sky first then shoes: dusk

2012-08-20

apricot blossoms

Apricot-tinged clouds bring up our under-appreciated word of the week:
apricate (v). To bask in the sunlight.

Two fine examples from the OED:

His lordship was wont to recreate himself in this place, to apricate and contemplate.(1697) Aubrey in Halliwell at Toms-of-Bedlam.

Not sunning, but mooning himself—apricating himself in the occasional moonbeams.(1839) T. De Quincey W. Wordsworth and R. Southey in Tait's Edinb. Mag. July 461/2.

Feeling under apricated this summer?

2012-06-28

this rooftop sculpture is one of antony gormley's figures from the series Another Place. it has a fanstatically intense, yet completely blank stare, making it a vehicle for whatever pensive attitude the clouds bring with them... another place you might have come across these figures is the long-standing installation at crosby beach, just on the edge of liverpool, where some of the 100 iron men installed along the 3 mile beach have recently been involved in a fantastic act of yarn bombing.
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i've always been intrigued by unmatched pairs of words in language. in this case gormless (deriving from a much older word 'gorm', meaning knowledge or sense), is a shorthand for stupidity in the absence of style, and is tragically bereft of its morphological twin gormful. you'd think gormful would be a pretty positive word - 'knowing' - but the phonological similarity to mournful makes me think its probably more like 'sadness borne of great knowledge'... like finding out that pluto doesn't make the grade, or discovering in advance the manner of your own death, or knowing that you'll never, ever find the other glove...
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and yes. bonus points to anyone who played sculpture bingo right at the start, and twigged to the link between my favourite new word and the sculptor.

2012-06-01

2010-10-23

sky-blush

I'm addicted to the pink tint at the edge of the horizon - it reminds me of one of my favourite printmakers of the Japanese floating world, Hiroshige Ando. His prints often employ hand-graded tints across the sky and water, like in this scene, Crimson Foliage at Kaianji, Autumn (Aki Kaianji Momiji), from the 1830s series Famous Views of Edo in the Four Seasons.