What Do You See?

Look at these pictures closely.

What comes to your mind? What's the first word that comes up in your mind when you see this picture?

Surely we all come up with various ideas to find meaning to something that is unknown to us.
But have we really look closely to what we actually see? Often I find myself not understanding what I see and I have no desire to look further into it if it's not interesting. I first saw these pictures in a church service today and really I had no idea what I was seeing. These are actually called "MUDPIE" yup MUDPIE but not the regular chocolatey, creamy, appetizing mudpie we eat to satisfy our sweet tooth cravings. The name actually describes itself. It is literally made of mud, salt and vegetable oil. Interestingly, they are made to actually be consumed. Yes, eaten by human beings I mean. This is the only way people in Haiti overcome their cravings for food. Starving to death yet having no resources, this is the only way they try to spare their lives. Children are fed these mudpies to satisfy their hunger pangs. Conceiving mothers consume it to fulfill their calcium needs during pregnancy. What do we see?

Are we aware of this? Have we really look at something properly? I feel really inspired when I listened to the story of Bill Wilson, a man who has actually seen all this with his very eyes, when he held a dying child on his own arms, crying uncontrollably due to starvation and being fed with dirt.  But he did not stop there, he saw with his heart and did what his small heart cried out.

Our egocentric nature often gets in the way when looking at things. We only see superficially most of the time but I feel it is necessary to find meaning to it, let alone meaning, first we must have the desire to know something that is quite irrelevant/meaningless to us. To see is not to only put our eyes at work, but our heart in action too.

I found these postcards artwork when I shopped in IKEA last week and without too much thinking I grabbed them. I love this kind of artwork. The idea of combining animal and human being style is very unique plus on these artworks the animals are dressed quite fashionably, making it so much fun to be look at. The artist, Matt Dinniman, incorporated the western style of dressing up with other cultures style as well. For example the rabbit, it is dressed up with Egyptian Islamic red hat  and wearing a butterfly bow. Another one is the bear that is wearing a mix style of gypsy and broadway dancer. The owl, however, reminds me of the Mad Hatter style from the book Alice in the Wonderland!

I find it quite smart that the artist also use the animal's physical feature to suit the garments it is wearing, for instance the seal's face that has wrinkles and mustache (a.k.a whiskers) is dressed up like an old British man back in the 19th century

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Negative

Randomly took a picture of this bird that was standing on a rock at a drainage. Then I read about how difficult it was to freeze a moment 200 years back from now. It would take a long process to just capture one moment plus storing the pictures would probably take a lot more effort. Nowadays, we just do it with thumb effort, just press the button! I guess I take photography for granted, it's something so usual to just take pictures now but looking back I'm thankful that there were people who would take the troubles to actually develop cameras :)

Anyway, I edited the picture with negative effect. At first I didn't know what it negatives in photography meant. According to the all knowing Wikipedia, negative means an image in which the lightest part of a photography appear darkest and vice versa.
It's quite interesting!

Picture 1 (Heartsease Flower)

From afar this flower can be easily mistaken as a butterfly!

Picture 2 (Gazania Tiger Stripe)

Picture 3

Looks like a painter just can't be bothered to finish his artwork?

When it comes to colours, it is necessary to observe from nature. What have more palette of colours than flowers? Deep purple, yellow, orange, red, white, this palette of colours on the flowers I found while taking a stroll in the Flower Dome gave me feelings of happiness, calmness yet energetic. I love the contrasting colours on some flowers (pic 1 &2) like deep purple and yellow, the colours really jumped out of the bushes of dark green attracting so much attention. Nature does provide a great example of gradation of colour. I noticed the perfect gradation of colour on one flower (pic 2), from dark to light purple and this gradation combined with white is just beautiful to see. Not only that, the "washed" colour on a red flower (pic 3) is really interesting, to me the flower looks like it's been bleached out. 

Picture 4

The stripy purple and white flowers (Petunia) somehow reminds me of lollipop!

Picture 5

Just imagine these flowers without the white tip on each petal, I think it becomes less "cute"! :P

Looking closely to each type of flower, each has its own beautiful part whether it is the shape or the colour or just simple white tip at the end of each petal. There are so much to see on just a single flower because each part is so beautiful!