Some natural history museums

Smithsonian (take the tour here)

Paris (via)

London (via)

Eton (via)

Oxford (via)

Grant Museum of Zoology, UCL, London

Edinburgh University (via)

Edinburgh (National Museums of Scotland) (via)

Harvard (Cambridge, MA) (via)

Zoological museum of Strasbourg, France (via)

Copenhagen, Denmark (via)

Berlin's museum features a glass gallery of specimens in jars

From Wikipedia: "Renaissance cabinets of curiosities were private collections that typically included exotic specimens of natural history, sometimes faked, along with other types of object. The first natural history museum was possibly was that of Swiss scholar Conrad Gessner, established in Zurich in the mid 16th century. The Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, established in Paris in 1635, was the first natural history museum to take the form that would be recognized as a natural history museum today. Early natural history museums offered limited accessibility, as they were generally private collections or holdings of scientific societies. The Ashmolean Museum, opened in 1683, was the first natural history museum to grant admission to the general public."

Arty books

Shelf candy, very handy -

Nicholas Jones (see more here)

Also I'm liking the black and whiteness of this sewn book -

See more of it at gerdiary.blogspot.com.

" Language transmutes into malleable material subject to construct new meanings outside the pages of a book" -

Mar Arza, Statement series (see more here)

"Connect", fabric tunnel book by Jane Merks (see more tunnel books here, and her fabric book made of found handkerchiefs here) -

Showing off old doilies

Carved books by Kylie Stillman, who also does interesting things inside plastic bottles -

Travel literature?? -

Onisim Colta (via; more here)

That's enough for now - if you want more, have a look here, which is where most of these pix and artists came from.

Sunday pootling

Up with the lark and into the studio! This is the New Year, after all!

It was about 6am and I felt aimless, but it was lovely to sit in the light of the new, bright lamp and "just do something" - a nice long bit of perle cotton came to hand and got stitched into the corner of the notebook page, then I started writing down words from the radio programme that was on - about boredom, very interesting (catch it on BBC iplayer in the next few days). After which I didn't much fancy listening to "On Your Farm" so turned off the radio and did a page of stream-of-(un)consciousness writing. Using different pencils as they came to hand made the writing like having a conversation with myselves  - and then there was a selection of white/grey pastels to try out -

Now, how to obliterate the writing? First, a candle rubbed over some of the words was meant to "preserve" them - but the combination of wax resist and pastel was unsuccessful -

And what next? By then the sky was getting light, and the tree gave me an idea -

Inky branches ...

The bottle of ink that came to hand was "sepia india ink" - grainy and blobby - dropped on with the dropper and smeared a little, and more added...

After covering the ink with pastel (imperfectly, but that's ok), I decided not to take more photos or use more time on this. Start afresh another day.

So good to have quiet hours and a chance to think and/or play: to pootle*, with no particular end in view.

And those stitches - later I placed a thinner piece of paper over them, quickly drew lots of straight lines with an empty ballpoint pen, then coloured it over with 6B graphite -

*Pootle (v.) - to move or travel in a leisurely manner

High horizons

The size for the 2014 journal quilts is 8" square, and they must have a line running through them. As soon as I saw this painting, "Thistles" by John Singer Sargent

I had a theme for my JQs: "high horizons", landscapes with a thin strip of sky at the top, the line being the division of land and sky. 

Further inspiration is Fred Williams' "Blackwood Wattle" (1976) - it's about a metre square -

What a palette! Wattle is the harbinger of spring, season of regeneration.

Another Williams, "Landscape with Water Ponds" - the colours and feel are very different -

This next painting is 8" x 10" so in terms of marks gives a more realistic idea of what might be done in the space available for JQs -

Suzie Baker, Field by the Fairy Ring

This large painting showed on the screen as a thumbnail with a high horizon, and the image could be cropped to replicate that. The colour idea is useful - using grey to represent a line of trees in the fog -

Field of Red by Simon Fairless

Klimt's "Farmhouse with Birch Trees" doesn't have a horizon as such, but a line showing the field's edge (and another, vertical, line also running from edge to edge) -

Looking up from keyboard and screen, I see this small landscape by Jean Davey Winter, displaced from the wall to the bookshelf - another high horizon, and perhaps the subconscious origin of the idea -

Urban pigeons (of the textile variety)

First, the photo that started this train of thought - a City Pigeon by Karen Suzuki, seen at an art fair a year or two back. Her company, making one-offs and limited edition textile animals, is called Nameless Wonders -

Make your own London pigeon! This was a workshop held in the autumn - read about it here -

Along the same lines - though in a different way - this pigeon (by Chloe) is stitched too ... and it's a wood pigeon, which are often found in London gardens -

Handpainted and stitched, this wood pigeon by Emily Sutton is 31 cm long -

Not to forget the birds by Abigail Brown - this might be Temminck's fruit pigeon, which lives not in cities but on tropical mountain tops -

Moving into 2D, yet another wood pigeon (by Sami Teasdale) -

Next, a carrier pigeon designed by Ayame Kikuchi - and yes, it's a greetings card; it comes with a paper cage (see it here) -

Amanda Wright's stitched birds are on display at Goat Street Gallery in Fishguard; this pigeon (pic is from the gallery's website) is therefore not a London pigeon but something less harried, less care-worn, less alienated by city life -

To end, a link to a pinterest board - Fabric Art Birds - and another of (many!) photos of colourful birds, no dull urban pigeons among them though. (And if it's ceramic pigeons you're after, that's a different kettle of fish ... start here perhaps.)

Organising ephemera - some questions

Gerhard Richter assembled everything "that somehow seemed important to me and is a pity to throw away" - look how nicely the 802 sheets are organised! Dieter Roth did something similar, archiving all the scraps of rubbish less than 5mm thick, placing them in transparent folders in the binders. Fortunately he did this for only a year (1975-6), but even so this collection filled 623 ring binders, kept in travelling/storage cases -

Chronological order (via)

My thoughts, while sorting through my own collection of "things that somehow seem important to me", are about the usefulness of making such an archive - does the artist refer to it again? (Do people actually refer to their vast collections amassed on pinterest etc? I've been scrolling through a few of those lately...) How is something found if it's not catalogued or indexed in some way? Is the task to find something specific, or just to plunge in and see what chance might turn up? Is that a waste of time? Is there enough time available to start new projects generated at random in this way? What happens in such a rummaging - probably the items/images that catch your interest are things related to what runs deep for you ... and indeed you are looking through your own collection, which you've already chosen with that in mind.

What about the issue of preserving things "that it would be a pity to throw away" - is it better to move on to fresh things? Is having too many images/items actually a barrier to creativity/productivity? Can plenitude coexist with focus? What makes for a rich life? (oops I'm digressing)

Is it necessary, in the 21st century, to preserve newspaper cuttings, interesting packaging, snippets of quotes written on the back of envelopes? Will you or I "do a Richter" and organise and display our pitiful items beautifully ... and would anyone be interested? Is this self-indulgence, or is it art? In looking at one person's collection, does another ruminate on the ephemerality of life, or compare the items to those in their own collection?

Roth also reused his appointment diaries as sketchbooks

and for me this comes closer to a useful project, a way of retaining personally-important ephemera, of keeping hold of memory and even drawing the past into the present. Thinking about the irreducible minimum in my studio, I'd certainly want to keep all my sketchbooks - not just as a summary of my creative history but as a place where I'll find what continues to interest me, the strands that I'd like to develop in some way, indeed that have been developing since they first appeared on paper via my eye, brain, hand, heart. Though it's a comfort knowing they are there - when was the last time I looked at any of them? Is the act of recording "simply" a means of paying attention?

We're so lucky that so many images and ideas are easily accessible through the internet at the moment. There doesn't seem to be a need to keep anything other than our computers and other creative tools - no need for books, for collections of magazine articles or newspaper cuttings. No need to organise and store those collections.

Or is there?

------(addendum)
In "Collections of Nothing", William Davies King talks about his collection of labels:
"One day I started to save the labels of all the food products I consumed—cereal, soup, candy, beer. I did not keep the cans or jars, only the paper or cellophane or plastic labels. Boxes and cartons I cut or dismantled. Everything had to lie flat, like a leaf in a book. ... Initially I kept the labels in my file cabinet, but soon began to punch holes and place the leaves in a binder. That way I was creating a “book,” and eventually I would have a lot of these books."

Books of the 12th century renaissance

With no word breaks, and abbreviations, reading was a special skill
(Inscription on Trajan's Column - much the same format in early manuscripts)

once upon a time all books were manuscripts and consisted of continuous text without punctuation and sometimes without the benefit of new paragraphs anyone reading would have to guess or know where and when a new sentence started and without commas if you were reading aloud as most reading was we are told there would be no signal for a chance to draw breath but they got round this by other people than the scribe in other words the readers putting in points as signals

Then along came the twelfth century renaissance and things got a lot better on the reading front:

" Almost a thousand years ago, in the age of renewal known as the “Twelfth-Century Renaissance,” when books were still written by hand, a new communications technology appeared: a new book format, custom-tailored for the age. 

"This new format included new types of script, new page layouts and new reading aids, most notably pagination, running titles, paragraphs, quotation marks, footnotes, cross references and diagrams. The technological innovations improved what is called “book fluency,” or the ability to read a text quickly and accurately. 

"While in the late eleventh century intellectual culture nearly completely lacked tools that could rise to these occasions, by the outset of the thirteenth century scholars had a rich palette of aids at their disposal that facilitated comprehension and speedy access. 

"The inventions dramatically changed the reading experience of medieval individuals. It helped to create a new international community of scholars, bound by a shared desire for knowledge. And it proved remarkably durable: it is essentially the book we are holding today."

Those words are from the VIDI project, which is concerned how technological innovations in the manuscript relate to cultural change. [I've broken up its text into paragraphs, because a necessity for easy reading on screen is to have short paragraphs, even just one sentence with white space top and bottom to help readers keep their place and absorb the information.]

I stumbled on the 12th century renaissance only yesterday and am finding out more via sites like this one -

which, as you can see from the screen shot, is laid out with lots of white space to help today's reader (though those long lines across the screen aren't too helpful ...) but that is 21st century technology; let's get back to the 12th century.

It was at this time that the first universities were founded (Bologna, Paris, Oxford, Modena) - based on people who got together to read books, outside cathedral or monastery schools, becoming an international community of scholars.  Courses were based around books, not subject or theme - eg Aristotle or a book of the Bible - and students would read it together. [Were they likely to have owned a copy (no!), or to write their own notes? Paper started to spread to Europe, replacing animal skins, around this time and was neither common or cheap, so could the students have afforded the writing materials? Nowadays we can't imagine studying or learning without having our own books on hand or plenty of paper to write with, or print out onto.] The universities taught the seven liberal arts and Aristotelian philosophy, and students could go on to further study in law, medicine, and theology (of which theology was the most prestigious).

Other developments in the twelfth century were in literature (the romance form; wandering scholars), philosophy (scholasticism), and architecture (gothic, with its pointed arch and flying buttresses) - as well as in government bureaucracy, and the recovery of the corpus of Roman law. This renaissance paved the way for the Italian Renaissance of the 15th century, during which time the book (the codex) underwent a major change, with the advent of printing - change not so much in its format, but in it availability.

written about 1145 (via)

"By the twelfth century, most medieval scribes relied heavily on the use of abbreviations to limit the amount of space each word needed to take up on the page. Parchment was expensive and the more words crammed onto a single folio could mean a great deal of savings in production costs. Most words, therefore, only consist of a few key letters and an abbreviation mark of some kind, perhaps a small hovering circle, or a swirl at the end of the word:

 

 “Et qd his mai est” (The full version: Et quod his maius est)." (via)

Eventually we get to late-medieval manuscripts that used the new reading aids mentioned above, not just in the text (especially punctuation, which was known until the 16th century as "pointing"), but especially the features that would help readers find their way around the volume - features that arguably became more important in the printed book.

Poetry Thursday - Love Calls us to the Things of this World by Richard Wilbur

Angels in bed-sheets and blouses?
detail from "Deep Canyon" by Millard Sheets (painted 1933-4) (via)

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,
And cries,
“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,
“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.”

--Richard Wilbur

(from here, where you can read more poems by Richard Wilbur)


In this video, Wilbur says the title is derived to some extent from St Augustine, then goes on to read the poem. Later he says, "One thing I like about that poem is that I managed to use the word 'hunks' in it" - a word out of keeping with the rest of the language in the poem "but that's precisely why I'm glad that it's there and that I've gotten away with it." It seems that the poem was written in Rome, inspired by a line of laundry hanging outside his window.

Wilbur, born in 1921, was appointed the second poet laureate of the United States in 1987. Though he had been publishing poetry since the age of 8, it was his experience as a soldier in WW2 that drove him "to versify in earnest" - his first collection, in 1947, is shaped by an emphasis on order and organisation. In addition to winning lots of poetry prizes, Wilbur has translated plays from French and written prose and for children.

A midwinter tonic

The perfect midwinter tonic, for me, is to start an exciting course - maybe something arty, maybe something else...

Currently I also need "something" that will structure my week ... and get me out of the house regularly.

So I've been looking through the City Lit's 292-page catalogue of courses for one (or two?) starting soon. Maybe in the Visual Art department ... maybe in Creative Writing ... or even (gasp) Drama, Dance, and Speech ...

Some of the courses I was vaguely interested in were already full (you can check on the website), but there's still plenty to choose from.

My shortlist includes Drawing with colour, Painting and the imagination, Starting portraits [challenging!], Textiles into ceramics, Woodblock printmaking, Creative non-fiction, Persuasive speaking [scary!], and Three classic novels (Gulliver's Travels, Wuthering Heights, The Waves). What to choose, what to choose... 

And there's more - short courses at University of the Arts London (UAL) - these are a bit more pricey than at City Lit. Interestingly, among them are online courses that are live sessions, accessed on the internet at a particular time.

The courses are listed by starting date, which is really useful. (But I do like having a "real" catalogue - for turning down corners to mark the page, and making notes in.)

Yet more choices ... where to go, what to choose?

Warming wishes for the new year

The end of 2013 saw a flurry of soupy activity in the kitchen and some tasty results - so here is the method, in hopes it will inspire you … but no doubt many readers do exactly this already!

May you enjoy it in good company...

Wordless Wednesday