Another Foster building in the capital is the Nazarbayev Centre, which resembles a vast eye looking up at the sky.
And if some kindly old ladies should totter through, clanking against their walker frames, the vast eye above them will taste their frailty in the air, narrow its gaze in their direction, and start furiously flashing large-print advertisements for life insurance, bath lifts, Dignitas.
And if some kindly old dears should totter through, clanking against their Zimmer frames, the vast eye above them will taste their frailty in the air, narrow its gaze in their direction and start furiously flashing large-print advertisements for life insurance, bath lifts, Dignitas.
This is partly because she is so flawless, she seems almost enamelled – the dazzle of the mother-of-pearl teeth when she smiles, the click of manicured nails on the table to emphasise a point – and partly because when she widens those vast eyes, they sparkle with Joan Crawford's diamond glint, rather than beseeching with Cheryl Cole's chocolate-button liquidity.
Now the cloud we track across our television screens as a harbinger of all those things is touched with the ancient and divine: a vast, swirling eye.
'Baby,' he would say softly and glare back with vast glowering eyes, 'yes, baby.
Today, surviving versions of this face, with its vast almond eyes, make you think of an alien - a bug-eyed, sexy alien.
Vast pop-eyes set in a shrivelled-pumpkin head on an extendible neck, with vocal cords of purest sandpaper-and-tin-tacks, he is the antithesis of the foetus-like aliens from Close Encounters.
For all the surface brio of illustrations that are crammed full of everything from photographs to fabric scraps, in person, Child remains as tentative as her books are bold, as hesitant of her success as her characters, with their crimped mouths and vast, wary eyes, appear to be of their exuberant environments.
White walls, highlighted with lemon-yellow, papaya-orange and sky-blue highlights, are nearly obscured by a vast array of eye candy: folkloric figurines in straw, ceramic and plastic; sombreros in sundry sizes and styles; pressed-tin cacti; paper flowers; various types of bottles; vintage and stylized photos and art pictures.
In an era when so many books and films seem concerned with the self and the now, John Keene's recent story collection, Counternarratives, opens a vast and vital eye toward the past, while charting inspired new imagined territories.
