Tiny showers

Even the most carefree cloud gets a little blue sometimes. I think there's some saying about rainbows after a storm, but lets just enjoy this metaphorical shower.

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The urban fox has had a bit of bad press in London recently. As a rule they don’t pose much of a threat to people. Humans on the other hand are historically rather harmful to pretty much most things.

Every now and again I glimpse a fox dashing about under the cover of darkness and am always taken aback by their ethereal qualities. I admit the mange-infested look isn't a crowd pleaser and their exceptionally aggressive mating noises are honestly quite repulsive, but for the most part they’re just going about their fox business like everybody else, trying to nut out an existence in this crazy time of economic downturns. 

So this is for the urban fox – a highly adaptable creature living (generally undetected) amongst us.

Learning something new

I have finally bought a decent camera so I can learn how to take beautiful photographs. Although I am a complete amateur my friends are graciously helping me by letting me take photos of them. Many thanks to Felicity for her modelling skills this weekend - I like how you handle that guitar!

© All photographs are the copyright and property of Katie & Percy (the owner of this blog). Please credit me if you use them.

Not so boring brollies

It’s raining again today. Well, this is England after all.

While I like a smattering of rain and the red wine/wood-fire vibe it sends out, the sea of black umbrellas on the way to work does little to lift my spirits.

On occasion I have spotted some truly excellent brollies including an aerodynamic version that I’m sure comes into its own during a bout of horizontal rain and wind. But in general a wet winter’s day is one very gloomy shade of grey.

However, just imagine if everyone had a colourful umbrella. Birds would look down and think the city had been sprinkled with confetti!

Now that would lighten my mood on even the bleakest of days.

Whiskers

Yesterday my man and I headed down to Islington to get his whiskers clipped at a barber shop called Sharps. This led to quite a long conversation about beards, naturally over a few beers.

You may have noticed there are a lot of them around of late and a great many styles going – bushy and big, sharp and streamlined, unruly or ironic. With the exception of the moustache-less Abraham Lincoln variety perhaps best to be avoided, I can conclude that I’m in favour of a bristle or two.

I’m told they’re practical in as much as they keep a man’s face warm and let’s be honest, the lazy man’s secret weapon. Personally I think they make an excellent accessory – in some cases a bit like a feature wall in an otherwise bland room.

A beard brings a lot to the party. It can sit comfortably in a three-piece suit (as we’ve seen with the influx of follically-endowed models parading down recent catwalks) and works equally well stripped down to just a swagger and not much else. You get the point – I like a man with a beard.

All images: http://beardedmalemodels.tumblr.com/

Tim Walker photography

If I could be photographed by anyone in the world, Tim Walker would be up there with the likes of Cartier Bresson. It’s a big call but Walker’s photographs are romantic, crazy, Alice-in-Wonderland trips of colour. 

They are extraordinary and most incredibly they are not digitally manipulated. Everything in his photographs are realised in reality. They represent the finished product of an immense design effort that encompasses a team of fashion and set designers, models, giant hand-built or sourced props, unique locations and everything else in between. 

His exhibition Story Teller at Somerset House, London, displays some of his bespoke props alongside his quirky and unique visions, which have been published for many years in Vogue (American, British, French and Italian versions). 

As I jostled for viewing space in this heavily popular exhibition (it seemed that half of London’s fashion students had like me left it to the final day), I was drawn to his consistent use of flowers. Like his models they are a constant ingredient and take on many forms. Soft and dreamy, hard or seductive, he uses blooms as both a backdrop and the star of the show.  Each image is impressively curated much like a bride’s bouquet, and whether on a grand scale or more intimately as seen in the Kate Moss series, Walker’s flowers are a celebration of natural beauty and limitless dreams.

All photographs are by Tim Walker: timwalkerphotography.com

Mariko Mori

I’m a big fan of the Japanese artist Mariko Mori and was pleased as pie to learn that she was holding her first exhibition in London in well over a decade – and the best bit – it was only 5 minutes from my work!

Mori ‘s art is a seamless mix of tradition and technology. While eastern spiritually feature heavily in her creations, her tools are those of the 21st century. Her photographs, installations, sound-scapes and sculptures are veritable digital playgrounds of a futuristic landscape to explore. Instantly recalling popular Japanese animated culture, her work is like Sailor Moon meets Mother Nature.

In Mori’s current exhibition Rebirth, showing at the Royal Academy London until February 17, the New York based artist takes her cue from the cyclical nature of life and death.

One of the most impressive pieces of the exhibition is typically alien in appearance. Titled Tom Na H-Lu II (2006), it is an imposing glass monolith with science at its core. Connected to a computer in Japan that records energy from a supernova (death of a star) in space, this beautiful statue comes alive as hundreds of LED lights react to an event that occurred in a distant solar system.

Persistent throughout this exhibition is a blanketing calm. Several dark rooms with pods pulsating soft light in hypnotic rhythms keep me in a state of Zen. Their circular formations are based on prehistoric ceremonial sights such as Stonehenge in England and Jomon culture in Japan and emphasise a circle theme both physically and metaphorically. Added to this the clean, white palette suggests a purity that feels entirely otherworldly and at the same time like being inside a big ovarian filled womb.

As her voice sweetly narrates over a film explaining her site-specific artwork ‘Sun Pillar’, 2011, it is clear that Mariko Mori intends to combine the celestial with the terrestrial. Her world is quite simply heaven on earth.

Wallpaper

One of the main reasons I dream of buying my own place is literally so I can wallpaper it. That’s right. Not for any grown-up reasons, but so I can get my craft-on in a way that rental properties don’t allow. Oh yeah, I want cats too, lots of them, but that’s another matter.

Great Britain loves a good wallpaper story. They’re into it I tell you. It might be all the indoor activity that goes on here. I've come across a great many designs while pottering through home-wares shops and not one harks back to the beige florals that lined the kitchen cupboards of my youth! 

House of Hackney is a great example of exhilarating interior fun. I stumbled upon them last year after they had taken over a derelict Victorian town-house on the Kingsland Road. Performing something of a resurrection, their textiles brought renewed life to a dilapidated interior. 

I can’t mention modern wallpaper without paying due respect to the extraordinary creative flair of Florence Broadhurst. This Australian born lass knew more than a thing or two about colour and design (if you have a penchant for remarkable women I highly recommend her biography). And rather fittingly she spent the good part of a decade in the UK.

I think we should all take a leaf out of Florence’s book and banish white walls in favour of a bit of wallpapery fun.