Train spotters

Children seem to do the same things the world over.  This could be a scene from "The Railway Children " (by Edith Nesbit) but in fact it's an oil painting by Pavel Gavrilenko, a Belarussian artist. It was painted in 1957, just four years before he died.

This is a post for Postcard Friendship Friday, hosted by Beth at The Best Hearts are Crunchy.

Summer

Sometimes I receive cards that have no particular significance apart from being pleasant to look at. And this is one of them. It's title is "Summer" and that seems fair enough, it does look summery - and today was the warmest day this year here.  Very appropriate.

It was sent from Belarus where it was 19 degrees C (66 F) at the time of sending.

In the Garden

He has such a distinctive style that it almost seems unnecessary to say that this is another card by the artist Leonid Afrenov, "In the Garden". It comes from Belarus, his native country.  He has also lived in Israel, the USA and now his home is Mexico.

It's such a delight to the eye, I have to wonder why mine never looks like this. Well, partly of course because I no longer have a garden.

Christmas postcards and stamps

I bought several sets of these Royal Mail PHQ Christmas postcards a few years ago and now I'm down to one remaining set.  I'll use them up over the nest few weeks but I'll be sorry to see them go.  They show the images for the 1983 Christmas stamps:

12½p Christmas Post (pillar-box),
16p The Three Kings (chimneys )
20½ World at Peace (a dove and a blackbird)
28p Light of Christmas (street lamp)
31p Christmas Dove (topiary)

As I was looking up what the images represented, I discovered that someone is selling them on Zazzle. Surely that's a copyright issue?

That aside, I found plenty of other bird stamps:

Great Egret from Belarus

Long-eared owl on Belgian stamp

From the Netherlands 

Siberian Crane on stamp from Russia

and a cute little owl from Switzerland.

This is a post for Sunday Stamps, now hosted by Violet Sky at "See it on a Postcard!"

Autumn

The beautiful colours of autumn on the card please me so much that I have in fact posted it before (two years ago) but Sunday Stamps gives me the opportunity this time to show the stamp.  I'm showing the se-tenant strip because I think it's both attractive and clever.  All four seasons are shown, trees reflecting on water.  Not only that, the names SUOMI and FINLAND are shown in reflection on the two stamps and so too the denominations.

Other seasonal stamps I've found have been mainly mushrooms.

From Poland, the Mushrooms in Polish forests series, issued in August 2012

From Taiwan, the Wild Mushrooms series, issued in March 2010

One of  a set of 4 values showing Edible mushrooms, issued in September 2013

That made my mouth water so I had mushrooms for lunch, but they weren't wild.

This is a post for Sunday Stamps, now hosted by Violet Sky at "See it on a Postcard!"

Too early for snow

Our summer is ending - you could almost say it ended at the beginning of August this year - but I haven't started to think of winter, or I hadn't until this card arrived.  A taste of things to come.

It is an oil painting, "Snow Cloudlet", by Belarusian artist Anna Silivonchik and sent to me from Russia.

A post for Postcard Friendship Friday hosted by Beth Niquette on her blog, The Best Hearts are Crunchy.

Summer berries

Summer seems to have arrived here, more or less, and at the same time I received a mouth watering postcard from Belarus showing summer fruits.  It is a card issued by BelPost in 2013.

Belarus, map and stamps

I struggled to know what exactly was meant by folk art, where to draw the line between it and "fine" art. Wikipedia defines it as art used to decorate useful objects and the art in itself is not a source of income, though even they say the lines are blurred.

It was on this map card that I first saw one of the Belarusian decorative applied art series of stamps.  In fact, even though the card is cartoon style, it appears that the woman is holding a cloth decorated with embroidery, the skirt and hat too.

The top stamp illustrates satin stitch (and comes from a minisheet, while the second is cross stitch.  There is a third which shows counted satin stitch.

They were produced by the Centre for Belarusian culture, language and literature research.  this is a picture of the three mini-sheets :

From Kiev Philately Club

N is the surface mail rate for postcards going abroad, M is the air-mail rate for a postcard abroad, and H is the surface mail rate for a letter going abroad.

Now that I had the idea of folk art in my mind, I saw several other examples of folk art:

Batik from Indonesia. Batik Basurek is produced in the province of Bengkulu on the island of Sumatra.

A joint issue between Serbia and Algeria showing what I take to be a carpet from Algeria.  The minisheet shows an alternative design for the same postage rate but the stamp is in Cyrillic script.

