Picturing MARY HOWITT


©Suzanne Fox 2020
May not be downloaded or reproduced without permission
Sources: Book
Photograph
Landscape behind photograph
Background

I came across a series of books by Mary Botham Howitt while searching the University of Florida's amazing Digital Collections site for something else and got curious about this prolific woman that I had never heart of. Come to find out that Howitt wrote, edited or translated over one hundred books, though she's perhaps best known for writing the brief poem "The Spider and the Fly." I have fond memories of reading it to a young friend, and love the edition with Tony deTerlizzi's illustrations, which though fabulous would probably horrify Howitt.

The spiders in my collage are a nod to the poem. In addition, I gave Mary a nice orchard painting (by British artist George Clausen) to rest on and some bits of plant life. The background is a recoloring of William Morris's classic Acanthus wallpaper design. The beautiful photograph of Howitt was used as the frontispiece for her 1889 Autobiography. You can't see it well in my image,  but the soft folds of her skin and the equally soft folds of her bonnet and shawl are beyond lovely.

Photograph source

COVETABLE CLASSICS: Timothy Snyder's ON TYRANNY in a new graphic treatment by Nora Krug

I just got a look at the advance readers' copy of the upcoming graphic edition of Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny, each page of which is designed and embellished by Nora Krug, and I am moved, awed, and seriously impatient to hold a print copy in my hands. 

I'll post a full review closer to the publication date of October 5, 2021. For now, let me just say that Krug (winner of the National Book Critics Circle autobiography award for her visual memoir Belonging) has done an astonishing job of embellishing Snyder's stark, prescient text. Each page is entirely different, and each at once (suitably) disquieting and beautiful; the result is an edition that feels at once utterly surprising and completely, perfectly inevitable.

You can see a handful of its images on Amazon (you can also pre-order it on bookshop.org) though they give barely a hint of the richness of the edition as a whole. (The cover art, for what it's worth, is to my mind slightly misleading, suggesting a more brutal and less colorful graphic vision than is actually found inside.) 

In addition to being a powerful text on how societies slide into tyranny and what we can do to resist that, the graphic edition is a powerful exemplar of the power of word/image combinations. The hardcover edition appears from Ten Speed Press on October 5, 2021.


From On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
by Timothy Snyder, illustrated by Nora Krug

Picturing EDITH WHARTON


©Suzanne Fox 2020
May not be downloaded or reproduced without permission
Sources: stock images plus

In addition to being the author of one of my favorite novels, The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton was an influential interior decorator, the first female winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and a close friend of Henry James. Born as Edith Newbold Jones to wealth and social status (it's said that the idiom "keeping up with the Joneses" refers to her father's family), her priorities and opinions weren't always admirable—for example, she was a committed supporter of French colonialism. Yet she did extensive and important charitable work during the First World War, and she was an extraordinarily astute observer of the ways elite society damaged as well as eased the lives of those born into it. And of course, suffering is no respecter of privilege: among other sources of distress in her life, the mental illness of her husband Teddy caused Edith years of deep difficulty and pain.  

My piece plays with her extensive travel as well as some of the residences in several countries she inhabited, wrote about and/or designed. Chief among these is The Mount, her estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, where she wrote The House of Mirth and which I'd love to visit some day. It's pictured here in snow at the top left. Clockwise from there, the compass frames display images of the Pavilion Colombe, her estate about an hour from Paris; Land's End, the home in Newport she bought and redesigned; and an outbuilding at the Villa Borghese, which appears in the book on Italian villas and gardens Wharton created with illustrator Maxfield Parrish. Though the title doesn't show, the book cover on which her portrait rests is that of an 1865 edition of Owen Jones' seminal The Grammar of Ornament, which Wharton would certainly have owned and used and which I've altered into a mirror-image block that looks a bit like a figured carpet. (I couldn't find a Wharton original book cover that would work.)

It was fun to work on a piece that could be quite dense and over-the-top, and also to play with warm reds and browns, which are not colors I'm generally drawn to. It was pure serendipity to find David Dashiell's wonderful photograph of Wharton's copies of her own books, which I used to line the borders. I layered a mostly transparent antique marbled book endpaper over them just to bring down their contrast and detail a bit: even in a piece that could serve as an illustration of horror vacui, the fear of empty space, too much is just too much.

COVERING EDITH WHARTON: introducing the "facial fragments" series

Sources: stock images plus, clockwise from top left,
Image title TK
Book cover art © Suzanne Fox 2021


 The novels of Edith Wharton offer many pleasures and some perfectly executed pain. Exquisite place descriptions, nuanced characterizations, absorbing narratives and a unique insight into American class divisions mark her best work. So too, at least for me, does a sense of sometimes unbearable constriction. Wharton is tremendously astute about the cruelties as well as niceties of society, its imbalances of privilege and power, and the steep price it charges people, particularly women, for whatever (always conditional) protection and comfort it provides. Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, my personal favorite among Wharton's novels, is a woman who reveres the very systems that  paralyze her, who can sometimes perceive the bars of her prison but can never imagine another world sufficiently to chart a route there. It's oversimple yet not entirely incorrect to say that her tragedy stems not so much from others' refusal to see her as more than a polished manner and a pretty face as from her own inability to do so. The social construct in which she lives dismembers her, in some deep psychic sense, and she colludes with it as it does so. Like many if not most of Wharton's protagonists, she is surrenders to something less than wholeness.

In thinking about "covering" Edith Wharton's books, my mind kept returning to that tension between beauty and a sort of brutality. This cover series uses some of the glorious portraits of women from the periods of which Wharton wrote, the late 19th and early 20th centuries, cropping them so that most of each woman's face is missing and most of what is seen of her is covered by her garments. Each woman becomes both presence and absence, and a mouth that seems ready to speak but of course never actually does so. The title and author type extend into the space around her, echoing the shape of her jaw and neck. The faint grid of circles overlaid on these covers was originally an overlay of an actual grille or gate, suggesting the way Wharton's women are locked within their gender, class and roles. I could never make that work, but I like this less literal version.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: Edith Wharton, One Big Hat, and Two Tiny Pups

 




Celebrating: MISTER FINCH

The mystery, strangeness, beauty and occasional grotesquery pervade the work of British textile artist Mister Finch. He describes himself thus: "Scraps of thread and fabric are stitched and pulled into fairy tale creatures looking for new owners and worlds to inhabit. Finch works alone and makes everything himself by hand in a studio full of books, glass jars and naughty cats." Michael Reynolds of Wallpaper notes another characteristic of Finch's work that also delights me, his connection to 19th century natural history specimen collectors and scientists, saying that Mister Finch "seems to have imagined quite a fantastic other reality, populated it, foraged it and has been good enough to share its spoils with us. Birds, insects, flora and fauna — all specimens that he has meticulously curated and fabricated with an almost Darwinian flair. Part modern day hipster, part Victorian dandy—Mister Finch has always struck me as an eccentric whose obsession with the natural world rivals that of his 19th-century counterparts." True, dat dat. In addition to his website, you can see his work on his Instagram and read about it and him in his book Finch: Living in a Fairy Tale World. The altered animal forms that pervade Mister Finch's work aren't to every taste, but they are definitely to mine.


Mister Finch, Florin

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