If you happen to have grown up in the English countryside, you probably retain a certain sensitivity to and affinity for nature. This can express itself in any number of ways, most often by a compulsion to garden, no matter how urban the setting in which you now live. But Jo Brown has shown how to base a career on it: an artist and illustrator — and “birder wildlifer mushroomer,” according to her Twitter bio — she has long kept a “nature journal” documenting the flora and fauna encountered in the countryside around her home in Devon.
“At the end of April 2019, Jo posted a video of her journal so far on Twitter,” says her web site. “It went viral and her followers jumped from 9K followers to 20K followers in two days.” A glance at any given page reveals what so impressed them. “Each page of Brown’s notebook contains a pen and colored pencil drawing that begins at the pages’ edges, appearing to grow from the corner or across the paper,” writes Colossal’s Grace Ebert.
“Sometimes captured through close-ups that mimic scientific illustrations, the delicate renderings depict the detail of a buff-tailed bumblebee’s fuzzy torso and the red tendrils of a round-leaved sundew. Brown notes the common and Latin names for each species and common characteristics, in addition to where and when she spotted it.”
In other words, the nature journal showcases at once its creator’s keen eye, well-trained hand, and formidable knowledge of the natural world. It also stands as a prime example of the art of notebooking.
Using to its fullest advantage her ruled Moleskine notebook (the brand of choice for those invested in doing their jotting and sketching on the go for a couple of decades now), Brown effectively delivers a master class in the vivid, legible, and elegant — dare we say organic? — organization of both visual and textual information in the space of a small page.
You can take a closer look at how she does it on her web site as well as her feeds on both Twitter and Instagram. More recently, her journal has been published in book form as Secrets of a Devon Wood. Few nature-lovers, perhaps, can equal Jo Brown as an artist, but everyone can enjoy the gloriously varied realm of life that surrounds them just as much as she does. “All that’s required,” she says, “is a little patience and quiet observation.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
How, exactly, does one go about making a global dictionary of symbols? It is a Herculean task, one few scholars would take on today, not only because of its scope but because the philological approach that gathers and compares artifacts from every culture underwent a correction: No one person can have the expertise to cover everything. Yet the attempts to do so have had tremendous creative value. Such explorations bring us closer to what makes humans the same the world over: our productive imaginations and the archetypal wellspring of images that guide us through the unknown.
When Spanish poet, critic, translator, and musicologist Juan Eduardo Cirlot began his 1958 Dictionary of Symbols, he did so with Carl Jung in mind, writing against a current of positivism that devalued the symbolic.
Cirlot quotes Jung in his introduction: “For the modern mind, analogies… are nothing but self-evident absurdities. This worthy judgement does not, however, in any way alter the fact that such affinities of thought do exist and that they have been playing an important role for centuries.” Like it or not, we interact through the symbolic realm all the time. Those interactions are freighted with historical and cultural meaning we would do well to understand if we are to understand ourselves.
In his method, Cirlot writes in a Preface:
I wanted to embrace the broadest possible range of objects and cultures, to compare the symbols of the post-Roman West with symbols from India, the Far East, Chaldea, Egypt, Israel and Greece. Images, essential myths, allegories, for my purposes, all these needed to be consulted, not, self-evidently, with the intention of making an exhaustive reckoning, but rather to comb out patterns in meaning, in what counts as essential, in fields both near and far.
Cirlot draws his inspiration from Dada and Surrealism and the comparative method in religious studies popularized by scholars like Mircea Eliade, who influenced prominent students of myth like Joseph Campbell (and through Campbell, the popular culture of film, television, and the internet). “Thus I drew near the luminous labyrinth of symbols,” Cirlot writes, “concerned less with interpretation than with comprehension and concerned most of all, really, with the contemplation of how symbols dwell across time and culture.” And “dwell” they do, as we know, in elemental figures like dragons and serpents, destructive gods and evil eyes. (In 1954, Cirlot published The Eye in Mythology, a precursor to A Dictionary of Symbols.)
In times of trouble and uncertainty like ours, symbols become important ways of organizing chaos in our collective imagination, and are integral to what Sinding Bentzen, professor of economics at the University of Copenhagen, calls “religious coping” in the face of COVID-19. Ripped from their historic context, as happened with the swastika, symbols can be used to intentionally manipulate and mislead, to turn collective anxiety into acquiescence to tyranny and totalitarianism. Cirlot was acutely aware of this as an artist working under the rule of Francisco Franco. As a leading member of a group of painters and poets who called themselves Dau al Set (“the seven-spotted dice”), Cirlot and his contemporaries “championed creative liberty and resistance to the dominant Fascist regime.”
