kellysearsmith
23 June 2008 @ 01:16 pm
Mottoes  
Today's decorative words and mottoes tend to be blandly sentimental. No doubt those who buy them -- and I have -- tend to invest them with their own meaning: Dream. Love. Follow your heart. The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams (Eleanor Roosevelt).

At various times historically, mottoes have figured as devotional, familial, national / regional / civic, organizational, and personal emblems, as powerful to those who held them in their dress or home as any graphic representation of belief: the cross or herald's mark.

We find them in the medieval favor, saint's medal, and shield; the Renaissance poesy ring. The Arts and Crafts Movement of the Nineteenth Century adored mottoes, and gave them something of a revival (William Morris made motto tiles, for instance, and mottoes were commonly carved above mantlepieces). Nineteenth century authors loved a good epigraph at the start of a chapter, too. Words that condensed, that codified, a moral or emotional state, or that richly served a thought worthy of rememberance, ponderance, and even devotion.



Charles Voysey, above and below; images' source: Daryl Bennett and David Pickle's Arts and Crafts Movement site


I have long had personal mottoes, to which I add from time to time. And it's worthwhile thinking of your own. These serve as guiding lights -- stars in the dark. They don't have to be especially fancy, or in Latin, or even said by someone famous. You just have to own them and return to them, like mental touchstones.



Here are some of mine then:

leave the world a better place (than you found it)

ad astra per aspera: to the stars by hard ways

strength is not the same as anger (The English Beat)

speak truth to power (Quakers)

the pen is mightier (than the sword)

work is love made visible (Kahil Gibran)

sapere aude: dare to know (The Enlightenment)

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kellysearsmith
14 August 2007 @ 05:42 am
Reminder to Readers: Dream Tree Gallery  
Dream Tree includes a gallery of mid 19c through early 20c decorative arts movements, including Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, and Aestheticsm, from architecture to home furnishins to personal adornments. The gallery's offers are posted without regard to copyright, since they are provided only for educational purposes and personal study. The original source should be found and permissions sought for any other use.

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kellysearsmith
30 October 2006 @ 04:50 pm
Art History Discovery -- Bernard Palissy  
Perhaps those who have formally studied the decorative arts will raise their brow at my latest enthusiasm -- but it is new to me, and so glistening with the fresh gloss of novelty. My discovery? None other than Bernard Palissy (1509-1590).

click the links below for images


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Bernard Palissy has been called an eccentric ceramacist, not least of which because he was a Huguenot living in Paris in the late 16th century. He is known for having crafted molds from natural objects, once living and otherwise, to render most accurately the flora and fauna with which he infused and mounted his ceramic pieces. By 1563, he was so admired, the King of France named him "King's Inventor of Rustic Ceramics." Rustic ceramics, indeed.

Palissy's style (after Christopher Dresser) seems quite modern to us, and indeed it enjoyed a nineteenth-century revival, particularly in Portugal, in a form known as Palissy Ware. The more immediate imitators of this master were those of the seventeenth century Palissy School, although their integration of neoclassical motifs, especially of idealized human forms, ruins the effect.

Also noteworthy, and reminiscent of nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts ceramics (known for inventive glaze techniques), was Palissy's innovation of lead-based glazes, which give his pieces rich but earthbound hues. If they seem slickened, it is with the shine mud develops when wet. The Getty Museum describes his technique thus:

"Palissy produced his designs by attaching casts of dead lizards, snakes, and shellfish to traditional ceramic forms such as basins, ewers, and plates. He then painted these wares in blue, green, purple, and brown, and glazed them with runny lead-based glaze to increase their watery realism."

Let us call Palissy's style Naturalist Rococo, if this isn't a contradiction in terms. What strikes us most about Rococo, of course, is its artifice, the gilding of the shell, the dolphin, the leaf. Palissy strips Rococo of its gilt, but leaves the natural form amidst its composite confusion -- the beautiful but grotesque underbelly of much too much.

StrangeScience.net gives a portrait of the man that portrays him as a largely unsung hero of early science, a man whose efforts helped to inspire paleontology:

"Palissy rejected the idea that the biblical flood could have deposited all fossils throughout the world, even on the highest mountaintops. But this stance put him in a shaky position because the fossil shells he found well above sea level resembled marine — not freshwater — species. (Palissy got out of the difficulty by suggesting the fossils had come from inland lakes that had somehow been salty.) He didn't get out of every theological difficulty quite so easily; more than once, he was imprisoned for his Calvinist beliefs. Being an alchemist didn't help him escape accusations of heresy, either. After two especially difficult years of imprisonment, he died in 1590.

Palissy made the best he could of his time in prison, writing admirable dialogues on earth science in 1563 and 1580, and taking pride in his status as a "man without Latin." His work as a naturalist, however, went largely unappreciated until the 18th century."

( Read more... )


BTW, the glorious Rene Lalique was so moved by Palissy's design sense that he crafted a vase named, what else? The Palissy.

