VT (for all of my design-obsessed peeps)

Exiled/LuisCruzAzaceta courtesyTumiamiblog Peeps, Today, the peep-show dedicated to text + image continues with a painting entitled Exiled by Luiz Cruz Azaceta paired with Cuban writer extraordinaire Reinaldo Arenas, who wrote: One of the first things that I ever did in life was to eat dirt.  My first crib was a hole in the dirt, dug by my grandmother.  In that hole, which was waist-deep, I learned to stand up.  My grandmother had used the same technique with all her children; stuck in that hole, I would crawl around on the dirt floor.  Later I would throw dirt against the wall, and one of my solitary diversions was to build mud castles.  I would mix dirt with water that I had fetched from the distant well.  A favorite game for me and my cousins was to throw dirt at one another.  To dig out the earth was to discover unusual treasures like pieces of colored glass, snail shells, and shards of pottery.  To water the earth and see how i...

imagecourtesyaperfectgrayblog Peeps, The transitory nature of life is not lost on me; my stated preference for interiors where the passage of time is markedly evident has been noted by many of my fellow design-obsessed peeps.  As an artist and lover of beautiful objects, I am especially drawn to the patina of age; the tell-tale signs of extended use and toil; the signs of wear, repair, care, and respect.  Similarly I find buildings and rooms that reveal their histories without guilt and guise to be illuminating and transformative and quite analogous to our own destiny. This beautiful sitting room captures the Cuba of both present and past.  The fate of the owners of these Colonial masterpieces is frequently unknown.  An exit visa to the US or an extended sentence at one of the many work-camps would have had the same result: a home quickly abandoned and entrusted to the vicissitudes of one's family or the vagaries of an increasingly corrupt government und...