In the 21st century, we can just as well read Cirlot’s dictionary with this same mission. It is not an artifact of another time but as an ever-relevant, erudite, and fascinating resource for our own. Through the study of symbols we learn to see, Cirlot wrote, that “nothing is meaningless or neutral: everything is significant,” every idea connected to others across time and space. “It is only by reading through the volume steadily that one can become aware of the intricate interrelations of symbolic meanings,” wrote Catherine Rau in a 1962 review of the book. We can “develop such awareness by starting off with any random entry,” Angelica Frey observes at Hyperallergic.
Do so in the “original, significantly enlarged” new edition of the Cirlot’s Dictionary of Symbols, just published by the New York Review of Books in an English translation by Valerie Miles. We can read the book for reference or for pleasure, Herbert Read writes in an introduction to the new edition, “but in general the greatest use of the volume will be for the elucidation of those many symbols which we encounter in the arts and in the history of ideas. Man, it has been said, is a symbolizing animal; it is evident that at no stage in the development of civilization has man been able to dispense with symbols.”
Viewed head on, it appears to be a somewhat unconventional landscape in which one of the few remaining branches of a mutilated tree spreads over a city, far in the distance. Streaky clouds suggest heavy weather is brewing.
Stroll to the end of the corridor and take another look. You’ll find that the tree has contracted, and the clouds have reconfigured themselves into a portrait of Saint Francesco of Paola, praying beneath its boughs.
It’s a prime example of oblique anamorphosis, an image that has been deliberately distorted by an artist well versed in perspective, with the end result that the image’s true nature will only be revealed to those viewing the work from an unconventional point.
The Quay Brothers’ documentary short, above, a collaboration with art historian Roger Cardinal, uses a combination of their delightfully creepy signature puppet stop motion, as well as animated 3‑D cut outs, to lift the curtains on how the human eye can be manipulated, using principles of perspective.
Anamorphosis may not seem like such a feat in an age when a number of software programs can provide a major assist, but why would Renaissance artists put themselves to so much extra trouble?
The Quay Brothers delve into this too.
Perhaps the artist was injecting a bit of social criticism, like Hans Holbein the Younger, whose 1533 portrait, The Ambassadors, includes a secret anamorphic skull. This could be taken as a jab at the excesses of the wealthy young diplomats who provide the painting’s subject, except that the one who commissioned the work, Jean de Dinteville, prized the motto “Memento mori.”
Maybe he knowingly ordered up the naked death’s head to go along with his ermine and bling, an example of having one’s cake and eating it too, and yet another dizzying head trip for those viewing the painting from the intended angle.
(Betcha didn’t have to work too hard to guess the skull’s location, though…)
Or an artist might choose to employ anamorphosis as a brown paper wrapper of sorts, as in the case of Erhard Schön’s erotic woodblock prints.
Much of the world has only recently discovered the Moomins, those lovable hippopotamus-like figures — given, it must be said, to moments of startling brusqueness and complexity — created in the 1940s by Finnish artist Tove Jansson. In forms ranging from dolls and school supplies to neck pillows and cellphone cases, they’ve lately become a full-blown craze in South Korea, where I live. Like any massively successful (and highly merchandisable) characters, the Moomins overshadow the rest of Jansson’s oeuvre. Hence exhibitions like Tove Jansson (1914–2001) at London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery, which “aims to rectify the fact that less attention has generally been paid to her range as a visual artist.”
That description comes from Simon Willis’ review of the show in the New York Review of Books. “In October 1944, Tove Jansson drew a cover for Garm, a Finnish satirical magazine, showing a brigade of Adolf Hitlers as pudgy little thieves,” Willis writes. These drawer-rifling, house-burning caricatures “were not unusual for Jansson, who had been belittling Stalin and Hitler in the magazine since the early days of World War II.” But “peeking out at the chaos from behind the magazine’s title,” there was also a “tiny pale figure with a long nose”: a proto-Moomin making an appearance the year before the publication of the first Moomin book. (And even he was forged in mockery, having first been drawn by Jansson, so the story goes, as a caricature of Immanuel Kant.)
