Stationery with an "E"...

...as by its very nature - what with all that folding, posting, departing, arriving and being man-handled, dog eared, refolded, tea stained, paper clipped and shredded - it is far from stationary!

If dog eared letters are your thing you can spend hours of fun looking through the archive of letterheads at www.letterheady.com. Although their examples are often unused and unposted (but aged, from lying about in piles of papers at the back of a filing cabinet in some fabulously dusty store room somewhere, have I just contradicted my opening paragraph there?!). The about section reads "Letterheady is an online homage to offline correspondence; specifically letters...at Letterheady we don't care about the letter's content. Just its design." I think that's a pretty good premise for a blog, don't you?

Miss Haversham Eat Your Heart Out!

a rat curls up in a champagne glass - titled "Rest a Little on the Lap of Life"

When reading the Sunday Times Magazine last week I had occasion to wish (as I often do) that I had been given the task of styling a window display depicting Miss Haversham's wedding breakfast table. If it was the case, I would most definitely be calling upon the talents of Miss Polly Morgan.

I've never been a fan of small furry animals, but I am inexplicably drawn to her art. Maybe it's the bell jars, like the upturned glasses used to trap particularly scary spiders, in any event the threat of 'scurrying' has been removed. Morgan herself attests to the fact that she is seeking surreality rather than naturalism. She thinks "it would be a bit perverse to kill something so you could then try and make it look alive again!"

For Morgan there is a beauty in the fleeting transience of decay - "The beauty of decay has always appealed to me, but it isn't very easy to harness - this is a way of faking it." Like my previous post, here is an artist concerned with capturing a precious moment and freezing it in time.

www.pollymorgan.co.uk

Windows to the Soul

"Nothing is meant to last forever" is the bitter-sweet sentiment we hear from an old audio-tape recording of Vivian Maier's voice. And nothing could sum up the fleeting beauty of her candid shots more eloquently.

Vivian Maier is a previously undiscovered street photographer who was based in Chicago from the 1950s - 1990s. John Maloof stumbled across her treasure trove of images at an Auction. After falling in love with the images John has taken on the olympian task of archiving her work, which includes over 100,000 negatives, thousands of prints and countless undeveloped rolls of film.

You will find John Maloof's blog here http://vivianmaier.blogspot.com where I am very excited to see that, over the course of scanning her work, John discovered that Vivian traveled the world in 1959. Visiting and photographing places like Egypt, Bangkok, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam, France, Italy and Indonesia.

You can pledge money to fund a book and documentary about Vivian here http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/800508197/finding-vivian-maier-a-feature-length-documentary

Thank you to my old school friend Karl Argue for posting the video below on Facebook.