Blossoms

Spring in full fling.

Octopus Garden Yoga

Can you see the octopus in the ancient maple tree? Lateral thinking is fun!

Promotional postcard for Octopus Garden Yoga, and their upcoming teacher-training offerings.

Ah, yoga!

I have been practicing yoga for many years, in varying degrees of commitment through different stages of my life. When my favourite studio announced they would offer a yoga teacher training program this spring, it felt like the time was ripe to take this practice deeper! With only one month (out of four) left to go, I am so pleased with that choice. A period of sustained, intensive practice and learning, with the guidance and support of great teachers, has been such a powerful experience. How amazing to come to old barriers and find them gone, to study poses that seem impossible and begin to see my way in. 

A few weeks ago, a photographer from the Toronto Star came to take pictures at the studio for an article on "The Rise of Yoga" in Toronto. I was shy to pose with my co-students and teachers, but it was fun! I am glad I did, though I didn't make it into the newspaper!

Thanks to photographer Rene Johnston of the Toronto Star.

Project Bookmark Canada

It's been such a busy time I have been very much remiss in posting about new projects. I launched two major websites in the last month. The Ontario Herbalists Association I posted about last week. Today I want to show you Project Bookmark Canada's new website. Project Bookmark Canada "places text from stories and poems in the exact, physical locations where literary scenes are set." Founder Miranda Hill asked me to redesign their website and prepare the ground for a great fundraiser that is running through the month of April, the Page Turner Campaign. Every day a different author champions the campaign, spreading the word on their blog, through social media, or in the case of Shelagh Rogers, on the CBC. Check it out! There are prizes every day.

I can't wait!

"THE VIOLIN (MOZART/KUBELICK)"
Georges Braque, 1912

I was delighted and excited to read about Leonard A. Lauder's extraordinary gift to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: a trove of cubist paintings valued at $1 BILLION. This extraordinary gift includes 33 Picasso works, 17 Braques, 14 Légers and 14 Gris, many of which represent major turning points in art history. New York City, you will be visited in 2014, no doubt!

I saw an exhibit of Picasso's work at the Art Gallery of Ontario last year — works that Picasso had kept in his own collection until his death, each significant markers of his artistic development in all its radical glory. There were several cubist pieces in the collection, and these are the ones that entranced me beyond any other. I could gaze upon them for hours. Something about this incredibly bold movement away from linear representation has always moved me, possibly because it is the threshold that once crossed, opened the endless possibilities of abstraction for all artists since. I think of this process when I create art in any medium. By taking what is seen and breaking it open, by allowing the mentally ordered perception of sight to shift and twist and fragment and be presented through time — this glance here, this observation there, and here, a new angle — even the process of thought becomes freer. The linear sense of narrative that we habitually impose on everything, can loosen. The tyranny of procedural logic and strict, frozen perspective is optional, Cubism shows us. When we allow ourselves to see differently, we can think differently too.