( Read more... )

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kellysearsmith
03 July 2006 @ 10:18 am
New Dream Tree Scrapbook Galleries  
I've added new sub-galleries to my Art Nouveau, Arts and Crafts Movement, and Aestheticism main gallery. These include the Herter Brothers, Amphora Pottery (the work of Eduard Stellmacher, in particular), and Daniel Pabst.

The Herter Brothers are interesting in particular for being what many call the "it" cabinet makers to East Coast Society. They designed for the Vanderbilts and the White House. Among period designers, they are noted for promoting full interior design: designing rooms, rather than only individual furniture pieces or suites; examples are shown here and here. This is, of course, characteristic of Aesthetic design in general, although the Herter Brothers showed a greater range of design tastes. For example, some of their pieces featured more French Imperial and Renaissance Revival features (neo-Classical) than other art designers of the late nineteenth-century, but they also worked in other art modes. Perhaps the Herter Brothers were best known for their mixed woods marquetry work, and, needless to say, their exquisite craftsmanship. This last quality was more typical than not of the German and German-descended, American-based cabinetmakers of the period.

Amphora Pottery was a turn of the century (nineteenth century) art pottery located in Bohemia (now the Czech Republic--but sometimes given as Austria for Amphora Pottery). The firm was started by Alfred Stellmacher and worked by his family, as well as a few gifted designers. The pottery was famous for ivory porcelain; Orientalist, neoBaroque, and nouveau design; as well as extraordinary glazes. According to Jason Jacques--a high-end, NYC dealer in Amphora--the decade of 1894-1904 marked the peak production of the firm. "Key series from that remarkable decade...feature these forms and motifs: plants (including applied flowers and fruit), animals, prehistoric/mythical creatures, Klimt- and Mucha-style portraits, biomorphism, and simulated jeweling."

Daniel Pabst is a German cabinet maker who was located in Philadelphia. His work was known for extraordinary craftsmanship. His pieces tend toward the Gothic and Renaissance revival, and are typically carved and massive.

As always, these works are posted for private study, without regard to copyright. If you should intend to copy and use them for any public purpose, please observe the appropriate copyright measures.
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kellysearsmith
30 June 2006 @ 02:19 pm
Carlo Bugatti: Nouveau Design Visionary  
I've just discovered Milanese nouveau designer Carlo Bugatti (1856-1940). His work's a shock to the senses, medieval, exotic (Moorish, Japanese), and wholly different than the Parisian / Belgian, Anglo-American, or Austrian / German Secessionist anti-industrial design styles of the late 19th / early 20th centuries. He tended to work with walnut, ebony, ivory, vellum (often worked with gold or water-colored dyes and then shellacked), copper, pewter, brass, and other "true" materials favored by Arts and Crafts artists. His metalwork is characteristically stamped.

Bugatti's company was aptly named C. Bugatti & C., Fabbrica Mobili Artistici Fantasia. I've created a scrapbook gallery just for him.

Here, from the French Bugatti Club, are some details about his life:

"Carlo Bugatti, born in Milan (Italy) on February 16th 1856. Son of Giovanni Luigi Bugatti, an architect doubled as a sculptor of monumental fireplaces, and of Amelia Salvoni , Carlo undertakes studies at the academy Brera in Milan, then to the Académie des Beaux Arts in Paris. In 1880 he creates his first known work, a complete furniture of bedroom with vegetable motifs inlaid metal, of ivories, elevated copper of Japanese and Islamist style decorations, that he offered to his sister Luigia at the occasion of her marriage to the painter Giovanni Segantini. The same year, he marries Theresa Lorioli (1862-1935) who gives him a daughter, Deanice, then two sons, Ettore and Rembrandt . Carlo is in 1902 at the summit of his career and he obtains the honour diploma of the first international exposition of the Decorative Arts of Torino (Italy). In 1904, he leaves Milan for Paris that had attracted him for many years. He puts himself then to work on silverware pieces and jewelry to the motifs of animals and of stylised insects. He establishes himself about 1910 in Pierrefonds (in a house called “villa La Roulotte”), in the Oise French department, where he befriends Clément Bayard, the well-known French automobile manufacturer. When the war of 1914 bursts, Clément Bayard, mayor of the town in the aera, leaves Pierrefonds to transform his automobile factory into armament manufacture and consigns the city hall to Carlo Bugatti. In 1918, after the return of Clément Bayard, Carlo Bugatti divides his time between Pierrefonds and Molsheim, where lives his son Ettore. He joins him definitively in 1937 after the deaths of his daughter Deanice in 1932, then of his spouse in 1935. The old patriarch that was a cabinet-maker, jeweler, engraver, painter, inventor, died on 31 march 1940, 84 years old, in Ettore's house in Molsheim. He was buried in the family vault at Dorlisheim cemetary with the military honours because of his behaviour in Pierrefonds during the first World War."

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