Friday Pics: Art

And it's Friday again. How is everybody feeling today? Was it worth it? Of course it was. Before I get on with the pictures, I wanted to pass along some information to those of you who tweet with me. Yesterday I had a little message from Twitter:

Unexpected changes in our billing have forced us into a difficult situation with our Canadian SMS service. We can’t afford to support this service given our current arrangement with our providers (where costs have been doubling for the past several months.) As a result, effective today we are no longer delivering outbound SMS over our Canadian shortcode (21212).

The ability to update Twitter over SMS will still be supported over 21212. But we know that this is only part of the experience and we want to make Twitter work in the way folks want … regardless of where they live.

There is a realistic, scalable SMS solution for Canada (and the rest of the world.) We’re working on that and will post more details on the Twitter blog as we make progress.

What the hell does that mean, you ask? It means that if you respond to some random message I just posted from my cell phone and I don't answer you it's not because I hate you, it's because I didn't get it. Or that, much like American cell providers, Canadian cell providers are GREEDY BASTARDS!!!

*ahem*

Anyway, the pictures. My pictures turned out bad, but at this point I have movies to watch and can't be bothered to go redo them. I love this picture. A little house tethered to a balloon with cherry blossoms and a giant koi. What's not to love?



This looks like a small poster, but it's actually at least 6 feet tall. It's an advertisement for the Vancouver Opera and nicely filled out a gigantic wall space. And what says home like a giant picture of a homicidal Italian woman who eventually dives out a castle window and plunges to her death? O Scarpia, avanti a Dio!


Ellie from Me & You & Ellie. "Here's my favorite piece of art hanging in our house. A triptych by St. John (U.S.V.I.) artist Elaine Estern. Which we bought in a local gallery in Cruz Bay one year we were there. It hangs in my house in New London, CT, and makes me think about St. John every day."


Mary Anna from Random. "Here are some pics of my favorite art from around my house. Sorry the quality isn't great. I didn't use a flash because of the glass, and my house has a two-story family room with windows from the ceiling to the floor - there is no shortage of natural light, which is nice but it does cause some strange glares sometimes!

"The painting of the fall scene was done by my husband's grandmother. It hangs in our living room and makes me smile. Mitchell and I like to talk about what kinds of animals might live in those barns. Noah loves to look at it too."




"The clothes line of artwork is in the boys' playroom. We hung some twine on the wall and added a bunch of clothes pins. It's holding up all different art projects - including Noah's very first drawing and a pretty cool robot my hubby drew. I keep trying to encourage Mitchell to do more artwork so we can switch it out, but he gets all upset if he thinks I'm taking something down!"



"The fruit and vegetable prints hang in our breakfast area. We bought them at an antiques market years ago for next to nothing then spent several hundred dollars to have them framed! At our old house, they hung side by side down the long wall in our kitchen, which I loved. When we moved into this house, there wasn't a perfect spot for them, so we tiled them on the wall. (Excuse the motion detector for the alarm system in the upper corner of the photo. I absolutely hate seeing that thing but the alarm people said it had to go there!)"


Middle Aged Woman from Unmitigated. "In an effort to stave off writing tomorrow’s post, I have decided to overwhelm you by sending NEXT Friday’s material THIS Friday. And some text. The black-and-white scratchboard portrait was of and by my son. With it he won a Scholastic Art & Writing Award last spring. It was on display for awhile in a juried art show at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit. The gorgeous photo is one I found on cog’s website Driving the Flies. I have not yet had the funds to have it properly matted and framed. Isn’t it amazing?"



From Sherry at Sherendipity. "This is part of my antique Chef Menu chalkboard that I got for Xmas last year. He hangs in my kitchen. He's big and bold, and old and I loves him."



Participation seems to be waning for Friday pics so I'm not sure if I'm going to keep it up or not. Maybe it just needs a rest.