April 19 2020 - A Doll's House

We saw an Antiques Roadshow highlights program last night and the highlight was a 311 year old doll's house valued at £150,000.  A camera crew went to the home to film the object.  They weren't called doll houses in the 1700s, they were called "baby houses".  This one was considered to be of national significance. Can you imagine the person valuing the object had seen pictures of it in a 1950s book, but no one knowing if it still existed or where it might be?  There are no follow-up articles on whether this went to auction or was donated to a British Museum.  All those listings are repetitions of just one article. What you can look through, though, are summaries and highlights of the most valuable items found on the show.  Here's the article of the top 16 items HERE.  The top one listed is a model of Antony Gormley's Angle of the North with an appraised value of $1,565,000 and sold for $2,946,300, then a pocket watch by Patek Philippe made in 1914 for entrepreneur George Thompson, sold at auction for $1,541,212 and so on. Part of the fascination of this show is each person's story of the object.  The 1904 Diego Rivera's oil painting with a $1,000,000 value hung behind a door for decades in the parents' home.   And this one:  A young man named Richard Hobbs went down in Roadshow history when, in 1993, he presented silver specialist Ian Pickford with a carrier bag full of pieces he didn’t think would be worth much. It turned out to be the show’s most important silver collection. Hobbs discovered that his father had been secretly collecting silver and stashing it under the bed in shoeboxes. The family had very little money and never went on holiday or had any luxuries — and it was suddenly clear where the cash had gone. Richard and his mother Margaret later sold the silver for a total of £350,000. In 1917, cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths took five photographs to prove that fairies existed at the bottom of their garden in the woods of Cottingley, Yorkshire. It was widely believed to be a hoax at the time, until Arthur Conan Doyle said he believed the story and also set out in 1920 to prove it, giving the girls better cameras to take more fairy photographs. In 2008, the daughter and granddaughter of Frances caused amazement when they turned up on the Roadshow with the photographs and camera. One of the greatest pranks of the 20th century was valued at £25,000. The Antique Roadshow came to RBG in the Autumn 2019 and let's hope something fascinating turned up there. Today we have a colourized bark abstract.

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April 12 2020 - And It's About Eggs

What about eggs?  How did eggs get to be part of Easter? The Christian interpretation of the egg is that it represents Jesus' emergence from the tomb and resurrection. But eggs have been a symbol of new life since ancient times.  The ancient Egyptians, Persians, Phoenicians and Hindus all believed the world began with an enormous egg.  It is called the world egg, cosmic egg or mundane egg.   Some primordial being comes into existence by 'hatching' from the egg, sometimes lain on the primordial waters of the Earth.  The very earliest idea of 'egg-shaped cosmos' comes from Sanskrit scriptures. It continues through all ancient societies and into modern mythology and cosmology. With that long history of sacred celebration, what have people done with eggs that make the Guinness World Records stand up and pay attention?  Many irreverent things, all involving many people and many eggs. Largest egg structure - 48,230 eggs forming a pyramid. Largest East egg hunt - 501,000 eggs that were searched for by 9,753 children Largest Easter egg tree - 82,404 painted hen eggs Largest decorated egg - 49 ft 3 inches tall and decorated Most people dyeing eggs - 582 in Redmond, Washington Tallest chocolate Easter egg - 34 ft 1.05 inches I didn't colour eggs for Easter, but I did colour hosta leaves to create this  Nature's Impressions abstract.

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Mar 4 2020 - How to Name a Currency

The headlines today include South Korea's measures for the coronavirus.  Here's the headline: South Korea compiled an 11.7 trillion won ($9.85 billion) supplementary budget on Wednesday to strengthen anti-virus measures and prop up its economy as its coronavirus cases topped 5,600. Initially, I couldn't make sense of "won".  To me, it is a verb not a noun.  That got me looking for unusual currencies and I offer these - they come from moneyversed.com HERE. Rai stones: On the island of Yap in Micronesia, if someone asks you for change, you might need to get a slightly larger coin purse. These massive limestones are between five and 20 feet in diameter… and their value may be determined by how many people perished while transporting them. Katanga cross: You’ll find this currency in the Katanga region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. For a short period time, it was used as the primary form of currency. Good thing it was for only brief amount of time, however, seeing as how each one weighed a hefty two pounds! Manchukuo yuan: The Manchukuo yuan was used by Japanese Imperial forces when they occupied Manchuria. These coins were actually made out of cardboard since metal was in short supply during the war. German wooden dollars: In Germany after World War I, inflation was out of control and this led to some towns making their own money out of wood. They called this currency not geld, which literally translated to mean “not gold.” So as we look forward for what will happen in currencies, given our digital journey.  The Moore Global says:  Whilst sovereign fiat currency in the form of physical cash remains the only universally acceptable form of public money, innovations in cryptocurrencies and stablecoins can offer more effective forms of transactions and will continue to disrupt the finance industry. I sure have a lot of images of tree bark.  These are from our trip to Colorado a few years ago - that wonderful pine bark with its rich colours and curving shapes.

On the Surface of Things

Whenever I go to conservatories and to Florida, I seem to take many pictures of the surface of palm branches, trunks, and other tropical plants.  They are unfamiliar and interesting.  They have so many patterns and designs.  Their textures are often in a horizontal pattern, compared to our northern trees which have more in the way of vertical patterns. Today we look at Palm patterns, with a Eucalyptus at the bottom.