Having started contributing to Garm, according to the official Moomin web site, “in 1929 at the young age of 15 (her mother Signe Hammarsten-Jansson had worked for the publication since it started),” she kept on doing so until the magazine folded in 1953.
“During that period she drew more than 500 caricatures, a hundred cover images and countless other illustrations for the magazine.” In them, writes Glasstire’s Caleb Mathern, “angels appear on battlefields. Reindeer prepare to rain TNT. An effete, undersized Hitler cries instead of eating slices of cake. Jansson even impugns Stalin’s manhood with an oversized scabbard/undersized sword joke.” To the young Jansson, the best part was the chance, as she later put it, “to be beastly to Stalin and Hitler.”
Even after the success of the Moomins, Jansson continued to draw on the imagery and emotions of war: “The first time we meet young Moomintroll and his Moominmamma in The Moomins and the Great Flood (1945), they are refugees, crossing a strange and threatening landscape in search of shelter. Moominpappa, meanwhile, is absent, as fathers often were during the war,” writes Aeon’s Richard W. Orange. In the next book “the world is threatened by a comet that sucks the water out of the sea, leaving an apocalyptic landscape in its wake.” With the Cold War heating up, the allegory would hardly have gone unnoticed. Like all master satirists, Jansson went on to transcend the solely topical — and indeed, so the increasingly Moomin-crazed world has demonstrated, the boundaries of time and culture.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Sometimes describing a classic work of literature as “timeless” draws attention, when we revisit it, to how much it is bound up with the conventions of its time. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland emerged from a very specific time and place, the bank of the Thames in 1862 where Charles Lutwidge Dodgson first composed the tale for Alice Liddell and her sister. The future Lewis Carroll’s future bestseller became one of the most widely adapted and adopted works of literature in history. It never needs to be revived—Alice is always contemporary.
Those who have read the book to children know that Carroll’s nonsense story, though filled with archaic terms and outdated ideas about education, requires little additional explanation: indeed, it cannot be explained except by reference to the strange leaps of logic, rapid changes in scale and direction, and anthropomorphism familiar to everyone who has had a dream. Dodgson was a pretty weird character, and prim Victorian Alice is not exactly an everygirl, but every reader imagines themselves tumbling right down the rabbit hole after her.
As far as illustrators of Carroll’s timeless classic go, it’s hard to find one who is more universally beloved, and more Alice-like, than Tove Jansson, inventor of the Moomins, the Finnish series of children’s books and TV shows that is, in parts of the world, like a religion. How are her Alice illustrations not better known? It’s hard to say. Jansson’s Bohemian biography is as endearing as her characters, and she would make a wonderful subject for a children’s story herself. As James Williams tells it at Apollo Magazine:
The artist, Tove Jansson (1914–2001), was a great colourist who lived a richly plural life. Born into Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority to a Swedish mother and a Finnish father, both artists, she grew up on both sides of the Baltic. Jansson trained as a painter and illustrator in Stockholm and Paris, and made an early living through commissions and piecework. She was an acerbic and witty anti-fascist cartoonist during the Second World War, sending up Hitler and Stalin in covers for the Swedish-language periodical Garm. Descended on the one hand from a famous preacher, and on the other from a pioneer of the Girl Guide movement, she was raised on the Bible and on tales of adventure (Tarzan, Jules Verne, Edgar Allen Poe). In her thirties she built a log cabin on an island and was a capable sailor. She lived visibly and courageously with her partner, the Finnish artist Tuulikki Pietilä, at a time when lesbian relationships did not enjoy public acceptance. She considered emigrating at various times to Tonga and Morocco but, despite travelling widely, remained rooted in Finland where she became (dread accolade) a ‘national treasure.’ She wrote a picture book for children about the imminent end of the world and spare, tender fiction for adults about love and family. She never stopped drawing and painting. She was Big in Japan.
We’ll find dream logic woven into all of Jansson’s work, from her early Moomin-like creature paintings from the 1930s to her illustrations for The Hobbit and Alice decades later. Her Alice, in Swedish, was first published in 1966, then released in an American edition in 1977. Sadly, her illustrations “did not receive such a great reception,” notes Moomin.com. “Readers already had their own imaginations in their minds about these classics.”
Blame Disney, I suppose, but there is never a bad time to re-imagine Alice’s journey, and the artist has left us with an excellent way to do so, “crafting a sublime fantasy experience,” Maria Popova writes, “that fuses Carroll’s Wonderland with Jansson’s Moomin Valley.” See more of Jansson’s timelessly weird drawings at Brain Pickings.
