Posts from the ‘narrative’ Category
These images are from a group of photos found with a group of recently purchased textiles.
The textiles are from the collection of Sue Goldberg of San Diego. (I also have a couple of her magazines). I was told that she used to go to China every summer to visit the Miao and to learn how to weave and embroider. Some of her textiles along with her loom went to the Mingei Museum. Got to the Mingei in July and there is a great exhibit on American Carved and Whittled Walking Canes.
Besides the nobel art of getting things done, there is the nobel art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of the non essentials. –Lin Yutang
There is something about this quote of Lin Yutang’s our images of the convent of the Basilica of St Francis that work together. Assisi left a wonderful reassurance in the goodness of life even with all of it’s extremes.
So we just got back from Italy on Tuesday. These are some pictures of Cannaregio– the neighborhood we stayed in Venice–shots of vistas and treatments that you just want to keep staring at so you take a picture and move on. It’s beautiful in it’s rhythm and order; and I would describe it as surreal, but I’m not entirely sure what I mean by that. It is floating and melting and then flooded with colors and details that I thought if I were a decorative painter I would die to get right.
I posted earlier that I’ve been researching the narrative of this textile. I wrote my dealer friend Zhang and he told me that they are butterflies–made by in Guizhou by the Jin He Miao. They live in a village about 5 hours from Kaili City.
It’s really the butterfly antenna, I would add that the movement of the design represents the the flying butterfly. For the Miao the butterfly is a main motif of their embroidery. Since they do not have a written language, their narratives exist in their embroidery. The butterfly connotes Butterfly Mother, who created the world and created the Miao. I’ve included a couple more pictures of some of the same motif that Zhang sent me.
Walking around Baochao Hutong in Beijing.
The text is from Mina Loy’s Poem, There is No Life or Death. Read the complete poem and some of her others over here. This pillow is from a group of text pillows–done free-hand on my sewing machine. The fabric is dark oatmeal linen and the thread is this fantastic pink from my favorite embroidery shop, Des Fils et une Aiguille, in Paris. The other pillows in the group, not shown, are similar and the quotes are at the very bottom of this page.
To see some of my past blogs on Mina Loy, click one or both of those links. 
The group of Grey Hmong Wedding Quilt Pillows— I just finished them this week– have accent colors from a true pink to a pale peach.
Elaine Scary in her book On Beauty and Being Just writes that beauty replicates itself and one of the first acts of replication is staring. “The first flash of the bird incites the desire to duplicate not by translating the glimpsed image into a drawing or poem or a photograph but simply by continuing to see her five seconds, twenty-five seconds, forty-five seconds later–as long as the bird is there to be beheld.” Beauty also increases, I think, through staring. When looking long enough at something, it can jump out at you where before it wasn’t. It’s my fun new practice.
Every city has smells of street food that waft in the air. Some of Beijing’s Yams & Mutton.
Some photos I took last December on a trip to Beijing–these at the Ming Dynasty Tombs.
