It’s only at a specific time of year you’ll see the foliage-based work of Nik Rust.
The local designer is behind some of the unique, intricate designs left in some of Vancouver’s parts and public areas this past fall. Going by the handle @rakemob on Instagram, he raked leaves into simple but precise circles around the trees they fell from, creating patterns of concentric circles like ripples of water or sound waves emanating from deciduous trunks.
“The idea has been bouncing around in my head for at least a decade,” he tells Vancouver Is Awesome. “Falls would come and go and wouldn’t get to it.”
But, like many people, the parks were the place to be with the pandemic in play in 2020, and he finally put rake to leaf and got to work.
“Everything was kind of different as far the day-to-day,” he says. “Parks were being used in ways they never had before.”
He goes out early to create his art, so as people head out at the start of their day the designs are already in place, having appeared as if out of nowhere. While the majority of people who see his art have no idea how it got there, some early risers do catch him.
“Tons of people come up and approach me,” Rust says. “Some people are baffled, and want to know why it’s happening, and some people super stoked.”
The trees and leaves, he says, offered up the chance to be creative, like paint with no brush.
“I’ve always noticed these beautiful pools of leaves under trees before wind comes through,” he says, “almost like a colour shadow of the tree. They invited some sort of design.”
He was, in part, inspired by zen gardens and the patterns that are created in the little, stony landscapes. Another piece is the temporary nature of the designs.
“It’s important that it’s ephemeral,” he says. “I’m a huge fan of ephemeral art, from seasonal things like sandcastles, snowmen, jack-o-lanterns.”
The interaction of the creator with natural world as it’s in flux is a big part of the leafy designs. By the time he’s done a design it may already be getting destroyed a little, as the wind starts moving leaves about. Maybe it’ll last a little longer; it depends on the environment.
This years season is almost over he says, though it wasn’t as good as 2020. The weather put a literal damper on things. However, he’s keeping his eye out for a little longer after having a good experience with a gingko tree recently, that was still shedding some leaves.
He likes looking for a couple of essential things. One is a good viewing location, so that people can see the design properly. That either means the piece needs to be on a slope or there needs to be a vantage point for people to look down on the (essentially) 2D piece of work.
The other important factor is contrast. Raking up brown leaves on brown dirt doesn’t make a very good design, but bright red on deep green grass catches eyes.
How many leaves are around is also important. To many and he’s making big lumps. Too small and it doesn’t really work.
Next year he intends on continuing his art, with Vancouver parks his template. Typically he hits areas in English Bay, Stanley Park, and south of False Creek, so it might worth keeping an eye out in 11 months.
And next year might bring a new twist; he’s considering leaving a rake at a site after he’s started a design.
“Then I can come back later to see what became of it,” he says. “So people can either choose to add to it or help maintain it.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
