In the Labyrinth

Beaded Treasures from Great Great Grandmother.

My great great grandmother immigrated as a small child with her family from Sweden to Northern Wisconsin. They lived and farmed for a while in Ojibwa country -- before moving father west to North Dakota. I have the beaded moccasins with a leather sole that she wore as a small child. Such sweet work on these little shoes.

 

 

The Marginalia of Flowers

Always swoon-worthy, are these lovely Medieval flowers appearing in the margins of various Book of Hours, sometimes in medical texts, sometimes in gardening books. I can never get enough of looking at these beautiful images and feeling inspired, mostly to embroider May Morris style textiles. They are helpful when writing historical fiction for they reveal the unique preoccupation with flowers, of which each has a medical and social significance. It is just those small details that provide a certain weight and body to a description of a place, or action taken, or a letter written, or the evolution of a plot based the underlying language of flowers.

Barrio Viejo: The Blue Mural

Tucson's very old inner city neighborhood, The Barrio Viejo, has some of the best murals painted by residents over many years on the exterior of the houses. When my daughter and future husband were in town a number of years back, they took these wonderful photos of one of my favorite houses. I learned recently that new owners of the house built a substantial wall around these murals so they are no longer visible to the public -- and that portions of of it were removed  as the owners renovated and up-scaled the house. I am grateful to have these photos of it in which to remember it. 

 

 

 And here's one of the hidden Christ, who appears at the bottom of an adjoining corrugated wall.

  

The Return: Beautiful New Animation

This is a lovely piece of animation from Russian animator Ekaterinburg Natacha Černyšovo who studied animation in France. It is so charming and delightful. It has been a few years since I first saw this little video, and in between my first posting and now re-posting, I have become a grandmother, which has made this film all the sweeter. 

 

"Forget me not," More Friendship Calling Cards

The pleasure of unpacking in a rented house is deciding once and for all to unpack everything, knowing that in due time, one will be moving again. So there is a desire on my part to organize and winnow everything that has sat in a box somewhere in my old attic for thirty years waiting to be noticed. Well, I am noticing now!

A while back I posted a cache of these lovely "calling cards" which you can view in a gallery located on the right sidebar. They belonged to my great grandmother as mementos of past visitors to her home. In a file folder, I found a handful more -- and these are a bit different. Most of them express a sentiment on the front and then when one lifts the hand or the image, there is a signature underneath on the card stock. They are quite ornate -- and I love the ones with the images of the houses as though seen in a crystal ball. So here are a few more to enjoy.

"Bright as fair flowers, be thy life's fair hours!"

 

 

 

 

 

 

"From A Friend," the Art of the Calling Card

I have been going through a cigar box of collected calling cards from my great grandmother and I am astonished by the variety of pretty designs combined with the elegant scripts. It just seems such a lovely convention and I am rather sorry we don't do it anymore. Now we hand out "business cards" which have every conceivable method of contacting us crammed on the card -- and while it's true the designs can be quiet striking -- their function is so different than these beauties, which was simply to announce or memorialize one's visit. That my great grandmother gathered them together and stored them says something too about her visual delight in keeping them, not just as mementos but small slips of domestic art. I love too that they were used equally by both men and women.

So I thought I would share them with you and have created a little gallery of all the cards which you can find here -- or in the right hand column for future reference. Seeing them all together really makes me want to design a few for myself -- and to hell with the clever, efficient business card!

Here are some of my favorites (though I confess to being besotted by all of them):

 

 

The last calling card is especially unique as it is made from a small rectangle of birch bark inscribed with the visitor's name -- A. G. Robinson.

You can view other terrific collections online, such as the accumulated calling cards of the Washburn Family of Camps Mills, Town of Hounsfield, Jefferson County, New York, or read about the etiquette of using the cards on the Jane Austen website, or rather wistfully have a look at this gorgeous antique silver calling card case.

In the comments below, Mark wondered about the cards also using the language of flowers to send a more subtle message. Yes, of course as it turns out! There are quite few posters which help to reveal some of the more subtle meanings on the card. 

And this one from a paying site --so excuse the watermark -- but the bunches of different flowers seemed to more closely resemble the calling cards. 

 

Fantastic Life in the Maze

The maze of Labirinto in The Innamorati (and reappearing in Zizola's story) is a work of alchemy and fantastic art. It has an organic nature, the twisting pathways lined with walls of densely packed trees. From the outside, it appears solid, immutable. But once inside, it expands and contracts, and once on the path, one is confronted by a constantly shifting architecture. The walls change from yew to cedar, to hedges of roses, or cypress; the path breaks opens unexpectedly to small fields, or rose gardens, or fountains that smell of the ocean. And the path is different for each person who enters the maze. The pilgrim is never sure who he or she will meet in the maze because it is full of creatures, lost souls, and even longer-lost lovers, daemons, talking heads ( I realized just now how many talking heads I had in the novel!), drenched sirens, and automatons: all of it a dream-reflection of the pilgrim's world outside. This is not a solitary journey through the turns, but a lively, populated internal landscape that must be entertained, confronted, and negotiated. Reaching the center matters to the intrepid pilgrim; but reaching the exit alive which often lies elsewhere, matters even more.

Stoat Race, 1951-52

The work above is by the great Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington and is one of my favorites -- when writing The Innamorati, it was this mystical image of a maze teeming with ghostly life that most inspired me as I thought about the maze, the centerpiece and setting of the novel. And working on the sequel, I return to it as a reference. And here is another painting I love because the feminine figures have almost the same silhouette of a Renaissance woman in her headdress, but here they appears as fantastic, slightly amused reflections in a noblewoman's mirror.

 

Detail from "Samain," 1951

 

Ran across this interesting note on "Samain:"

Art critque Teresa Arq says about the work: "In the painting, we see two main figures, one in white and the other in black, separated by a small wall upon which a black and a white bird are perched. They allude to the encounter between life and death or light and darkness. A group of figures in white grip white ropes that are attached to a kind of transparent cocoon, inside of which one can make out a strange figure undergoing a transformation. Repetition is an important element of magic rituals."