushes, paint-splotched rags and old cottage cheese containers filled with water. Happily, there is basket, which tucks into a nearby shelving unit, to hide these supplies when I want to serve dinner to friends.

To develop and maintain artistic skills, you need to practice them. This gets easier when you have the equipment at hand and a designated place to play with it.

A wannabe artist also needs a way to explore artistic ideas and save them for future reference; an artist’s journal is a great tool for this.

Cathy Johnson shows how to create one with her new book Artist’s Journal Workshop: creating your life in words and pictures. She starts by exploring the why of journal keeping which she believes is the important first step to kick start the process.

She provides information about choosing art supplies and a journal with paper that will support a variety of media. She offers tips about designing the page and overcoming the terror of a blank one.

As well, she explores the different kinds of journal that one might choose to keep – daily journals, travel journals, memory journals and many more. A chapter on the journaling lifestyle is aimed at helping the reader to integrate the journaling habit into everyday activities.

“Keep it up,” she advises. “The way to get closer to your goal of improving your art is to keep making art. You’ll see you’re on the right path when you look through your journals. “

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

Sometimes a new book turns up on the shelf and you go WOW!!!

Today that happened with Dan Burkholder’s book: iphone Artistry. The time has now arrived when you can almost effortlessly transform your favourite photos into something that you will be happy to hang on your wall. I say almost effortlessly, because there is, for me, a learning curve involved.

While learning Photoshop seems daunting, the process described by Burkholder looks doable. Check out the images on his website. They were all taken with his iPhone and altered by using low-cost apps with the methods he describes in the book.

The “iPhone” in his title is a bit of a misnomer because his methods work with an iPod touch as well. If the App fits, try it, is my motto. I have an older iPod, one without a camera. It is easy enough to transfer images from my computer onto it to work with his process.

The great thing about the iPhone/iPod is its portability. You could be sitting in your favourite coffee shop and working on the latest creation for your living room wall.

The only downside to this whole experiment is the size of the screen. I'm thinking that a trip to the optometrist might be in order. After playing around for a while, the whole world is a bit blurry – which leads me to the last link I want to share with you: a good article on digital eye strain.

Candace

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

Other than balsamic vinegar and a bottle of wine, the only things that I brought back from my trip to Italy, were a bracelet and a bead. Both featured Venetian glass beads. They were glass and glittered and Italian – so perfect souvenirs for a glassblower.

If you share my fascination with these tiny treasures, you will enjoy a new book, Venetian Glass Beads, by author Kathy Fox. She takes the reader to Venice and Murano for a brief history of the beads produced there. There are also 24 jewelry projects to make, should you wish. Sprinkled throughout the book are photographs from Venice, just another enticement to turn the pages.

Lark Books publish great sources for crafters, both how to and inspirational. Creating Glass Beads by Jeri Warhartig is a great how to for glass blowers, while Glass Beads: Major Works by Leading Artists is full of inspiration from the work of master craftspeople. For inspiration closer to home, check out Calgary glass artist, Martha Henry’s pendant gallery.

One of our older books, a Schiffer book for collectors, is Glass Beads from Europe by Sibylle Jargstorf. It is full of unique information about bead history. I would love to get my paws on a Bohemian bead or others from the 1930s.

The book also shows a glass head bead by Cristiano Balbi from Venice, made in 1993, next to an ancient one, probably from Carthage (p 13).

Online, you can see master Balbi at work in this Youtube video.

Exciting stuff for glassblowers.

-Candace

A few months back, we added a new title to our collection called Fresh American Spaces by Annie Selke. If you are yearning for a splash of colour to brighten winter-weary interiors, this book will give you a fix.

Selke is a product designer whose popular home furnishings frequently decorate the pages of shelter magazines such as House Beautiful and Better Homes & Gardens. She identifies five distinct design/lifestyle perspectives that she uses to guide her design.

The first one, which she labels Everyday Exuberance, is characterized by vibrant colour. I am captivated by a room inspired by an exotic rug. Here, walls are painted lilac and furniture is upholstered in pink and burnt orange. Sweet colours of the same intensity are balanced by earth tones. The result is a knock-out.

Exciting colour is also a theme in her Cultured Eclectic outlook where colour appears in ethnic textiles, such as Afghani Suzani embroidery and Indonesian batiks. Happy Preppy borrows crayon-box colours to cheer up the rooms.

If you prefer to colour your world with subtlety, she shows the way with Nuanced Neutral and Refined Romantic. She advocates a restrained approach to romantic style that “is about incorporating beauty, grace, and elegance into a space without a heavy hand”.

