Ok, ok…I won’t go on and on about how busy I am, but I will show you what we’ve been busy doing. Please note the pronoun toward the end of that last sentence.
Though I tried to hide it discreetly in the middle of the kitchen, Matt has found the hulking block of cast iron and has made his mind up: he’s going to print, too! The only problem with this is that now we’re going to have to have schedules for our activity stations. Sometimes you get the computer and sometimes you get the press. It’s kind of like indoor recess in elementary school…sometimes you get Connect Four, other times it’s Hungry, Hungry Hippos…both great, but you can’t play them at the same time.
Feeding paper & getting it set just right!, How cute is he?!?, Isn’t that my table?
Somehow, we’ll figure out how to get along!
Today was an inky day, to say the least. I ran tests of several new floral plates I had made in a light green, sage-y color I mixed up, and then ended up doing a slew of new business cards for myself with bright green text set against those pale floral backgrounds. Needless to say, the cobbler’s children finally have shoes…and they’re awfully stylish!
Backgrounds & the cards! (And the album in green & gold is up on Etsy, too!)
After a day spent printing images of flowers I had drawn, I couldn’t help but be hooked by the chapter regarding women painters and natural history in the 17th & 18th centuries in the gorgeous botanical art history book Matt so sweetly gave me for my birthday. This is just one passage, among many that made me consider and reconsider parallels to modern work and the cycle of life and inspiration we all go through, collectively and as individuals:
“The prevailing conviction, therefore, was that embroidery, the sermo humilis (humble language) of flowers, insects and birds; the still life; and in certain cases domestic scenes and portraits were peculiarly adapted to women artists. Techniques requiring the precise application of colors or a delicate touch, such as the painting of miniatures and works in gouache or watercolor, were considered appropriate to the feminine hand, just as the painting of frescoes and large-scale canvases in oils, not to mention sculpting in stone–which demanded physical strength and, above all, were sustained by the power of genio–were regarded as the domain of men. It is certainly not fortuitous that most historical sources describe those virtuose donne (talented women) who dedicated themselves to the arts as miniatrici (miniaturists) or intagliatrici (engravers) rather than as genuine pittrici (painters), thus underlining the distinction between the higher and lower forms of artistic endeavor.”
- from Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi’s ” ‘La femminil pazienza’: Women Painters and Natural History in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries” in The Art of Natural History: Illustrated Treatises and Botanical Paintings, 1400-1850
It’s nothing new to note that so much of what we do and who we are is guided & preceded by those who have done our work before us. With that particular passage, I’m left pondering the tendencies of women artists of the late 17th and early 18th centuries to depict “flowers, insects and birds”. Surely the imagery and its modern day ancestors have some deep parallel to our own time (when the motifs of “flowers, insects and birds” are, well, everywhere). What I can’t tell is whether it all represents some sort of advanced gender gap (why are we drawn to these images?) or a desire to return to the scientifically curious and precise (when so much of what we do on a daily basis is so far removed from its origins), or just a little of it all, mixed with an aesthetic with which we connect on a fairly basic level.
My mom reminded me that when you make every process as personal as possible, you’ll always find something meaningful in your hands when you’re done. I think those are wise words to follow. In an effort to do just that, it’s necessary to challenge yourself a little more than usual. In my own challenges, I come back to the same questions: Which images are meaningful? Why abstraction here, realism there? What moments and artifacts inspire us to create the things we do, to remember life the way we do, to create the things that mean the most to us?
