The mansion garden

 

I may have a few champagne problems living in this Belle Epoque town, but I could happily go take pictures in the mansion garden every day forever. And at the end of the picture taking, I can go down the almost secret path by the garbage, still surrounded by flowers, climb the almost secret stairs, and have the platform at the top of their property wall all to ourselves to gaze out at the ocean from.

Then I come home and sort through the pictures; little birds, blazing flowers, ancient sprawling trees, fat bumblebees, giant curling leaves, and the crows. Sometimes, as I have before, I show a pleasant roll of unedited pictures, and sometimes, like today, I spend hours doing all sorts of mad science on the pictures, unable to stop myself as I run one more pass or one more edit until I find it is quite late, and I need to put together the clerkmanifesto post for the morrow pretty quick, because the day is long gone and my time with you is nearly over.

So while in the future I may present my garden pictures here in a more orderly way, for this post I will just be running off to my file of new pictures from my work today and grabbing a few things that catch my eye.

Maybe they can catch your eye too?

Don't worry though, they'll probably give it back if they do.

Look ma, no hands!

 

I was out at my favorite park here, right by the water, in the open grounds of a villa turned museum. I love this park because really, as peaceful and parklike it is at first glance, at second glance it is an extraordinary garden, featuring without much fuss an exquisite assortment of flowers, succulents, and palms worthy of any botanical garden. The Meditterranean climate offers a hand up for this kind of a thing, but it's only a hand up. Some group is up to something amazingly clever behind the scenes there!

Anyway, things were looking particularly wonderful on the grounds, maybe even a bit better with the Autumn coming in, and I had the unusual opportunity to spend a real span of time taking pictures. Some of them came out quite nicely and I thought "I am just going to show these without any ai shenanagans, let everyone see what I can do with my eye and my phone and a bit of time!"

Plus, I'm really busy with my Genoa series and the administrative paperwork that is likely the bane of any emigree anywhere, but is definitely the case in France. So posting off twenty pictures or so without much fuss here sounded like a great idea!

And that's what I came here to do!

So I opened up my first picture and I thought "What if I just drew right over it instead?"

At least an hour later here I am, with one picture for you, hand drawn in two simple layers, the photo, and my drawing. I think this might change the direction of my Genoa pictures, or divert me into twenty flower pictures. I don't know, but I like this just fine. I am much more satisfied than with yesterdays gambit.

And now I can go do my daily tithe of French lessons!

"Wow, you do French every day?" You ask.

"Yes, yes I do." I answer warily.

"You must know a ton of French by now!"

One would think, wouldn't one?

When the rain comes...

 

A couple of days ago I took a suite of random pictures around my city. There was no great motive or theme behind them, nor was it a feeling of capturing anything special. Maybe that kind of bewitchment is harder to find after living here for a year. I see the constant stream of tourists photographing like mad around my Belle Epoque city of legend and I think... 

"Do you know how many times all that has been photographed already?"

"By me." I add.

Really what I wanted is some pictures to experiment with new styles and visual ideas. I had come to the end of my series of color highlighting photos and thought maybe something else might appear to captivate me. I tried all kinds of things with these pictures, but nothing really made me feel anything, or really added much to the photographs. So I chucked it all aside. Instead I wrote you dark political pieces and tales of beggars, and we took a little break from the photos that have become so ubiquitous on clerkmanifesto.

Then today it finally rained. I think I have been wanting it to rain here for half a year, so one would think I would be happy. But I wasn't happy at all! Holed up inside, on an unbelievably dark day, my mood crashed. I looked out the window. Rain.

Aw, it's just a state of mind

Rain, rain, rain.

So I took all those random pictures and made them into rainy day views.

It's nothing special.

I can show you. It's just the views out of the fifteen different windows of our little apartment.

I can show you, the world is fine. 

But sometimes it's harder to show me.

Belle epoque in four colors

Love or hate this series of color reduction and mix-up pictures, I think we might be at the end of them now, at least for a little while. 

I shan't over-explain them anymore, but for those of you just popping back from a vacation from clerkmanifesto, I have been applying some randomized short lists of carefully defined colors to altered to black and white pictures I took with my trusty phone camera. Thus far I have covered the categories of flowers, Saint Minneapolis, my favorite French city where I started all this, and Japan. The last category of these pictures I have to share today are of my... home. 

This is where I live. And though we still are trying to move away from it, you can maybe see in these strange alterations, that are nevertheless hard rooted in reality,...

...it's not so bad here. 

Journey to the falls

We went to the falls the other day. 

At the end of the tram line one could technically take a mile or two walk up the winding road there, if one doesn't mind being killed by cars, or one could take the bus instead.

So we piled on the bus to go to the falls, and just like that we were in the beautiful countryside!

Weird.

What falls? You ask.

That's right, we have two here, the impressive falls in the sky, and the one we went to, which is at a sort of chalet and marks the end of a canal system built in the late 1800's. It is very pretty, and also, and I say this to emphasize its greatness, not to degrade it, it is a bit of Disney, with fake grottoes and scenic cave walkthroughs.

It is an awesome place.

Or at least, very charming. A real tourist hotspot circa 1910, but still charming people.

The falls were turned OFF when we were there, but I turned them on in this picture for you:

For a first set of pictures of this trip, I have just the pictures featuring the whole gang, headed out on a clerkmanifesto field trip. It was a lovely outing and I'm pretty sure everyone had a good time, although I worried a lot, and you can never tell with the fox.