A Quilt from the Met

Pieced wool quilt, ca. 1900, probably from Ontario, wool front, cotton back.  What a great design....would be so easy to replicate.

Heather MacCrimmon's Project Runway

I've always loved Project Runway, the reality show that searches for the next fab fashion designer ("One day you're in, the next you're out").  If you don't know it, each week presents a new competitive sewing challenge where the contestants have, let's say, 5 hours to shop for fabric and make 3 outfits that can be worn to a ball by Serina Williams (or some such).   When I saw an article about costume designer Heather MacCrimmon I couldn't help but think what a great PR challenge this would be.....namely, she takes the fantasy drawings of children too young to be influenced by the fashion industry and turns them into real clothes.  How utterly adorable!  Check it out....

Artist and model: Anne Marie Perlewitz, age 7

 Artist: Ella Ottersbach (photograph by M. Luder)

You are awesome Heather!!  (read the full article here).  I'm thinking I should fire up the old sewing machine and make the William Morris outfits my aunt Anne designed for me last year!

Yup!  It is fashion week in NYC again....

Camille Paglia on Pre-Raphaelite Art

The Golden Stairs, Edward Burne-Jones, 1876-1880, Tate Gallery

 

The Wheel of Fortune, Edward Burne-Jones, 1863, Musée d'Orsay

"Burne-Jones' transsexual world is populated by one incestuously self-propagating being. We are in another Late Romantic bower, shadowless under a grey sky. The ritual limitation on his sexual personae is a Decadent closure, denying our eye right of access to other human types.  The Golden Stairs (1880) expands Rossetti's triplets and quadruplets. We drown in a shower of identical women, eighteen in all, cloning themselves and assaulting the eye. Beauty in excess makes Decadent dyspepsia. The sadomasochistic tableau of The Wheel of Fortune multiplies the male. Giant Fortuna turns her torture wheel, chaining a row of beautiful young men, male odalisques in Michelangelo's troubled late style. Each seems languid twin of the next, limbs stretched in sensual suffering.

   "Burne-Jones' embowered nature begat Art Nouveau, which flourished from the 1880s to World War I. Then modern machine culture geometrized Art Nouveau's organic patterns into Art Deco. So Spenser's dynasty, extending through High and Late Romanticism, unexpectedly ends in the Chrysler Building and Radio City Music Hall. Burne-Jones' serpentine line comes from Blake, whose rapacious flamelike flowers reveal the covert sexual meaning of Art Nouveau's arabesques. The copious histories of Art Nouveau lack psychological insight. Twenty years ago, I was struck by Art Nouveau's popularity among male homosexual aesthetes, for whom neither it nor Beardsley had to be revived, since they had never been forgotten. In every star, style, or art work celebrated by these Alexandrine homosexuals, there is always a secret hermaphroditism. So with Art Nouveau, the most epicene style since Mannerism."

.....read the rest by Camille Paglia.

 

Chant d'Amour, Edward Burne-Jones, 1866-1873, Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

The Depths of the Sea, Edward Burne-Jones, 1887, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University

The Perseus Series, The Doom Fulfilled, Edward Burne-Jones, 1884-1885

 The Tree of Forgiveness, Edward Burne-Jones, 1881-1882, Liverpool Museum

Hogweed Bonking Beetles....

...in local parlance.  Officially known as common red soldier beetles who like to hang out and bonk on the hogweed in the Irish hedgerows (click to enlarge, parental guidance suggested).  I wonder why Morris never included insects in his wallpaper or fabric designs--they have a certain repetitive geometry and beauty.

Makes me proud to be a scientist...

If you have a few minutes to be inspired, this video, part of the Periodic Table of the Videos series, exemplifies everything that is wonderful and good in science.

 William Morris would be a great supporter of the narrator Dr. Poliakoff who is a leader in the field of green chemistry, which designs products and chemical processes that avoid introducing hazardous substances into our environment and lives.