I’ve blogged about Ernst Haeckel before, but yesterday I picked up such a cool little book: a mini version of Art Forms of Nature, published by Prestel. Its only 12cm x 9cm, and has 25 plates of his drawings. Of course at that scale you lose something, and I would still love to have the large format version, but its still very satisfactory. There is a range of Prestel Mini art books, by the way.
By chance I discovered that the British puppetry company Puppetcraft have done a puppet show of The Mousehole Cat, one of the books by Nicola Bayley that I mentioned in my previous post. These are their carved wooden puppets of the legendary Tom Bawcock and his cat,
who ‘saved the villagers of Mousehole from starvation by putting to sea in a fearsome gale on the day before Christmas eve and catching seven sorts of fish, enough for everyone to make and enjoy a life-saving, local delicacy – starry gazey pie’. The pictures and reviews on their site, make it look like a great production, and they have a recipe for starry gazey pie, too. Apparently Tom Bawcock’s Eve is still celebrated in Mousehole on December 23rd each year.
This year I ordered a Georgia O’Keefe 2005 Calendar online, having been a slowcoach and letting January slip by without getting a new calendar for the year. It arrived last Friday, and it’s beautiful:
I do love her paintings, particularly her later more abstract landscapes.I used to like getting a UNICEF wall calendar each year, the kind that has drawings done by children from all over the world, but they were all gone. So was everything except dog or cat breed calendars, and even for half-price, and if I were obsessed with siamese cats, I don’t want to look at everyday siamese cat photographs all year. In fact I’ve never really understood why so many calendars have so little visual variety, except that I suspect they provide an easy avenue for Christmas shoppers, who can think ‘Oh, Auntie Mary loves cats, this will do for her’.Calendars that feature artistic interpretations of a single topic stand a better chance of being interesting, as long as you particularly like the style in which they are done, or there is some variation of style in the 12 illustrations. For example, in 2003 I had a calendar I loved, a cat calendar by Nicola Bayley. Its selection includes drawings from Bayley’s books The Necessary Cat: A Celebration of Cats in Picture and Word, Fun with Mrs Thumb, Katje, the Windmill Cat, and The Mousehole Cat, and although there are cats in all of them, and they all show Bayley’s exquisite attention to detail and the decorative, they tell so many different stories.
Nicola Bayley’s drawings have been a favourite of mine since my children were small; we had two of her books: The Mouldy, and The Patchwork Cat (written by William Mayne). When I was the illustrator for the Republic of Pemberley in the 90’s, the cat drawing that I did for the Portrait of our Community board was inspired by those in The Patchwork Cat.
Here are some wonderful walkabout puppets: The Big Heads, made by Bim Mason. There are a few thumbnail pictures of The Big Heads if you scroll down in the ‘Companies’ section of Fool’s Paradise, and check the publicity images links. But on JaneandRichard I was excited to find two great close-ups among photos taken of the street performers at the Brighton Festival Big Weekend, part of the Brighton Festival in 2002: Big Head and Another Big Head. No wonder kids find them scarey!
Here is Fool’s Paradise’s description of the heads:
Three giant sized latex heads (one metre high) with protruding/retractable tongues and emerging arms made by renowned mask maker and street theatre author Bim Mason. The heads can lower down to conceal the actor’s legs within, enabling intimate contact with smaller people.
The actors are linked by walkie-talkie to a minder enabling synchronised response to opportunities for interaction. It also enables sudden synchronised dancing without apparent cues. The heads are truly carnivalesque in the sense that they induce two conflicting simultaneous reactions – attraction and recoil allowing the actors to strike the right balance according to the situation. Can perform in any weather.
The University of Exeter School of Perfromance Art has some images of cool carnival masks made by second year students working with Bim Mason in 2002. He is also the author of ‘Street theatre and other outdoor performance’ (Routledge Publisher, New York, 1992). In a paper on Wearable Performance, examining how ‘wearable computers offer the street performer powerful tools with which to create innovative experiences for the audience’, the writers (Flavia Sparacino, Alex Pentland and Glorianna Davenport) refer to five catagories of street performance that Mason identifies in his book:
“Bim Mason has carried out an extensive study of street performers. He has defined five categories that group performers according to their motivation and artistic intent. There are: Entertainers, Animators, Provocateurs, Communicators and Performing Artists. (snip…)
Entertainers are defined as those performers with the simple aim of pleasing the audience, either by making them laugh or by impressing them with skills such as juggling, acrobatics or magic. In contrast, Animators play games with the audience. They use audience interaction not just for part of the show but as the main act itself. Provocateurs are more concerned with loosening-up society as a whole. They ask questions of society by going to the limits of conventionally acceptable behavior. Communicators see themselves as educators who feel they have something to teach to the rest of society or a message to pass on. Finally, Performing Artists are mainly interested in showing an artistic work, and their own personal view of art, focusing more on form rather than content.”
Unfortunately the book seems to be hard to come by now. Maybe the library has it.
I’m looking forward to reading Peter Wilson and Geoffrey Milne’s book ‘The Space Between, The Art of Puppetry and Visual Theatre in Australia’. The book has just been published by Currency Press, and was launched last Tuesday at the Arts Centre in Melbourne.
‘A history of puppetry and image related theatre in Australia, written from extensive research but which also offers a personal view from one of Australia’s most experienced and imaginative puppeteers, Peter J Wilson. The book includes practical information on how puppeteers go about their work and documents a host of innovative companies and individuals who helped shape puppetry in Australia in its broadest sense; and looks at how puppetry has influenced, and been a part of, major theatre company’s programming.’
In 2002, when Peter held an Arts Centre Senior Creative Fellowship at the Victorian College of the Arts, he also brought together the celebration that was the first National Puppetry Summit , and he has gone on to develop the first Australian tertiary course in the art of puppetry at the VCA.
Geoffrey Milne is head of Theatre and Drama at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He has worked in theatre since 1967 in many capacities, especially as a lighting designer, and since the mid 1980s as a theatre reviewer for print and radio.
‘The Space Between’ is available from all good bookshops, and retails for $49.95. I’ll have to check when I get my copy, but I think the cover photograph was taken by Jeff Busby, and the featured puppets were made by Rob Matson.
I’ve always had a feeling that the time around 1860 was a watershed in many ways. Apart from anything else it was when Darwin published his revolutionary ‘Origin of the Species’.
Earlier this year Scott Draves released a rendering of some of the beautiful images in Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms of Nature). In these the alpha (transparency) channels in the PNG files are released under the attribution share-alike Creative Commons license, under which you can use them to composite them into other images.
Ernst Haeckel lived from 1834-1919, and became a supporter of evolution after reading the ‘Origin of Species’ in 1859, although he was more of a Lamarckian than Darwinian. In 1862 he became a professor of comparative anatomy in Jena, Germany, and in the 1860’s worked on many invertebrate groups, among them radiolarians, a group of aquatic protozoa. Kurt Stueber has made available online scans of Haeckel’s lovely Die Radiolarien drawings , and a complete index of his Kunstformen der Natur drawings. The exquisitely fine detail and natural patterns in the drawings are a delight, and the geometry always intreguing.
The drawings also made me think of several passages in Peter Carey‘s novel ‘Oscar and Lucinda’, where Oscar has to help his father, Theophilus, collect specimens of creatures from the sea, a job that he hates and fears.
‘In the sea-shells on the beach he saw the wonders which it was his father’s life to label, dissect, kill. He also saw corpses, bones, creatures dead. Creatures with no souls. When the sea lifted dark tangles of weed, he thought of jerseys with nothing in their arms.’
and later:
‘He ran, the guilty and obedient son, to help with the little creatures his father had captured, the anemones, antheas with fragile white tentacles, red-bannered dulses, perhaps a sleek green prawn or a fragile living blossom, a proof of the existence of God, a miracle in ivory, rosy red, orange or amethyst.’
Describing Oscar’s father, Carey writes:
‘Theophilus Hopkins was a moderately famous man. You can look him up in the 1860 Britannica. There are three full columns about his corals and his corallines, his anemones and starfish. It does not have anything very useful about the man. It does not tell you what he was like. You can read it three times over and never guess that he had any particular attitude to Christmas pudding.’
