Cornflower

Blue and white - 3

    One last blue and white post before we move on, and as Melody asked about the china in the first set of pictures, here it is again (click to enlarge). It's Crown Derby - I don't know the pattern, and it was bought cheaply at auction years ago, though it has certainly seen better days! Despite its many imperfections, I love it, and I keep it on a dresser in the bedroom where it matches the blue and white colour scheme.

Blue and white - 2

 
     More blue and white china, these fragments all fished out of a Scottish loch which seems to have been used as a convenient dumping ground for the local "big hoose" in bygone days. But they tie in nicely with something called Penrose Tiling which I'd never heard of until I read a reference to it in The Debt to Pleasure and then found this rather lovely (blue and white) explanatory video.

Blue and white

   Not quite Rupert Brooke's beloved "White plates and cups, clean-gleaming, Ringed with blue lines..."(see The Great Lover), but blue and white - on china or anything else - makes such a lovely combination that it's worth putting here.

Blue is the colour

    In The Morville Hours: The Story of a Garden (in which there are so many wonderful, quotable passages, and I recommend it highly) Katherine Swift describes blue as "the colour of possibility", and anyone who has ever gazed at a clear blue sky or an expanse of deep blue sea will understand what she means.

                         

      She comes up with wonderful words for the many shades of blue: looking at her garden in August, she says "I try to lift my spirits with blue late-summer flowers: Cupid's dart, monkshood, the cool blue fireworks of Agapanthus exploding like sherbet on the tongue.....I breathe in their colours, counting off the shades - navy-blue, purple-blue, sky-blue, pale blue, rehearsing other names from Sir Thomas's Garden Book: 'grideline'. from 'gris-de-lin, flax-grey, with tints of lilac; 'bertino', blue-grey; 'murrey', mulberry colour; 'watchet', sky-blue, the colour of childhood holidays by the sea."

 

   

     How has such a beautiful colour - and one associated with inspiration and spirituality, and as Katherine Swift says, possibility - given its name to a state of melancholy?

    (The pictures, by the way, are all of things in my house - which isn't completely blue, despite the impression given!)

In the frame

Taking so many pictures for this site over the last few months has given me a greater understanding of the importance of a frame for an image. What surrounds something can set it off - enhance it - or not, as the case may be.

The home is full of frames: doors, windows, alcoves, shelves, all focusing the eye on an object or a 'view'. An old house such as ours has panelling and moulding and fanlights and interior windows, all of which contribute to the frame effect where perhaps a more minimalist modern place might not.

As I walk around the house, I find I can't help seeing it in picture form, bordered by these architectural frames, some of which are only fleeting reflections, disappearing with the sun, but which I notice nonetheless.

Just as in music it is the gaps between the notes which point up the sound,

and in writing (or acting) it is timing and beat and delivery which frame the actual words to good effect,

so what surrounds something influences it significantly.

There is probably some deep philosophical theory here I'm not aware of but which might be worth a ponder in terms of the 'frames' in life.....

.....or perhaps I should just shut up and stick to baking cakes and knitting socks!

The sea

More themed pictures, all beach-combed from our own flotsam and jetsam.

Leaves

Over at Bluestalking Reader, Lisa is posting some great pictures; quirky, funny, or just plain beautiful, they are worth looking at. Thanks to Ann, a regular visitor to this site, I have discovered another visually inspiring blog: 3191, compiled by two girls with a great eye for the ordinary as extraordinary. Meanwhile at Happy Things, Amy's "Year of Colour" shots focus on - yes - colour. Looking at all these images gave me the idea to take a few photographs here in the house, linked by a theme. So today I've begun with "leaves" in different forms: