Kuriosas

Silver End Art Deco Modernist Village, Witham, Essex

Posted on January 18, 2019 by kuriosas

Made a chilly winter trip to a very unique place recently – Silver End in Essex, an enclave of Modernist housing with some supreme examples of Art Deco. Sadly pics have a slight grey tone! But their wonder still shone through despite the weather.

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Beachlands Modernist 1930s Bungalow estate – Pevensey Bay

Posted on January 8, 2019 by kuriosas

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Romanian 1970s Christmas postcards

Posted on December 24, 2018 by kuriosas

Picked up these superb and wonderfully Eastern Bloc Christmas postcards in Romania a while back, all dating back to the 1970s.

This festive Brutalist block one is particularly spectacular

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Pispala, Tampere and Porvoo – travels and Finnish interiors

Posted on December 14, 2018 by kuriosas

Am (almost) final installment about my travels around Finland. After my time in Helsinki and at the Haihatus art residency I featured in my earlier posts, I spent the last part of my trip in Tampere, Finland’s second largest city around 100 miles north of Helsinki, visiting a Finnish artist I’d met called Leena

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Alvar Aalto Muuratsalo Experimental House, Finland

Posted on June 28, 2018 by kuriosas

On a mission to find the Perala museum full of Finnish product design in my recent post, I accidentally but happily stumbled upon the 1952 ‘summer cottage’ of seminal Finnish architect Alvar Aalto called the Experimental House, on the sleepy island of Muuratsalo nestled in forest next to the epic and dreamy Lake Päijänne, the second biggest lake in Finland.

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Vintage Finnish book illustration – Outi Markkanen

Posted on May 10, 2018 by kuriosas

During my time in Finland, scouring charity shops or ‘kirpiis’ I was hoping to find some odd publications to blog about so was thrilled to come across this beautiful children’s book ‘Kurnau ja Kamaluu.’ Typing that into a translation tool expecting to find a gentle children’s title I was alarmed / tickled to find it means ‘Crouching and Screaming.’ Sounds like a lovely soothing tale for bedtime. Anyway, something was surely lost in translation there as the illustrations contained within it are so sweet and charmingly psychedelic.

Printed in 1978 by Sanoma Osakeythio, Helsinki and written by Jaana Lappo, I love the work of it’s illustrator Outi Markkanen (b.1951).

Eye catching retro colour palettes, with bright pinks and yellows – this far out image below is my favourite

I was really bewitched by some of these scenes, especially the friendship with the giant cat which reminded me a bit of the seminal and wonderful Studio Ghibli film My Neighbour Totoro (1988) where a huge rabbit spirit creature befriends a small girl – I am still fixated on a Totoro type creature coming to see me in my dreams one day.

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Finnish Vintage Product Design Museum – Perälä | Interview with Marjukka Perälä

Posted on May 9, 2018 by kuriosas

After over two weeks cooped up at our creative hideout in rural Finland we were itching for a daytrip before we headed back to Helsinki. The one feasible daytrip, beyond the miles of forest and lakes that engulfed us, was the unpronounceable city of Jyväskylä. Finnish travel can be super expensive and on a shoestring artist budget, we decided this was the one trip we would do, and could justify it right at the end of our stay. Well timed as by then our cabin fever levels in our tiny town had reached feverish heights.

The day before we planned to go, I happened to glance in the recycling box at our arts residency – and saw a particularly beguiling woman half obscured in a newspaper supplement. Pulling it out I was even more intrigued by this individual, perched by a lake in a dazzling get-up.