Kat Eye Studio

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Smile

I love this graffiti from a back alley in Bath. I don’t know that I’ve seen happy graffiti like this before. The words scribbled under it intrigue me too, “You might get hit by a bus tomorrow!” I’m not sure if the author of those words intends for you to smile because your life might be over soon or smile because you never know when life will end, but I prefer to interpret it as the latter myself. A reminder not to waste the life we have on frowns.

Happy smiley Sunday! I can’t wait to find out who is going to win the postcards tomorrow, can you? Today is the last day to enter.

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Symmetry and Conformity

“Georgian townhomes of Bath stone standing row upon row.” I wrote that in yesterday’s post on Door Personality, so today I thought I would show you what I meant with an image. There is wonderful symmetry in this place, the Circus in Bath. (Circus really just means “circle” for us American English speakers. No trapeze acts here.) A circle of houses, all built to the same design, using the local Bath stone. I originally tried converting this to black and white but you lose the warm color of the stone, so instead I just did some selective black and white to take out a tiny bit of distracting green from a few plants. I love the repeating patterns and lines along the curve of the street.

But in this place, there is no door personality. In this place, to maintain the original heritage of the site, the doors are all the same white, with very little room for personalization. This was a high end area (“posh” to use the British term) in it’s day, and still is now. Isn’t it interesting, that when you get to higher end neighborhoods, even in the USA, they are protected by covenants and rules and regulations to keep the look of them the same but also that reduces the opportunity for public expression. Granted, that is nice when you are a home owner and want the value of your property to remain high, but it’s also limiting.

So while I really love the lines and geometry of this place as art, it doesn’t give me the same heart-warming feel as yesterday’s door. I’ll add personality and non-conformity to the list of things that inspire me, like texture and peeling paint and imperfection. One more ray of light shed upon my soul through my photos.

PS – I forgot to mention on my Postcard Giveaway that I will be selecting the winner via random drawing. I am enjoying all of the convincing appeals that are coming through with the comments, however! You can still enter to win here until Sunday 5-Sep.

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What’s Your Door Personality?

Can inanimate objects have personality? I was wondering this as I selected this photo. I believe: Absolutely, they can! Maybe it’s not that they have personality on their own, but they have personality given to them by their creator, or their owner. The personality of the inanimate object is a reflection of the personality of the creator.

Take this door. On it’s own, it would just be a door in a wall of a building in Bath. That could be it, but look at how much personality the creator and the current owner have given it… obviously, color – bright pink! And style, it opens in two halves. And the touch of the pane window at the top with the lights both inside and out is nice. Also look at the tile on the step, no bare concrete here! The black drain pipe adds personality too. It could be painted to blend in with the wall but instead it’s a dramatic design statement, along with the black at the bottom of the wall, giving interest to an otherwise bare wall, setting off the door.

Does this door have personality? Definitely! I would love to know the person who created this entryway, but I love just knowing that they are in the world, creating fun stuff like this for the rest of us to see. One of the things that caught my eye during our time in Bath were doors like this one. In a town where there is so much the same – Georgian townhomes of bath stone standing row upon row – the little touches like this show the individuality of the inhabitants. Truly a theme you’ll find here over and over again in the Kat Eye View.

So, what’s your door personality? Is your front door telling anything to the world? Would I want to know you from your front door? A thought to ponder on this happy Friday!

PS – Don’t miss the postcard giveaway I’m doing! You have until Sunday 5-Sep to comment and enter.

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Flowers, Postcards and a GIVEAWAY!!

Bath had the most beautiful flowers. In window boxes, hanging from streetposts, in roundabouts – just everywhere. Bath does flowers so well that they are routinely excluded from the “Britain in Bloom” contest for towns, since they always win. For good reason, everyone wins when a town is so full of beautiful, happy blooms.

I love flower pictures – they just make me happy. So I had some postcards printed with a few of my favorites that I’ve posted here. I got frustrated a few weeks ago when I wanted to send a postcard with a nice photo to someone, something with just a pretty picture and not a touristy one, and I looked all around Milan and couldn’t find anything. Along came a discount from Moo (an awesome printing company!) in my email inbox, so I decided to make my own!I went through my posted photos and realized that, for all of the flower photos I take, I really don’t share that many of them here. I will have to rectify that! But here are the posts to show the photos I chose a bit clearer:
Making Ideas Real from Murten, Switzerland
Blissful Color from Barcelona, Spain
Abundance from Split, Croatia
Illumination from Nice, France
Stepping Along Flowers from Varenna, Italy

I am sooo happy with the result, I thought I would give away a set of them here. This set of five beautiful 4x6inch color postcards could be yours – to send, to frame, to stick on the fridge or at your desk – whatever will make you smile! All you have to do is enter the giveaway.

Here’s how to enter:
– Leave a comment on this blog post by 9pm PST Sunday 5-Sep. Please be sure to include a way for me to contact you (a link to a blog, an email, a blogger profile, or an identifier if I already have your email) so that I can get your mailing address if you win. If I can’t contact you, I’ll pick someone else.
– That’s it!

I’ll pick the winner on Monday morning, Italy time, and will let you know. So enter, and you could be smiling at these lovely blooms in person soon. Spread the smiles, tell your friends too!

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Dark Nights

September.
We turn our heads reluctantly from summer,
start to look toward fall.
Morning crispness, school books.
Endings and beginnings,
sadness and possibility.
Enjoy every last golden moment of this month.
Squeeze out the last drops of summer and
hang it on the line to dry –
our memory of sticky days and thunderstorms,
wind in the leaves and crickets chirping.
These will keep us warm and cozy in the
long dark nights to come.

This is just something I randomly wrote down this morning in my journal, after I wrote in the date. It seemed to fit with this picture from Bath, the row of chairs at night, cool drops of rain on them, empty of tourists – foretelling of the seasons to come.

I am finding black and white photos very interesting lately. Before I left on my trip, I participated in the Mortal Muses black and white challenge. It was interesting to look through my photos and join in with some of my favorites. I was even one of the featured photos last week, in Thursday’s post.

Participating in this challenge got me to looking at my black and white photos as a body of work, instead of each one individually. I love color, but I like the feeling that black and white can evoke. The simplicity of light and dark, lines and spaces. It got me to thinking about how I don’t really see an image as black and white when I record it in real time, but when I see the photo on the computer it just asks to be black and white. Like this one, when I saw it in yesterday’s editing, I knew that this was the way it needed to be.

And somehow, the words I wrote this morning, the challenge I participated in last month, the photo I took last week and edited yesterday all came together for this post. I love how that happens.

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Bath Time!

We are back from our lovely week in England, where we visited Bath, York and London. What a beautiful country! Buildings out of children’s story books, the fastest moving clouds I have ever seen, and everything was in English. Imagine! That might sound silly, but I wasn’t quite prepared for “foreign” travel in my own language, after traveling so much where the languages are different. The English language is the same yet so different in the UK. And some of the accents – they might well have been speaking a foreign tongue for what we understood!

Of all of the places we visited, Bath was our favorite. I loved the Bath stone buildings, the interesting doors, windows with flowers, rows upon rows of chimneys and the town at night. So much great history, from the Romans and earlier, to Jane Austen (I have to go re-read some books now).

When we found out the Roman Baths were open late I knew I wanted to visit in the evening, for the lights on the water. It turned out perfect – good light, fewer people – much better all around for me. You can almost transport yourself back in time with this image, imagining the baths in the Roman times. But not quite. The windows of the building behind, the signs, the walls – all subtle elements of modern day. An interesting juxtaposition of old and new, coming together in one pleasing composition. Hmmmm, that might just describe England as well!