Drawing/painting by Mark Grotjahn, one of his many pieces featuring an abstract butterfly. These are reminiscent to me of the work of children’s book illustrator Brian Wildsmith.

It would be nice to have a mural like this in Vancouver. It was designed by B.C. artist James K-M. Information on the mural, and on the collaborative community work of producing it, is here. Click below for a video interview with one of the coordinators.

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When I was about 12, my dad and I built four stellated polyhedra (star-shaped, many-sided platonic solids). Dad, a mathematician and math teacher, used the book shown below as a resource and then worked out his own dimensions and angles (you can see his notations right in the book). We hung the three largest polyhedra from the kitchen ceiling and they remained up there all the years I was growing up. I’m a bit heartbroken that I can’t find a photograph of them installed there. We simply hung them from cheap white cup hooks, using invisible dental floss which we knotted and glued inside the final glue joint of the model. This is what passes as decor in a math household, I guess, but it worked. They were beautiful, colourful and modern, and kids and adults loved them. My friend Doug, who owns way more of these platonic solids than I do, recently said that he feels good just looking at them, and I know what he means. 

The book Dad used, still one of the best resources for building geometric models, is Mathematical Models, 2nd Edn, by H. M. Cundy and A.P. Rollett, Oxford University Press, 1961. Nowadays, however, you can find plans online so you don’t have to be a mathematician to make these (I will provide links to these soon). Dad and I made the models with only a geometry set, his calculations, mayfair cover stock, an X-acto knife, white glue, hand-mixed tempera poster paint (as they used to call it) and dental floss. I highly recommended this as a father-daughter project, not to mention as decor. A note on the colours: the faces aren’t painted randomly. The colours help you to see what’s going on in each model. In the model above, for example, each colour indicates a separate triangular pyramid – for a total of five intersecting pyramids. In the polyhedron in the far right of the top photo, each colour indicates either a star shape or a large triangle. The actual choice of colours, though, was subjective. Not surprisingly the polyhedron at top right is Dad’s colour scheme, while the girly one above was mine.

More far out interiors from The Practical Encyclopedia of Good Decorating and Home Improvement, Greystone Press, 1970.

This amazing textile is actually the back of a quilt by Lauren Venell, but it could just as easily be the front. Venell’s fabric is dark blue denim, with light grey quilting thread to show the quilting design in contrast, and she pieced and quilted the whole thing by hand on the sewing machine. As you can see it’s a geometric abstract representation of mountains, lake and shore, with beautiful quasi-Japanese reflections, and we’ve been staring at it in a sort of trance. The quilt is one of the submissions to a sewing challenge by Craft Magazine. The theme is “Sewing with Nature” and it can be interpreted broadly. If you’re interested in entering, you can upload a photo of your submission to Craft Mag’s contest Flickr pool. We really like Craft Mag – or craftzine.com as it’s known in its online version – for its excellent tutorials and its hipness.