Mrs. Mary Delany

Art historians annoy me. Nothing personal if you happen to be one, mind you. It's just that I get ticked off whenever I read an official art history version of how collage came to be. The Cubists, we are told, invented collage. When Picasso and Braque decided to paste some scraps to their paintings, this became a brilliant revelation that changed the course of modern art. Bleh. People had been doing things, some of it quite interesting, with cut paper for centuries before the Cubists. But generally these people were women or peasants or their day jobs didn't involve working in a traditionally accepted fine art medium such as oil paint, so they don't count.

The Georgian aristocrat Mrs. Mary Delany (1700-1788) was one of those interesting characters in collage history. I wrote about her on my website:

Beginning at age 72 and continuing for ten years until her eyesight began to fail, she created almost 1,000 botanical illustrations from cut paper. Her pictures were made with incredibly intricate detail. She would cut out with exact precision each tiny detail of a plant—individual stamens, bits of pollen, cactus spines... She called her works “Paper Mosaicks.”

One of the great joys of my life was getting to study a majority of these in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. They have now scanned the entire collection of nearly 1,000 of these works and made it available online.

And while I was browsing on the web, I discovered that the Yale Center for British Art is currently having a show that seems to cover similar material to the radio program. It even got a mention on a NY Times blog, and a nice review of it was in the Hartford Courant [update--since deleted]. It ends by saying "...Delany, in her quiet way, continues to influence artists hundreds of years later." She certainly has influenced me.

Going Viral

Ok...this isn't paper-based art, but Luke Jerram's glass sculptures of viruses are fascinating. And he does touch on an interesting question in regards to traditional biomedical illustration. According to the website:  

These transparent glass sculptures were created to contemplate the global impact of each disease and to consider how the artificial colouring of scientific imagery affects our understanding of phenomena. Jerram is exploring the tension between the artworks' beauty and what they represent, their impact on humanity.

The question of pseudo-colouring in biomedicine and its use for science communicative purposes, is a vast and complex subject. If some images are coloured for scientific purposes, and others altered simply for aesthetic reasons, how can a viewer tell the difference? How many people believe viruses are brightly coloured?

Joan Gold's New Blog

My painter friend Joan just launched her first blog. Joan is a master colorist. Color and composition are what her works are all about—pure, joyful color. Imagine being in a room surrounded by big paintings that look like these, and tell me it wouldn't afterward make you want to race straight to your own studio (or other preferred art-making space). It's like listening to music that compels you to dance. Even though my own work is so completely different, and even in different media, I find Joan's studio and her shows quite inspiring. They connect to that primal part of my brain that lusts for texture, color and the smell of paint.

Bookmarks VII Update

A while ago I mentioned that I was taking part in Bookmarks VII, the latest installment of an international book arts project organized through the Centre for Fine Print Research at the University of the West of England in Bristol. Book artists from around the world contribute an edition of 100 bookmarks for free distribution to chosen venues such as bookstores, libraries, galleries and schools in different countries.  

The idea is to introduce more people to book art, while allowing the artists to get their work out to a broad array of the public. Each artist also gets to keep a collated set of everyone's bookmarks. This was the third time I've taken part. I must say, it's exciting to get that bundle in the mail, filled with little works of art. My edition of 4 designs is described on their website as well as in my earlier post.

This year has another local twist. Eureka Books, which also just hosted the North Redwoods Book Arts Guild exhibition I'd been making stuff for, is, for the first time, one of the worldwide distribution points (one of only 3 in the US). It's wonderful to see book art, and book artists, getting all this attention in our little remote corner of the world.

Brimstone and Dreamweaver

I have been trying to update my website for roughly the past five years. I originally was going to hire someone to do it. I knew nothing about making a website. After hiring and firing two "designers," a friend who was in a web design program at the local junior college offered to do it. This seemed perfect... until she took my first $100 payment, skipped town and wouldn't reply to any of my messages. This was a couple of years ago. I still haven't heard from her.

Then I decided I was going to have to do it myself. There's been a running joke around our house these past few months. "Do you hear something? Is the house possessed? That wailing and moaning... The agonized cries of tormented, damned souls are filtering up from hell!....No? Wait.... oh, it's just Ellen working on Dreamweaver."

At last, the big event happened this week. I hit "put" and it went live. I finally have a website again. I feel like the tortoise that just crossed the finish line. Or a damned soul who just got a pardon.

The site is Zebra Crossing Picture Factory, or zebracrossing.org