IT RAINED LAST NIGHT!

LITTLE RAIN LAST NIGHT!


READ ON AND RESPOND, 
I NEED YOUR HELP.

CN TOWER - TORONTO

The image below shows the panel, from left - Scott Barnim, Roger Kerslake, Robin Hopper and Thomas Aitken, and curator Rachel Gotlieb at the George R. Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art in Toronto. The occasional was to recognize the involvement of British and British-trained ceramic artists in Canadian Ceramic Education. It was in conjunction with a major ceramic exhibition titled "RULE BRITANNIA", honouring Queen Elizabeth II.

Between my Hotel and the Gardiner Museum  are two other museums, the Bata Shoe Museum and the Royal Ontario Museum or ROM as it is affectionately known. It is one of the world's major museums and among its fabulous art collections also has what is probably the World's Greatest Geological and Mineral Collection. If your are at all interested in Ceramic Glaze and Colour Development, this collection will give you more ideas than a century of playing with ceramic calculation. I will explain in later postings. The image below is of a huge Agateized Geode with Silica and Iron. Linear pattern is developed by different cooling rates.

The BATA SHOE MUSEUM is a real treat, holding intriguing footware from around the world and covering two thousand years of history. The shoes in the following image are from the "Flapper" period in 1920's Paris, France. The ideas of form, colour, decoration and texture are amazing. A future posting will show more.

The area of Southern Ontario known as Prince Edward County, or "The County" for short, is one of the newer Canadian Winegrowing and production areas. This area is particularly good for grape varieties that prefer a more alkaline soil. Soil conditions are similar to the Alsace area of France, but summers are considerably warmer.  Many Prizewinning varieties of wine are found here

I wasn't supposed to be working because of health reasons, but I had designed a couple of small gardens for my younger daughter, Sarah, a couple of years earlier that were beginning to fill out nicely. She wanted to join them and was prepared to spend the money and do the grunt work. I jotted down some IDEAS, did some drawings and we went off to all the nurseries in Belleville for plants, organic fertilizer and a truckload of topsoil. Down the length of the grass covering the septic, there had been the remains of mixed glacial till rocks from an old glacier that probably melted over twenty thousand years ago. The dumped rocks had been bull-dozed alongside the grass in a long straight line. I quickly designed a Wave Border some 80' in length. Sarah moved the topsoil, I placed the plants. In three to five years it should fill out and look pretty nice. My postings will give more about gardens and plants on a regular basis

Going back to Toronto to catch a flight back to the West Coast and HOME, my daughters Karen and Sarah treated meto a combination Father's Day and Belated Birthday. They took me to see the amazing stage performance of WARHORSE, about horses used in the battles of WW 1 in Northern France. I know the area well, having worked there as a travel guide when I was in my 20's for a summer. The "stage horses" were life-sized puppets operated by three people each. They captured every movement of real horses from flicking ears to stomping feet and everything between. As a former prop-maker in London's West End, I was utterly intrigued. The most complex props that I made in that particular career was a 20' fully articulated crocodile for Peter Pan and a full scale vintage car for Shaw's Man and Superman or Arms and the Man. I made Props as an adjunct income for the pottery studio. We finished the day with dinner at a great Thai restaurant, Khao San Road.

Everything I've talked about in this and almost all of my postings concerns the development of IDEAS and problem-solving in many diverse directions. I plan to continue along this direction. If you have thoughts about these directions, please let me know.  See you in a few days,  Robin