In the spirit of Spring, I close the week with this beautiful illustration by Scottish artist, Jessie Marion King. King was a member of the Glasgow Girls and created illustrations in the Art Nouveau style that celebrated whimsy and fantasy. The drawing below is from Oscar Wilde’s House of Pomegranates. Between the lilac swallows, inky blue butterflies and those flowers that look like fried eggs, it’s hard not to fall in love with its charms.
I’ve worn acid wash jeans exactly twice in my life, once when I arrived at Kingsley Pines summer camp in Maine, and the other to a Madonna concert in Toronto in 2003. It’s not a good look, even in the hands of my favourite contemporary designers. I lost so much weight at camp –– a combination of home-sickness and non-stop outdoorsiness –– that my jeans practically fell down when my Mum came to collect me three weeks later. I didn’t own another pair until 15-years on, when my friend, Antonella and I rifled through racks of jeans at a local Value Village looking for the perfect pair to channel Madonna in. Our black suede pumps, white lace gloves and rhinestoned chandeliers completed the look, and off we went to true blue the night away. Acid wash jeans date back to 1960s California surf culture, when ocean sprayed surfers got fed up of fading their jeans in the sun and resorted to chlorine bleach instead. Then came the gaudy 80s, and between the neon and the shoulder pads and the animal print, acid wash jeans with a paper bag waist fit right in. They have no place in 2022 unless bleach falls on your favourite jeans while you’re doing the laundry.
I read yesterday with my daughter that there are 950 species of sea urchins, and that puffer fish make huge, beautiful nests in the sand that look like mandalas, and that certain bees build cacoons out of petals and mud prettier than any springtime bouquet. Nature is flipping amazing. Each one of these seeds has a slightly different form and pattern. Purple, acid yellow and milky white. I can’t imagine how many seed species there are on earth, and like the urchins, how much variety exists in each one’s appearance, both subtle and dramatic. It blows my mind. Nature truly is the greatest artist –– resourceful, innovative, disciplined and fiercely imaginative. No wonder we all look to her for inspiration.
At first glance, Keisuke Yamamoto’s lithographs look like photographs. They’re that detailed. His hand-drawn stone lithographs of quiet, empty rooms demand you spend time with them, in them, in fact. “There are no re-dos with lithograph. It requires a great deal of systematic planning in the carving process. That’s why lithograph is fun,” says Yamamoto. Exquisitely crafted, with a beautifully meditative quality, the work reminds us to pause and reflect.
Key West Pottery is just what the world needs with bright, zingy colours and classical forms avec un twist. There are so many pieces on my wish list, starting with this polka dot floor vase. I’ll take a mango bowl, and this fabulous cobalt blue crocodile vase. There’s just so much joy and humour in each piece.
I remember standing at The Orangerie in Paris as a teenager enveloped in Monet’s waterlilies. “These landscapes of water and reflection have become an obsession for me,” he wrote to a friend in 1909. “It is beyond my strength as an old man, and yet I want to render what I feel.” The waterlilies dominated the last 30-years of the artist’s life, each painting capturing the passing of time from sunrise to sunset. The Orangerie (built originally to store the citrus trees of the Tuileries Garden from the cold in the winter) is the perfect place to house them. I often wonder what it would feel like to re-live its curved walls bathed in lilies through an adult’s eyes, like re-reading Lord of the Flies or Animal Farm three decades later. The subject remains the same, but the way we see and feel it changes.
“Paper is a magical material for the endless possibilities it offers; it can be modeled, folded, rolled up, curled up, painted and each technique creates completely different effects,” says Alessandra Fabre Repetto, whose delicate paper flowers caught my eye this morning. The Italian artist fashions everything from necklaces and boutonnieres to papier–mâché vessels and wreaths, all in a vibrant palette pinks, blues, and greens. I love the shape of these flowers, maybe because they remind me of ceramic cups and saucers balancing on elegant, spindly stems.
Sometime between the age of 39 and 42 the fine lines around my eyes morphed into crevices like the ones in dry mud. I’d like to attribute them to a life richly lived, but they’re more plausibly remnants of smoking, sun and stress. Does anyone remember that late 90s Baz Luhrmann song featuring a graduation-style speech over an uplifting backing track? “Wear sunscreen,” crooned the man in the voice-over. Well, I didn’t listen. Instead, I lathered myself in olive oil and fried on the decks of kaiki boats like a sardine on a blazing hot pan. I had a good time though, as I did smoking skinny Vogues in the back alleys of South Kensington. Genes play a huge part, too and deep set eyes run in my family. C’est la vie. I haven’t smoked in years, and these days, I wear sunscreen 365 days of the year. I can’t cut out stress, but I don’t know that a life can be richly lived without it. Same applies for mistakes. Regret, too. I hate the lines around my eyes, and while I haven’t ruled out Botox and fillers, for now, I’m working on acceptance. I’m told it has lasting effects.
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