The late Frances Glessner Lee (1878–1962) definitely loved miniatures, and excelled at their creation, knitting socks on pins, hand rolling real tobacco into tiny cigarettes, and making sure the victims in her realistic murder scene dioramas exhibited the proper degree of rigor mortis and lividity.
Her preoccupation began with the Sherlock Holmes stories she read as a girl.
In the 1930s, the wealthy divorcee used part of a sizable inheritance to endow Harvard University with enough money for the creation of its Department of Legal Medicine.
Its first chairman was her friend, George Burgess Magrath, a medical examiner who had shared his distress that criminals were literally getting away with murder because coroners and police investigators lacked appropriate training for forensic analysis.
The library to which Lee donated a thousand books on the topic was named in his honor.
The homemade dioramas offered a more vivid experience than could be found in any book.
Each Nutshell Study required almost half a year’s work, and cost about the same as a house would have at the time. ($6000 in the 1940s.)
“Luckily, I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth,” Lee remarked. “It gives me the time and money to follow my hobby of scientific crime detection.”
Although Lee had been brought up in a luxurious 13 bedroom home (8 were for servants’ use), the domestic settings of the Nutshell Studies are more modest, reflective of the victims’ circumstances.
She drew inspiration from actual crimes, but had no interest in replicating their actual scenes. The crimes she authored for her little rooms were composites of the ones she had studied, with invented victims and in rooms decorated according to her imagination.
Her intent was to provide investigators with virgin crime scenes to meticulously examine, culling indirect evidence from the painstakingly detailed props she was a stickler for getting right.
Students were provided with a flashlight, a magnifying glass, and witness statements. Her attention to detail ensured that they would use the full ninety minutes they had been allotted analyzing the scene. Their goal was not to crack the case but to carefully document observations on which a case could be built.
The flawlessness of her 1:12 scale renderings also speaks to her determination to be taken seriously in what was then an exclusively male world. (Women now dominate the field of forensic science.)
Nothing was overlooked.
As she wrote to Dr. Alan Moritz, the Department of Legal Medicine’s second chair, in a letter reviewing proposed changes to some early scenes:
I found myself constantly tempted to add more clues and details and am afraid I may get them “gadgety” in the process. I hope you will watch over this and stop me when I go too far. Since you and I have perpetrated these crimes ourselves we are in the unique position of being able to give complete descriptions of them even if there were no witnesses—very much in the manner of the novelist who is able to tell the inmost thoughts of his characters.
It’s no accident that many of the Nutshell Studies’ little corpses are female.
Lee did not want officers to treat victims dismissively because of gender-related assumptions, whether the scenario involved a prostitute whose throat has been cut, or a housewife dead on the floor of her kitchen, the burners of her stove all switched to the on position.
Would you like to test your powers of observation?
Above are the remains of Maggie Wilson, discovered in the Dark Bathroom’s tub by a fellow boarder, Lizzie Miller, who gave the following statement:
I roomed in the same house as Maggie Wilson, but knew her only from we met in the hall. I think she had ‘fits’ [seizures]. A couple of male friends came to see her fairly regularly. On Sunday night, the men were there and there was a lot of drinking going on. Some time after the men left, I heard the water running in the bathroom. I opened the door and found her as you see her.
Grim, eh?
Not nearly as grim as what you’ll find in the Parsonage or the Three-Room Dwelling belonging to shoe factory foreman Robert Judson, his wife, Kate, and their baby, Linda Mae.
The period-accurate mini furnishings and fashions may create a false impression that the Mother of Forensic Science’s Nutshell Studies should be relegated to a museum.
In truth, their abundance of detail remains so effective that the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore continues to use 18 of them in training seminars to help homicide investigators “convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell.”
I grew up on Mad Magazine. It was the one magazine I made sure my parents got me every month. I bought the Super Specials, the paperback reprints, the flexi discs, and even the board game. When we’d go to swap meets, I’d bring home older issues from the 1960s, and try to figure out the politics from a decade before I was born. It was why this eight-year old kid knew anything about politics, and knew that Nixon sucked, Ford sucked, Carter kind of sucked, and Reagan definitely sucked.
