In Pieces But Still Holding It Together sounds like an apt description of most people I know. In fact, the longer I’m here, the more I realize that we’re all a bit shredded up inside. What I love about Bouke de Vries‘ ceramic sculptures is how all the shattered pieces find a home within one beautiful, translucent vessel. Because that’s what we all are, walking vessels, custodians of all our little pieces.
It’s a beautiful idea to take relics from different cultures and time periods and re-imagine them as contemporary sculptures. French artist, Nicolas Lefebvre does exactly this. A background in antiques informs his work. As does his extensive travel. Imagine an antique Amazonian headdress and Nigerian coins, or a Khmer mirror and a Berber tent peg. Each one of his “objets montés” are a delicate balance of colour, texture and scale. As is often the case with collections such as these, choosing just one is impossible. I want them all.
“The things I did were the things I wanted to do…. so little by little, it became what it is,” says the German-born artist and landscape designer, Robert Jakob of his garden in Springs, NY. Irises, foxgloves, peonies, roses, geraniums, forget-me-nots and lavender all grow in his garden and inspire his paintings. There’s a sense of urgency to his flowers; immediate, fleeting, intense. “One tends to want to be in control, if you make a painting or a drawing,” he says. “Yet things happen that you don’t plan for—they just sneak in. But you can erase them, fix them, paint over them. In nature it’s different, because things never stand still and you can’t do anything about them.”
“It’s cool to see an old lady on the front cover of Vogue,” says my teenage daughter on seeing Isabella Rossellini on the cover of this month’s Italian Vogue. We’re standing in line at the supermarket with a week’s worth of food in our trolley. “71 isn’t old,” I shoot back, tossing a parsnip on the conveyor belt. But I know what she means. And I couldn’t agree more. I had zero interest in the hoopla around The Supers’ September Vogue cover. As the New York Times writer, Vanessa Friedman put it, “Do Supermodels age, or just get airbrushed?“ This cover though, this cover is beautiful and majestic and real. “I find it very reductive to appear younger than my age and in any case it’s a losing battle,” says Rossellini. “I asked Vogue Italia not to retouch the photos and leave me with my wrinkles. Francesca Ragazzi, who directs the magazine, accepted: the new generations are looking for more modern and intelligent definitions of beauty.’ I hope so.
Heyja Do. Holy moly. A truly talented ceramicist can take a lump of clay and turn it into something beautiful, refined and unique while still preserving the rawness of its original mud-like state. That’s the magic. That’s Heyja Do. Honey Vase, case in point. Alabaster Object VII, ditto. Canto II reminds me of a piece of limestone that holds down the table cloth in my studio. There isn’t a collection of hers that I’m not drawn to and that I’m not Inspired by. If I were to pick a favourite I might say, Reed II; the fragile, rough edged wing is so moving.
My daughter, Luma is an avid beader. This aerial view of Labbezanga, a small riverport village in Mali, photographed by Georg Gerster in the early 1970s reminded me of our kitchen table when Luma’s at work. One of the magical things about aerial photography is the multitude of textures, patterns and visual references that reveal themselves when we shift our perspective. We see a whole new world. “I see my best aerial photographs as a kick-start for flights of thought. The aerial picture is a tool of reflection. From high up, one sees not only what is, but just as well what could be – the inventory of our possibilities.”
It’s at this time of the year that my camera roll is chock full of flowers. The peonies on Brunswick, the poppies on Howland, Irises, lilacs, and wisteria. Some flowers are easier to photograph than others. The translucent quality of a poppy’s petals is hard to capture when too much sunlight is pouring through it. All the beautiful detail gets erased by the sun. Irving Penn shot his fragile and exquisite poppy portraits in the natural light of his studio. No photograph of a poppy comes close to his. This painting by Brooklyn-based painter, Shara Hughes captures the wildness and the whimsy of poppies packed together with the early morning light dancing all around in a way that I couldn’t with my camera when I saw a similar scene last week. I was happy to have found this painting, to know it exists, and to know that I can look at it and trace my way back to that morning.
David Neale’s Colour Fold series of painted metal on canvas remind me of mountainscapes, icebergs and handfulls of sea glass. They’re simple, crudely made, and so very lovely. I love his chalky colour combinations and the texture in the metal. There’s a feeling of rough cut gemstones to the work, which given Neale’s life long commitment to goldsmithery and jewellery design makes sense. It’s always so interesting to see how an artist manifests from one medium to another and these artworks are similar to his jewellery in that they have a warm, organic and tactile feel, but the overall impression is decidedly different. How exciting.
For several years my family has travelled to a small island on the Gulf Coast side of Florida for beach walks and grouper sandwiches. The sand there feels like pastry flour and is laced with a million shells from cockles and lightening whelks to rough scallops and calico clams. If you’re really lucky, you may even find a sand dollar or a dried-up starfish. Shelling takes time and patience. My largest shells are from Irene’s house. All the best shells wash up on her little beach. Irene and my Mum have been fiends since childhood and no visit to Anna Maria is complete without a drive over the bridge to her weathered clapboard on Longboat Key. Most of the shells have some imperfection –– a small crack, a chip or some discolouration –– but they’re still so beautiful. This time, I found two large Southern Quahogs, chalky white with rough lines on the outside, and a fighting conch (the ones with the jagged spires at the top). I also brought home a bag of broken seashells; teeny, tiny fragments that I’ll piece together to make something whole. Eventually, I hope to take shells collected over many years and mount them on some lovely fabric, but in the meantime, they live in pockets and drawers and inside my shoes.
The first pair of designer shoes I ever bought were cream with red piping and a kitten heel so small that they were almost flats. I think I was just as excited about the felt shoe bag as I was the shoes. Marc Jacobs. I wore them everywhere, and with everything. Skinny jeans, check. Tea dresses, check. To the cinema, out to dinner, in the grass. I have no idea where they are now. Did I give them away? Throw them away? Are they in my mother-in-law’s North York basement with all the other sartorial relics? What I loved most about the shoe is that it exposed the perfect amount of toe cleavage, not too much, not too little, and that the leather softened with every party and every mad dash for the 22 bus. The 22 bus that took me straight home. These pink leather beauties (with a point like my MJ’s ) are from the 1800s. Fashion is cyclical. So is life.
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