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.
I know it’s all about the hot cross buns this weekend, but these Semla Easter buns look damn yummy. Semlor are a Swedish-Finnish almond and cream-filled bun traditionally made to mark the Lenten period. If you like cardamom, you’re in luck. Once baked, the cardamom infused buns are stuffed with an almond paste and topped with a dollop of whipped cream and a dusting of icing sugar. I’d take one of these over all the chocolate eggs in the land.
“The bright colours, the exaggerated shapes and the over-sized pieces mock the circus that is our day-to-day,” writes Xanthe Somers in her artist’s bio. There’s an outlandish over-the-topness to her ceramic sculpture that steals the limelight from most else in my Instagram feed. I love how she re-imagines the conventional vase –– some are almost as tall as she is –– and how her lighting is both functional and wildly eccentric. “My use of color, pattern, shape, size and form are all indicative of a search for something slightly different,” she says, “something that asks you to question prevailing ideas about need, function, beauty and aesthetics.”
Artist, Sarah Boyts Yoder has developed a visual vocabulary of shapes and motifs that are the basis of her wildly colourful and expressive paintings. To watch her at work in her Charlottesville studio, mixing paints with well-worn brushes and fingertips and sweeping across her canvases as though she’s a five-year-old at play is such an energizing sight. She describes her work as “thoughtlessly careful, casually precious and carelessly precise,” all of which can only be achieved when one’s grip on the brush isn’t too tight. “I love the idea of letting go of control and in doing so, making room for the unexpected—for surprise.”
It was 1988, and I wore an emerald green satin puff ball skirt and black patent shoes with clip on grosgrain bows. My hair was crimped, as was everybody else’s. I was eleven, and this was my first disco party, in the sitting room of Dominque Westaway’s west London home. Her parents had created a makeshift dance floor complete with strobe lights and a shiny disco ball and the DJ (no doubt, her Dad) played one dance hit after another as we all spun out on sugar and Belinda Carlisle. In between songs, we ate sausage rolls and sipped fizzy drinks like they were cocktails. There were no boys for us to slow dance with, so the DJ kept the tunes light and bouncy with our idol du jour, Kylie Minogue dominating the dance floor. Dominique’s party was the first and last of its kind. This was the moment, just before things got awkward, where we could sing into our juice boxes, dance like no one was watching, and feel free and footloose. After that, boys did enter the mix –– we were at an all-girls school, so it was often an older brother and his mates –– and the dynamic shifted. We traded in our puff balls for tube skirts, straightened our hair and bought wonderbras. Cue Nothing Compares To You and that swallow-me-whole feeling when the boy asked you to dance. It’s all so wonderful and heart-wrenching to look back on. Even more wonderful and heart wrenching is watching your girl preparing for her own first ‘disco’ party next month. Okay, less disco and more Doja Cat, but you know what I mean. Coincidentally, Iole tried on a simple black t-shirt and a silk shift in emerald green at Zara the other day that reminded me of that outfit. What goes around comes around, in fashion, and in life.
I’ve never owned a trench coat, and chances are, I never will. I’m not an insouciant dresser, and I think one has to be to pull of the trench. Enter, Catherine Deneuve. The trench coat earned its name on the battlefields of World War I. Decades later, girls at elite English private schools started nabbing their older brother’s trenches and wearing them out. Today, there’s nary a celebrity who hasn’t attempted to rock the trench, some more successfully than others. Yes, Kate Moss, we’re looking at you. Right here, is the chicest way to wear one, with your no-fuss Asics, and your favourite pair of jeans. The more creases the better. It’s a rain coat, after all.
Quilting –– much like pottery, papier-mâché and printmaking –– is both a humble craft and a fine art. While Kathleen Probst‘s bold colours and minimal patterns grace gallery walls, Brigitte Singh‘s intricate paisleys live in baby cots. Both are skillfully made, and designed with huge imagination, and neither is more than a humble quilt, nor less than a work of art. There are no quilts more beautiful, and more original than the ones created by the residents of Gee’s Bend in Alabama’s Black Belt. Last year, Gee’s Bend artist, Sally Mae Pettway Mixon‘s multi-hued quilt landed on the wall of London’s Royal Academy’s annual Summer Exhibition. “No needlework, flowers, cut paper, shell-work or any such baubles shall be admitted,” read the original requirements of the show back in the 1770s. How far we’ve come, and how long it took.
