Look at these!
Gorgeous paper quilts from Anna Velez.
I love paper!
Ooooh! This is a happymaker! It makes me want to BE paper, just so I could be that beautiful and that colorful.
Go click around and make yerself happy.
Pappy.
I love paper!
Haven’t posted Artist Trading Cards in way too long. Here are a few that have caught my eye lately. The fourth one down is my favorite:
cutesy and whimsy
I love it when someone can give whimsy a physical shape and feel. It’s literally one of my favorite things. I love whimsy; I despise cutesy. There’s a difference between the two that I imagine is entirely subjective. I mean, what may be whimsy to one may be cutesy to another and vice versa. But for me, cutesy is self-conscious. Cutesy is trying SO hard to be cute that it sails completely past cute and splats dead all over cutesy and nausea and even horror. For me, cutesy is born when cute is the only goal, not creation, not self-expression, but rather the push of some sick inner mantra blaring “I will make something cuuuute!!” No, Peaches, no, you won’t. Because you won’t be creating from your SELF, you will be creating from your sense of what everyone else thinks is cute. You’ll be creating from inside that little prison of expectations where it’s dull and grey and stifling. The end result will have no choice but to be gross and eminently hateable. It’s vague — maybe I’m being vague — because I’m trying to think this out as I write.
I just hate the craftsy group-think of what’s cuuuute or adorable. I hate the whole “kit” mentality. The whole country-craftsy, let’s-draw-stuff-with-puff-pens mindset. It gives rise to woodworked bunnies with googly eyes and quilted tea cozies in the shape of roosters and isn’t that oh-so-CLEVER?? No. No, it’s NOT! Dammit all, anyway! And if someone is telling you it’s good, she’s either lying through her crafty teeth or she’s your blind lonely gammie who — frankly — is probably lying too, because maybe she’s blind, but she ain’t stupid, and what the hell is this quilted rooster-shaped monstrosity you just plopped in her blind wrinkled lap? SHEESH!
Okay. I’ve gotten myself all worked up.
Here. Pictures will tell the misguided tale of cutesy so much better:
The blue one in the middle with the cloudy bulging cataract eyes. I’m shuddering with horror. And what’s with the one on the right? Is it some kind of Breast Cancer Awareness rodent? Ugh. Shiver.
Ah, acid trips.
Lord. Let’s not forget the flavor that OAK adds to the appalling goulash of cutesy:
The oak is a hardy, beautiful tree. Look:
It deserves so much better than to die an ignominious death pasted over with faux brass numbers and a mincing little piggy going to market. Better to take your oak and give it to the bums in the alley to burn in their trash cans than insist it hang on your kitchen wall in perpetual porcine humiliation. Oak crap is all over my parents’ house and whenever I’m there, it cries out to me in a righteous, pleading rage: “Burn me! Burn me!! Burrrrnnn meeeeeeeeeeeee!!” Someday I will.
I don’t get it. Cook something wretched for your family and they probably won’t eat too much of it. Leftovers — and there’ll be lots of ’em — will languish in the fridge. And that’s your hint, Peaches: This did not taste good. But create something wretched with oak or googly eyes, and then what? It’s allowed to hang unopposed on your wall until you die or your daughter has to wear it to school and have kids laugh at how the reindeer eyes jiggle every time she heaves a sob? No, I say! That is how cutesy warps and ruins lives.
But whimsy. Ah, whimsy!
Whimsy, I think, comes from a place deep inside. It comes freely, unpackaged, unself-conscious. Things that I call whimsical always have something slightly off, a little wonky about them. Just like people. Someone who can make whimsy in a physical form creates from a solid sense of self. From an eye that knows how to please itself first. Someone who makes whimsy doesn’t listen to — or maybe doesn’t even hear — the chorus of people’s expectations or tastes, because there’s a stronger, louder inner voice that defies constraints. It’s a voice that says, “I will make something I like.” With that, comes a freedom to experiment and invent and discover something that may be just a little bit weird. Wonky. Not perfect, but beautiful. Whimsical.
From hop skip jump:
From petite collage:
From angry chicken:
I love this one — a fabric design — because the designer herself says of it: I’m all about the ugly, I can’t help it. Give me some little lines (I see them as hairs) and some mildly creepy biomorphic shapes, and I am all set.
Hahahahaha!
See? Not cutesy. Not self-conscious or coy or trying too hard. She says she’s all about the ugly, for God’s sake! And so it’s weird. Wonky. Whimsical.
And I love whimsy.
blog catalog card
I love paper!
A new site I found, Optical Toys, has a section featuring vintage paper toys. So very cool.