From Post of Serbia

This is a post for Sunday Stamps, now hosted by Violet Sky at "See it on a Postcard!"

Church of St Anthony of Padua, Pastavy

This building, the Catholic church of St Anthony of Padua in Pastavy, was constructed between 1898 and 1904 on the site of a former Franciscan monastery, founded in 1617.  It was severely damaged during the First World War but reconstructed in the 1920s and renovated again in 1988.  Pastavy is a town in the Vitebsk region of Belarus.

“You meet people who forget you. You forget people you meet. But sometimes you meet those people you can't forget. Those are your friends.” 

Le Petit Prince

"On est un peu seul dans le désert."
"On est seul aussi chez les hommes", dit le serpent.

"It's a little lonely in the desert."
"It's lonely when you're with people, too", replied the snake.

I've heard many times about the story "Le Petit Prince" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry but for some reason never followed up why it seems to be so popular.  Well, now I have and now I know.

It is a short novel written when Saint-Exupéry was exiled in the USA during WWII, telling the story of a pilot stranded in the desert who meets a prince who has fallen to earth from an asteroid and it is full of wonderful observations about life.

It is the most translated and most widely read book in the French language and this card, though coming from Belarus, had the translation in Russian.  I think I prefer the original illustrations, watercolours by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry himself, but I'm a little old fashioned that way.  [And I'm really not keen on that snake at all, but it IS the Year of the Snake I suppose.]  As soon as I've accumulated enough Amazon tokens, I'll buy myself a copy.

A post for Postcard Friendship Friday hosted by Beth Niquette on The Best Hearts are Crunchy.

A rhombicuboctahedron

What is a rhombicuboctahedron?  It's a 24 sided shape just like the National Library of Belarus in Minsk shown here.  It has eight triangular and 18 square sides.  The building consists of 22 storeys covered in glass panels that sparkle in the daylight and light up at night with 4646 LED lights.  The lift you can see at the side of the building takes you up to the observation point on the roof.

Cranberry juice

If I've thought about cranberries and where they come from at all, I would have thought they would grow on bushes like blackcurrants and blueberries and harvested in the same way.  Well, I was wrong.  They grow in wetlands - on bushes, it's true - but to harvest the berries, the fields are flooded, the vines are shaken to release the ripe berries which float and turn the area into a crimson lake.

This card was sent to me from Belarus from where we in the UK import a lot of our cranberries.  Since Delia Smith gave them the seal of approval, demand has soared.

Red deer of Belarus

I'm not sure whether this could be called a stamp card - it was issued by Belpost, the Belarus post office which did issue stamps of the fauna of Belarus.  The red deer stamp, though, is a bit different so maybe the card is intended to be a maxi-card.  The deer, Cervus elaphus to give it its Latin name, is very beautiful anyway.

Minsk Old Town

Troitskoe Predmestye translates as Trinity suburb and is the name given to the "old" town in Minsk.  In fact it's not very old at all but has been built on what was a settlement in the 12th century.  According to the Postcrosser who sent me this card from Belarus, it has no real spirit of antiquity but is a beautiful place for tourists.

Deësis from Belarus

For some reason I always find medieval art and music very attractive and this image, although painted much later, is in that style of traditional iconic art.  An icon in Eastern Christianity is usually a flat panel where the subject is a holy person or persons, or objects.  A Deësis is specifically a figure of Christ with the Virgin Mary and St John the baptist on either side.

This card came to me from Belarus and the image was painted by Vasily Markianovich in 1758, using tempera on board.  Tempera is an egg based paint which doesn't darken or change over the years, unlike oil paintings.

Minsk, Belarus

Nemiga Street or Nyamiha Street (as it says on the card) in Minsk showing the yellow Church of Saint Peter and Paul hemmed in by what at least one person (Bezjak) describes as "monstrosities of postwar modernism".  Actually, I quite like them though it's a shame the church is dwarfed like that.

A child's view

From a competition to illustrate "My country in my drawings" in Belarus, this is the entry from Lukashevich Aliaksandra, aged 5.  You can see the birds, a butterfly, a frog, and a cow with ribbons in its hair.

Belarus in words

I've always been fascinated by word maps of associated words.  Here we have the map of Belarus filled with words associated with the country.  It would be interesting to know how they came up with that particular selection.

Pottery from Belarus

I'm always very fond of pottery but I especially like the piece in the top left corner.  It is a map of Belarus!

Fluffy ducks

Ducklings from Belarus definitely have the "awww" factor.