I like this book a lot. Out in the design world, there is a swirling sea of ideas; if you subscribe to too many of them, your interior landscape becomes chaotic. Selke has the ability to sift through the ocean, distill ideas that work together and help the reader learn from her experience.

Today's blog comes from Deitra Kalyn, Central Library staff:

Have you ever wanted something so badly for your home that you were willing to travel 1000’s of miles to get it? Well I did and I did!

I’ve always wanted a beautiful carpet that I could love and cherish for years to come. As a result of coveting something for a very long time, I became quite picky about the characteristics of this yet-to-be-found treasure. In my mind it needed to be

-Something vintage

-Something soft

-Something that matched my couch, and

-Something unusual

So with this seemingly impossible set of criteria, my boyfriend and I planned a trip to Morocco where I was convinced that my dream treasure would be found. (Okay, we didn’t ONLY go for the carpet.)

Knowing very little about carpets and even less about how to find one once we got there, I found two books that I studied extensively. The Rough Guide to Morocco and Moroccan Carpets by Brooke Pickering helped me learn the differences in quality, fiber, how to spot fakes and, most importantly, how to buy one.

This was the most intimidating aspect to me. Being a ‘nice’ Canadian, the idea of ‘arguing’ or ‘haggling’ a price seemed very stressful. But after reading the tips and tricks, I felt somewhat confident that I could at least try the renowned mint tea and bargain for what I wanted.

So, after many hours, planes and trains, we found ourselves in Fez, Morocco. Luckily for us, the Moroccan husband of a friend of a friend graciously showed us around the maze streets and took us to the best shops.

One was this little hole-in-the-wall place which sold antiques and was packed floor to ceiling with some of the most beautiful treasures that I’ve ever seen. Ironically, we popped in only because the owner was a friend of our guide.

It wasn’t until AFTER the mint tea and wonderful visit that it occurred to me that my treasure might be there. I asked if he had carpets – and he did.

He pulled out several and then I spotted the mystic impossible thing – on the floor – of this filled-to-the-gills shop. It was vintage, soft and matched my sofa (YES!) And, by virtue of it being predominantly purple, I knew that I had found a special piece.

The bartering began. We both wrote our ideal amounts on a tiny note pad that he pulled out and exchanged prices back and forth until we came to agreement. It was $20 CAD less than my max price and he certainly had a big grin on his face.

Together with a few other gifts, we shipped the carpet home from a local post office. My treasure arrived three weeks after we returned home.

I loved it even more when I saw it again – a very happy ending to a wonderful vacation.

-Deitra

One of my favourite house books belongs to the literature collection on the 4^th floor at Central. Lev Tolstoy and Yasnaya Polyana tells the story of Tolstoy’s creative life at his beautiful and beloved estate in Tula, Russia.

It’s been many years since I have read the companion essays in the book which, I recall, betray the communist sympathies of the authors; however, I love to pull it off the shelf from time to time just to look at the pictures.

The rooms are comfortable and unpretentious and reveal the interests of the occupants. They remain attractive and inviting by today’s standards.

Tolstoy’s study includes a Persian walnut desk that belonged to his father, a long black leather sofa and several arm chairs. The caption mentions a big Italian window and door leading out to the balcony. Although, the window is not in the picture of the study, other photos allow you to imagine its effect on the room.

Sophia Andreyevna’s room includes a handsome writing table where she wrote letters and diaries and kept the household accounts.

On the walls around her bed are photos of husband, children, grandchildren and friends. “All who knew [her] commented upon the forcefulness of her character…”

This comment reminds me of the movie The Last Station* which tells the story of their final days on the estate which Tolstoy surrendered to the government. (It is now a museum.) The 2009 film was based on the novel by Jay Parini. In the screen version, Helen Mirren plays the feisty Sophia and Christopher Plummer is Tolstoy – and it’s another stunning performance from this year’s Academy Award winner.

* Editor's Note: We are unable to link the movie directly to our catalogue, but you if you search the catalogue, you will find it.

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

“Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve: it is life’s undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room.”

-Harriet Beecher Stowe

For nearly 30 years, the photographer David Douglas Duncan and his wife lived near Pablo and Jacqueline Picasso in southern France. In those years, the photographer documented the relationship between Picasso and his last muse in their home.

In Goodbye Picasso, Duncan wrote, “Picasso and Jacqueline lived a frugal, almost monastic existence together. …The villa was bare of modern comforts… and yet it was a noble place, bursting with creations of the artist’s hands and mind.”( p221).

The CPL Arts collection is home to six of Duncan’s books on Picasso. Two of these books, photographed mostly in black and white, read to me like a novel. They are about a home and the design of a life. They are also about the way a creative life shapes the environment around it. The titles are: Picasso & Lump and The Silent Studio.

