I hadn’t been paying much attention to the absence of the sun until this morning. Scrolling down Twitter I was stopped at some bright stained-glass sunflowers and the question “who needs a little sunshine today?”
Then I noticed my Twitter buddy Lewis tweet:
And I began to think : Start looking for your sun images. It is the time.
In the 60s and 70s sun images were popular, at least with me. My oldest sun is a tiny gift card bought in New York in 1968. Very designery at that moment.
During the Christmas holidays in 1971 I traveled around Spain alone (I was going to museum school in England). I was feeling particularly sorry for myself but brightened when I found this sun tile (and some swell boots of Spanish leather).
Knowing my sun thing, Sheila brought this smiling tile back to me from Mexico, also in the 70s.
In an early wave of interest in rubber stamps I got this useful sun. Now that we don’t use paper I forget about stamping.
This apple barrel label has the right message. Imagine barrels arriving in Britain in the 1920s. All they would know about Kentville is sunshine and tasty Cox’s orange pippins.
A Nova Scotian masterpiece of late 18th century art is this gravestone panel of Adam and Eve and the helpful serpent. The sun and moon flank the leafy apple tree.
This panel was in the pavement of the parking lot next to St Mary’s Basilica until it was carefully removed in the late 70s by St Mary’s University archaeology students and given to the Nova Scotia Museum. Weather, feet and car tires had removed some of the nuance.
In the early 70s my friends and I were very enamored with a little book called “The English Sunrise.” It was 75 pages of photos of objects and architecture decorated with sunrises or sunrise-like designs. For the last 40 years I’ve been cued to acknowledge the sunrises that surround us, like this old sprinkler alarm in downtown Halifax. . .
or a church window in Wolfville. . ..
or the Masonic Hall in Caledonia. It’s a good exercise, but be warned, it will last you a lifetime.
And to end , of course, a sunset. This beautiful sad-eyed sun is on a Yarmouth County gravestone.
Post Script
I’m not sure if that’s the sun or another celestial body on the Space Dust package. We were amused by the image and name in the 70s and when you put the “dust’ on your tongue there were a thousand tiny lemon explosions in your mouth! It was the 70s.
