Upside Down Inside Out

Another Town More Photos To Take 5x5 Print by Thompson Designs $8US

I love to be outside and if I can’t physically be there I still like to see out. Life can throw up curve balls though and we get stuck inside, ‘confined to barracks’. At these times I like to close my eyes and bring the outside in through my imagination. When I was little and often ill – I have a congenital lung condition - I’d lay in bed and imagine that the world was upside down and I was walking on the ceiling, stepping past the light, over the door tops and off down the hall ceiling and outside to step on the clouds.

Back in the BC years Mozi, a Chinese philosopher first mentioned the principles behind the pinhole camera setting in motion the journey towards the cameras available today. Along the way the camera obscura was developed. When light enters a dark room through a small hole, it projects the reverse image of the scene outside the room creating a camera obscura – an upside down world. There are still some of these contraptions in use today, usually at tourist spots, producing a static vista. But with the advent of high tech video equipment, the slowly changing scene can be sped up, thus bringing new meaning to ‘bringing the outside in’. Isn’t this Venice clip fantastical.

But I’d need lots of black plastic and tape to set something like this up at my place. I’ve taken some beautiful photos over the years particularly with my old SLR and I’m always meaning to get myself organised and have some enlarged and framed.

Behind the Light II 11x14 photographic print $32US from Shaded Memories

Zen Bridge 10x10 TTV photograph from House of Six Cats $25US

Pretty Plumbago 5x5 TTV photography from Hey Harriet $5US (not large but a lovely little photo at a lovely little price!)

And don’t you just want to dive into some paintings, a little person in a make believe world where anything is possible. This is the first painting I owned. I like to go walking in here sometimes. My Dad purchased it from a secondhand store 35 years ago and subsequently gave it to me. It’s big – 48 inches wide – and with the frame, very heavy - and cost only a few dollars. It badly needs restoring and Dad did a bit of ‘doctoring’ of it himself, patching up a couple of tears, and adding a few brownish leaves! Signed with initials then ‘Crespin’ I haven’t been able to find anything definitive about the artist.

I have fallen in love with the work of Marc Burstall, an Australian artist selling on Etsy. Below are two works from his Past and Present series, original oils, each 80cmx60cm oil on canvas and each only $180US!

I like it that I have an outside area, on a balcony, where I can sit and still be at home.

Image 1 from Apartment Therapy, and 2 and 3 from Houzz

And, of course, I can just close my eyes and let the film roll.