(dedicated to a brilliant little man named Samuel Ash Jacob Kornelsen)

Winnipeg, Canada

I felt privileged to spend a few hours at the studio today with Gerald Kuehl, a remarkable portrait artist who has been described as a historian, storyteller and visual poet. Portraits of the North, a collection of his portraits depicting the Indigenous people of the north, reflects his fascination with their cultures. (I had posted about Gerald and a presentation of his I attended at the Winnipeg Art Gallery a few months ago, here).

Gerald has met with and photographed subjects from Ojibway, Cree, Dene, and Inuit communities, focusing his efforts on their oldest living members, the Elders. He has conducted interviews, researched their cultures and taken part in sweat lodge, traditional pipe and fasting ceremonies. A self-taught Manitoba artist, Gerald’s photographs are used as a point of departure to create super-realistic pencil portraiture, each drawing taking approximately 70 to 100 hours to complete.

Gerald has also written riveting biographies to accompany the portraits, poignant stories from the fascinating lives of his subjects along with insightful remarks about the impact they have made on this earth. The Manitoba Museum began touring 30 portraits and biographies of Gerald’s work in 2006. The Portraits of the North exhibit is literally a celebration of the lives of our Indigenous people. The show has toured nationally and internationally and is currently on display at the Wanuskewin Heritage Park in Saskatchewan.

The images above are a small sampling of Gerald’s work (screen resolution does not, however, do these justice): some of the drawings of First Nations & Metis Elders of Northern Manitoba; Frank Moneyas of Hollow Water First Nation; Joseph Irvine Keeper of Norway House; and Helen Jane Ross of Cross Lake (detail). All images are © Gerald Kuehl.

Barcelona, Spain

I shot this pic of an elegant and clever sign hack (No Stopping becomes No Bombing) back in 2003, as the U.S. was raining down bombs on Iraq.

seriously…

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Saddened today, and feeling sorry for our embattled neighbours in the U.S.…

Nine-year-old Christina Taylor Greene is one of the victims of this weekend’s deadly rampage in Tucson, Arizona. She was born on 11 September 2001. She had gone to the Giffords event to learn more about the political process, her family members say. She loved baseball, horseback riding and swimming…

It’s a sad truth, but you reap what you sow…

(on products… almost everywhere)

We each encounter them almost continually—so much so that I would suggest we have become numbed by them. These ugly, intrusive little zebra-contrast patches have been a part of buying and selling since the first bar-coded item, a pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum, was scanned in 1974… we’ve been hearing the ubiquitous bleep bleep ever since.

Bar codes were originally invented in 1952 by Bernard Silver and Norman Woodland in Philadelphia, USA, but it wasn’t until 1973 that Woodland created an entire bar-code system, the Universal Product Code (UPC), to help stores track inventory and make check-outs faster. The UPC barcode was the first bar code symbology widely adopted by the grocery industry, followed by the EAN code format (similar to UPC, used internationally) in 1976.

The black bars represent a sequence of numbers. The five digits on the left represent the product’s manufacturer, with the five digits on the right representing the specific product. Bar codes are configured the way they are to permit a laser scanner to read the varying widths of lines to determine the digits listed underneath. The information is transmitted to a store computer which matches the numbers to a product price—in the bleep of a second.

Images above: at top, the UPC-A, the universal product code seen on almost all retail products in the USA and Canada; below, a selection of creative bar code iterations from Japan… go figure.

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(found here)

Cheers!

(as seen in Good)

In the past ten years, the human population of the earth has grown by a billion—to a current total of 7 billion (it was a mere 2.7 billion when I was born). For the first time in the history of our planet, more of us now live in cities than outside of urban areas. Cellphone subscriptions have multiplied almost ten-fold, while internet users worldwide have multiplied more than five times during the same period (now 1.96 billion have online access).

In the meantime, the worldwide temperature has risen, 60% more fauna species are considered endangered… and 15-times as many people were killed by natural disasters in 2010 than a decade ago. Don’t say you didn’t know…

Above: a handsome chart (if somewhat skewed to U.S. statistics) by Stephanie Fox, here (or click on the image above for an enlarged view).

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You’ve no idea how hard I’ve looked for a gift to bring You. Nothing seemed right. What’s the point of bringing gold to the Gold Mine, or water to the Ocean. Everything I came up with was like taking spices to the Orient. It’s no good giving my heart and soul because you already have these. So—I’ve brought you a mirror. Look at yourself and remember me…

—Rumi

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I can’t help but agree…