‘He was a dark, wiry widower of forty, hard and bristly on the outside, his beard full, his muscles compacted, and yet he was a soft man, too. You could feel this softness quivering. He was a sensualist who believed passionately that he would go to heaven, that heaven outshone any conceivable earthly joy, that it stretched, silver sheet, across the infinite spaces of eternity. … He was one of the Plymouth Brethren.’
So the stage is set for the wonderful story of how a taste of Christmas pudding leads Oscar at the age of 15 to abandon the Plymouth Brethren for the Anglican Church, and become an obsessive gambler to Lucinda’s compulsive one. Its also the story of how our lives and histories are governed largely by random incidents and circumstances. I don’t think it is any coincidence that the time-frame Carey chooses is the same as that of the emergence of Darwinism, and the religious doubts that that brought to society, stemming from the idea that we are no different to any other species: that humans, like other species, evolve and survive directly in relation to random events in their environment, rather than being subject to some divine influence.
One of the pleasures of Carey’s work, and one of his hallmarks, is the way he plays with fact and fiction. I googled to see if there actually was a naturalist called Theophilus Hopkins, and whether perhaps there was a way in which Haeckel fitted in. Instead I came up with another intrequing idea. In an essay in Gerard Manley Hopkins Online, titled ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins and Oscar Wilde – Victorians and writers’, parallels are drawn between Oscar Wilde, ‘the greatest talker of the Victorian age’, and Hopkins, ‘its most silenced poet’. It then goes on to say:
‘Peter Carey shows that the easiest way to conjoin two Victorian paradoxes is simply to combine their names: Oscar Hopkins of Oscar and Lucinda, or the devout Anglican priest with a passion for gambling. According to Norman White, Peter Carey based the Reverend Oscar Hopkins partly on Gerard Manley Hopkins; Oscar’s father is the Rev. Theophilus Hopkins; Gerard’s father, Manley, used Theophilus as a nom-de-plume.’
I don’t know if this is in White’s book ‘Hopkins – A Literary Biography’ (Clarendon Press, Oxford. 1992) or elsewhere. It would be great to follow it up and see if there is more information available. Was Gerard’s father a naturalist, or did Carey invest some Haeckel in his character?
As a sculptor of organic geometrical forms, George W. Hart has been inspired by Haeckel’s artwork.
Haeckel’s theory that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, that foetuses step through their evolutionary history in the womb, is still controversial in the evolution/creation debates. As an aside, its intreguing how often when I am carving a puppet creature, its face passes gradually through different stages, appearing like numerous other creatures before finally becoming the one which I am working towards. The experience gives the decided impression that we are related to other creatures in ways that we may not be aware of.
Amazon UK has a couple of copies of the book ‘Ron Mueck: Boy’ by the photographer Gautier Deblonde. This is a photographic diary of the nine months it took to construct, ship and assemble the sculpture in Venice. It was the ‘Art in Photo Essays’ award recipient in the World Press Photo of the Year, 2001, but seems to be out of print at present. I was interested to see the sculpture in segments, and crated.
Anita Sinclair’s book The Puppetry Handbook is a really useful comprehensive resource for anyone involved with making puppets. It has detailed coverage (including many drawings) of the main techniques, processes and materials that are used for building all kinds of puppets, and also gives consideration as to which sort of puppet to build for different circumstances. It also has good advice on all kinds of puppetry performances and teaching puppet making. A friend of mine was showing me a new edition that she had recently ordered. Its now spiral bound and slightly larger (about an A4 size) than my old copy, both good changes I think.
Wood that Works is a portfolio of beautiful wooden kinetic sculptures by David C. Roy who works out of Ashford, Connecticut. My favourite is Variations, but there is something about the unexpected timing in Migration, that is very attractive too. Each of the sculptures is powered by a constant force or Negator spring which you wind up to start the motion, and the movement lasts from 2 to 18 hours, depending on the sculpture.
Roy recommends one book for its great mechanism drawings: Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements by Henry T. Brown (copyright 1868, 1896). Actually, I like its full title from the seventeenth edition of 1893 even better:
“Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements, Embracing All Those Which Are Most Important In Dynamics, Hydraulics, Hydrostatics, Pneumatics, Steam Engines, Mill and other Gearing, Presses, Horology, and Miscellaneous Machinery: and including Many Movements Never Before Published and Several Which Have only Recently Come into Use”