Lump was a dachshund, a dog muse, whose portrait appears in drawings, paintings and even on plates. You can sneak a peek at some of the delightful photos from the book in this post on the Habitually Chic blog.

The Silent Studio speaks of objects and the echoes of a life. Poignant pictures of empty spaces wait for the sound of sandals slapping along tiled corridors, chairs that wait for the weight of the sitter and a silent studio.

-Candace

Wherever I travel, I love to see gardens and, typically, they provide the fondest memories and best photos of any trip. Needless to say, gardens figure largely in any travel plans I make, on a par with great buildings, galleries and museums.

At my coffee table for the past few weeks, I have been captivated by The Great Gardens of Spain, a new book by Anneli Bojstad. She leaves me yearning for a trip to Spain.

The author, a native of Sweden writes about the colours and scents of the Andalusian patios: “I was seduced by these marvelous spaces, created to exalt the senses, embodying the concept of a garden as a recreation of paradise…”

The gardens are presented in four regions of the country and reflect the climate and culture of the area. The Atlantic region includes a cloistered garden in the pilgrim city of Santiago de Compostela where dense box hedges are clipped into massive sculptures of religious symbols.

The Artigas Gardens in the Mediterranean region were designed by the great architect, Antonio Gaudi, which is easy to see in the quirky design of the hardscaping.

In Alfabia on Mallorca she shows a sensational pergola with sprays of water that shoot across a long channel from both sides.

I am charmed by the monastery garden covered with a dusting of snow. Indeed, there are many fall and winter gardens from Central Spain pictured in the book.

The reader tours the legendary Alhambra, “the incarnation of an exotic, enchanting scene from the tales of the Arabian Nights”. This magical place is perched on a hillside overlooking the city of Granada.

On these long winter nights, how lovely it is to take an armchair trip to sunny and beautiful Spain.

Jane

Today’s blog comes from Janet, Central Library staff, who explores exhilarating architecture at her coffee table:

One of the most memorable moments of my life was a rainy cold June day in Westminster Abbey. The exterior looked massive and very dark in the wet, but inside the stone arches just soared up and away from my eyes like nothing I had seen before.

At the time I felt awe and wonder. Now that I am older I feel even more awe and wonder at the master builders who raised these abbeys and cathedrals up from their paper plans. New and urgent problems had to be solved as the stone rose higher with the weight always pushing out and down. In fact many buildings did collapse often to be started again.

In Guided by a Stone-Mason: exploring the cathedrals, abbeys and churches of Britain, Thomas Maude tells the story. A stone mason by trade, he takes the reader on tour through British sites and reveals the intense medieval competition to build the finest and the tallest religious building in the land. It’s a fascinating account by a man who looks at the buildings as a builder and explains the extraordinary problems and solutions in plain language.

If you want to see beautiful colour images of these buildings, try books such as Cathedrals of the World by Graziella Leyla Ciaga, Churches and Cathedrals of London by Stephen Humphrey or High Gothic: the age of the great cathedrals by Gunther Binding.

Many of our fine art books are weighty and oversize as a result of the high standards in the publishing industry; so please handle with care. The images are crystal clear and the lighting and details are so perfect it makes me want to go see the world again.

Janet

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

The coffee table is a small surface that calls out for the clutter of life: a book, a tea or coffee mug and small things. Small things – either curious or beautiful – invite inspection and reflection.

The art of small things by John Mack considers the aesthetic of smallness and celebrates the art of the miniature. Among many fine things, he profiles two of the treasures that I keep on my coffee table.

I was given a plaster replica of the queen from the famed Lewis Chessmen. They are a collection of pieces from four different chess sets that were found in a bay in the Outer Hebrides.

My queen is great for ruminating on, although something a little stronger that tea may be called for. Based on her expression, being a medieval queen could not have been all pleasure. She is slightly larger than the figures of another obsession of mine: netsuke.

Netsukes are small sculptures about an inch tall, commonly carved from ivory or wood. Grace Gift Shop in the Dragon City Mall (second floor) in Chinatown carries some lovely Chinese netsuke. I have carved my own versions using taqua nut.

In the collection at Central Library, there is a splendid older book, The Art of Netsuke Carving, by Masatoshi. It shows traditional tools and techniques as well showcasing examples. Carving Japanese Netsuke for Beginners is another inspiring source that includes a gallery of beautiful pieces.

Finally, keep a place on the table for The Hare with the Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal. Winner of 2011 Ondaatje prize, it traces the history of a family and an era through the story of a delicate and exquisite collection of netsuke.

Candace