And then, I just grew out of it. Although the original Harvey Kurtzman-written issues from the 1950s still felt vital, the “Usual Gang of Idiots” felt, well, safe and boring. I wouldn’t have said a bad word against them if you asked, but I would not have told any of my teenage friends they absolutely needed to read it. Until its cancellation in 2019, Mad would be a friendly sight on the newsstand, but I’d never pick it up. Nobody *really* had a bad word to say about Mad, did they?
Apparently an unusual new gang of idiots at the National Lampoon did, back in October 1971. This 15-page satire on Mad is as vicious a takedown as they come, its veins pulsing with the kind of vindictive glee only a true former fan can muster.
The main charge: after publisher William Gaines and Harvey Kurtzman had acrimoniously split and gone separate ways, Mad magazine grew embarrassed of its comic book past, and sought out a more middle-of-the-road audience, with humor less “in a jugular vein” and more in a juvenile vein. Like Saturday Night Live for the last five? ten? twenty? years, it had forgotten what satire was and how it works.
That’s the heart of its centerpiece, a Drucker-style parody of Citizen Kane called “Citizen Gaines”. The dying publisher’s last “Rosebud” word is “satire.” Like in the film, an anonymous reporter goes in search of clues to the word’s meaning, interviewing current editor Al Feldstein, writer Gary Belkin, and the “usual gang of idiots” who say things like “I only draw what they give me”. But the Jedediah Leland character in all this is Kurtzman, who Gaines betrays in a similar Kane fashion…for the money and power.
Elsewhere, Antonio Prohias’ “Spy vs. Spy” gets a realpoltik update, Don Martin-style violence is used to illustrate police brutality, and Dave Berg gets assailed for being a wishy-washy liberal in a satire of his “Lighter Side” strip. In fact, years later a fan used exactly the punchline (“Boy, are you an asshole”) when he met Dave Berg at a convention. (Berg had no idea about the parody.)
Over the years the fresh faces at Lampoon would also lose their satiric edge and a company that called Mad “juvenile” would later churn out endless T&A straight-to-video comedies. All students eventually become the master that they once took down. It’s as much a part of nature as portzebie.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
The state of our troubled planet dictates that disposables are out.
Reusables are in.
And anyone who’s taught themselves how to mend and maintain their stuff has earned the right to flaunt it!
A quick scroll through Instagram reveals loads of visible mending projects that highlight rather than disguise the area of repair, drawing the eye to contrasting threads reinforcing a threadbare knee, frayed cuff, ragged rip, or moth hole.
While some practitioners take a freeform approach, the most pleasing stitches tend to be in the sashiko tradition.
Sashiko—frequently translated as “little stabs”—was born in Edo period Japan (1603–1868), when rural women attempted to prolong the life of their families’ tattered garments and bedding, giving rise to a humble form of white-on-indigo patchwork known as boro.
While sashiko can at times be seen serving a purely decorative function, such as on a very well preserved Meiji period jacket in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection, its primary use was always one born of necessity.
As Austin Bryant notes on Heddels, a news and education website dedicated to sustainable goods:
Over generations of families, these textiles would acquire more and more patches, almost to the point of the common observer being unable to recognize where the original fabric began. As they recovered after the end of World War II, to some the boro textiles reminded the Japanese of their impoverished rural past.
Keiko & Atsushi Futatsuya are a mother-and-son artisan team whose posts on sashiko and boro go beyond straightforward how-tos to delve into cultural history.
According to them, the goal of sashiko should not be aesthetically pleasing rows of uniform stitches, but rather “enjoying the dialogue” with the fabric.
As Atsushi explains in an Instagram post, viewers seeing their work with a Western perspective may respond differently than those who have grown up with the elements in play:
This is a photo of a “Boro-to-be Jacket” in the process. This is the back (hiding) side of the jacket and many non-Japanese would say this should be the front and should show to the public. The Japanese would understand why it is a backside naturally, but I would need to “explain” to the non-Japanese who do not share the same value (why we) purposefully make this side as “hiding” side. That’s why, I keep sharing in words. One picture may be worth a thousand words, but the thousand words may be completely different based on their (free) interpretation. In sharing the culture, some “actual words” would be also very important.
To try your hand at sashiko, you will need a long needle, such as a cotton darning needle, white embroidery thread, and—for boro—an aging textile in need of some attention.
Should you find yourself sliding into a full blown obsession, you may want to order sashiko needles and thread, and a palm thimble to help you push through several weights of fabric simultaneously.
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