Black and White

I've been working a bit on my creative skills while I've been here in France, some sketching and some photography. I had picked up a cheap $80 SLR camera (which used to cost $600 before the digital revolution) and I've been taking some black and white (or noir et blanc) shots. Poorly digitized, here are six of my favourites so far:

Even more shots can be found on my france2010 website.

Top and Bottom

From the top:

From the bottom:

Mont Ventoux is referred to as the bald giant of Provence and is quite the place. At 1909m it's not the tallest mountain, but it's history in the Tour makes it one of the magical cycling places on this planet. I had a funny conversation the other day with this old French guy in the village we're staying in about bikes...I was wearing my pink jersey and we were about to head off when he comes up and starts asking us about our bikes... Aluminum? Carbon?...He picks mine up to judge the weight (I think he was disappointed by my 20lb aluminum beast)...I can sort of understand him, but his French seems pretty flavoured with the local Provencal twang...then he asks me how many km's I've put in this year, but I haven't had a computer for a while so I just point to where my computer would be and he understands...then he says you don't need a computer you just need your heart (while pounding his chest)...he wishes us good luck and we head out...that was pretty cool.

I took some pictures with my 35mm film camera at the top of the mountain in black and white...they're at the photomat now, but I think there'll be a couple great shots in there.

Welcome to France

France is a great country, something I learned while driving halfway across it due to the Volcano eruption that made me rebook my flight through Barcelona. I'm staying near a medieval village, Vaison la Romaine, a suitably named Roman era town with a nice market and some great history. I'm hoping to do some sketching and work a bit on my proportions, something the Romans were experts at....I'm not real big on Classical design in general, but you have to appreciate the way they lay out their geometry! I've been reading George Walker's blogand he's real big on that kind of stuff...

We got a real nice haul from the market today, some fresh cheese, an old cave aged mountain cheese, heirloom tomatoes (which are gorgeous from a pure aesthetics standpoint) and some delicious Provencal olives.

My French is coming back to me little by little, we'll see how I am after a month!

Kanna

My first kanna arrived today all the way from Japan:

I don't know what this says:

...but the dai is a nice quarter sawn piece of oak...

...this says the same thing as the box, which I'm guessing is "katsusaburo", the name of the plane..

...overall a neat thing, but due to some humidity issues (or lack thereof) I'm still waiting to get to use it. You see the blade is stuck and I can't get it out to make the modifications needed to the dai that are required for a new kanna. I think that traveling from humid Japan to the dry Canadian winter of Ontario has caused the block to dry out and shrink quite a bit and lock the blade in place.

Engineers.......

Last week I got the chance to give a lecture to a class I'm TAing at the University of Waterloo. The course is based around social design factors and is meant to be a course that helps expand the engineering students' perspective about the design process. Here's a link to my slides:

Craft, Design, and the Engineer

A little Nakashima, a little Lago, and some Sam Maloof for good measure...getting the opportunity to talk about these things was nice because it gave me a chance to think about how the design of something as simple as a chair can be really quite a complex thing. Some of the students really seemed to appreciate what I was talking about...that was really rewarding.

Get a Handle on It!

I've started on a handled smoothing plane made out of ziricote...I've just got the handle roughed out, but I'm looking forward to working a bit more on it. I've said it before, but ziricote is a bizarre wood to work.

On a completely different topic I was thinking about how weird it is to have your work evaluated by people. For the past year or so I've had a coffee table on display at a cafe that I frequent pretty regularly, and it's kind of a strange experience to hide behind a coffee and hear people talk candidly about your work without them realizing you're person who made the thing they're talking about. Most of the time people seem to like my work, or even really like it, but I've definitely had a couple of bad reviews too. Selling craft is hard, real hard. It's definitely something I need to work on.

ABC's

So I've decided to try to learn some Japanese. To be honest, all of those "character" languages have kind of scared me as a roman alphabet user, but apparently the Japanese have sort of combined the best of both worlds. Although they do use some pictograms, where one character basically means an entire word, for the most part their language is syllabic with syllagrams for the limited number of syllables in their language. According to the book I'm reading there are about 110 basic sounds in Japanese, versus about 8000 in English, which also makes things a lot easier to wrap your head around.

The characters at the top of this post represent the basic vowel sounds, and also my attempt to start learning the hiragana character set. This is the equivalent of a little kid learning how to print, and is a humbling experience. It's on to the consonantish sounds tomorrow and trying to imprint the strokes into my brain.