Here are a few of them. (Actually, I don’t seem to be able to link to them individually. You can find them all starting from the link below, though. So click there first, then go to the side bar and click Paper Toys to find the names I’m listing here):
Mov-I-Graf
Coiffures aux Choix — totally weird paper doll, but that’s why I find it so hysterical. Please check out those hairstyles.
Handshadow Cards
Fore’s Moving Panorama — currently out of stock, but take a look at them, amazing-looking little things called phenakistascopes, precursors of sorts to modern-day film animation. I hope they get more, because I think my nephew Joseph would like them.
The site has a flipbook section, too. Go there and click on “Gestation Animation,” if for no other reason than to read the little blurb there. Who IS that guy?
Other flipbooks that look fun, too:
Whirlwind Moviescope — an old ad for the Whirlwind vacuum.
Oooh. Ooooh! I’m literally discovering this stuff as I write and I must get this for MB! (Hm. Our anniversary is coming up — Groundhog Day, you know. Haha.)
So look at this one, too:
Muybridge Series — a series of flipbooks featuring Eadweard Muybridge’s studies in motion. The man was a pioneer in the advancement of the modern motion picture. Legend. Okay. MB’s gotta have these!
Motion Study, “Woman Jumping Off Stairs”
Okay. Gotta stop. Sorry for the disjointedness here, but I was just clicking over there and then writing over here and just getting swept away by all the quirky cool stuff. Oh, and the prices are really reasonable, I think.
Just go check it OUT.
more beanhouse papers
I wonder if people ever see me sneaking papers like this into my pockets like some weird pack rat. Oh, well.
Uhm, I really don’t know here …. it’s like some kind of “Grid of Sorrows” or something. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the “Almost No Life” Zone. Although, really, the fact that someone actually drew this out is just killing me, on many levels. The “wow” looks like someone else’s writing to me. Like the person charted out their no-life zone and their companion commented “wow,” maybe? Which isn’t exactly a soothing balm for the hurting soul. I mean, your friend draws all this out for you and you can only scrawl back a flimsy “wow”?
Wow.
Still, I’m almost inspired to chart my own “Grid of Sorrows” for 2006 …. uh, I said “almost.”
I love paper??
Sooo …. what did everybody do today? Some shopping? Some baking? Some tree trimming? Good for you.
Uhm, did anyone succumb to peer pressure and make a Christmas ornament in 10 minutes using only materials found at their place of work?
Anyone else besides me, that is?
People … I have gone around the bend. I am so far PAST the bend that the bend is a straight line to me now.
I have to take my ornament back to work, but — and this is just how big of a dork I am — I kidnapped it so I could scan it. So I present to you now my — I don’t know — Victorian Christmas caroler?? It’s not nearly as good as the Perrier bottle Christmas tree with bus-token-“tip” ornaments, but, ah, well. One does what one can.
Her head: a sample cup bottom
Her hair: scrunched-up straw wrapper
Her eyes: crescents cut from a Dixie cup
Her mouth: a singing coffee bean, of course
Her cape: a napkin
Her scarf: a colored straw wrapper
Her hat: cut from a pastry bag
You know, maybe I’ll get some good rest over Christmas. The dark dark middle of nowhere is looking better all the time
angels
I started to decorate our tree tonight. I say “started” because I usually futz about with it for a few days. Ridiculous, I know, but I love it.
From the early days of our marriage — when we had nothing but love — to now — when we have nothing but love, I’ve made nearly all of the ornaments on our tree. They’re mostly made from — paper, what else??
As I unwrap my old paper friends, I spread them around me and sit among them. I sit and remember making them. I remember being happy making them. Or I remember being sad and still making them because I needed to climb into a different place in my head, a place walled off from sorrow where some kind of creative spark still flickered, however weakly.
So I remember these angels, from, oh, about 6 years ago. A terrible, sad year for us. Desperate, really.
But when Christmas rolled around I needed — felt compelled — to make something for the tree … end the year differently. Somehow. In whatever small and primal way. So I sat down one weekend with paper, paint, and scissors — like a kid — and crafted some rather naive folk-art style angels. I don’t think I moved from that spot the entire weekend. I was suspended in some sheltered place in my head where there was only snipping and brushing, snipping and brushing. Soothing, for that fleeting period of time, some remote, aching places in my heart.
Welcome to our tree, little angels. I remember you.
(just a few of them here…)
sheer loveliness …
Ohhhh! Look what I stumbled across! Some rare watercolors and pencil and ink sketches from Parisian fashion house Marthe Ida. They are signed by Zacha, one of the star designers for Marthe Ida and date from 1920 – 1930. I confess I know nothing whatsoever about this fashion house or Zacha, but I do know that these drawings are gorrrrgeous. You can order one here. Click around while you’re over there. Some truly beautiful things. (Sheila, you MUST check it out.)
