art – Page 7 – enclos*ure

Vintage landscape: flowers amicorum

April 25, 2016July 19, 2017 Cindy at enclos*ure5 Comments

A watercolor by Margaretha Roosenboom from an album amicorum created for the writer Anna Louisa Geertruida Bosboom-Toussaint on the occasion of her 70th birthday in 1882, via Archief Alkmaar Commons on flickr.

The album (684 loose sheets in an ornamental wooden box) contained drawings, watercolors, photographs, text, and music by friends and admirers.

The contributors represented a cross section of the cultural elite in 19th century Netherlands and Belgium, including many artists who were part of the Hague School.

After Bosboom-Toussaint’s death, the album was eventually given to her hometown of Alkmaar and is now in the collection of the Regional Archief Alkmaar.

To see some flower arrangements created and shared today, please visit Cathy at the blog Rambling in the Garden. She hosts “In a Vase on Monday.”

Vintage landscape: a terrace

April 20, 2016July 19, 2017 Cindy at enclos*ureLeave a comment

A farmhouse of To (or Ter) Coulster, in the town of Heiloo, Netherlands, 1815, by J. A. Crescent, via Regionaal Archief Alkmaar Commons on flickr.

You can click on the image to enlarge it. There are more of Crescent’s charming watercolors here.

A garden is the interface between the house and the rest of civilization.

— Geoffrey B. Charlesworth

Life in gardens: blossom time

March 29, 2016August 20, 2017 Cindy at enclos*ure5 Comments

“Blossom time in Tokyo,” ca. 1914, a woodcut print by Helen Hyde, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Helen Hyde grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and studied at the California School of Design and in Europe. While in Paris, she was influenced by Mary Cassatt’s early works, which made use of Japanese perspective and pattern and featured the intimate lives of women and children. In 1899, she moved to Tokyo, where she studied woodblock printing techniques. She lived there until 1914.

In a vase on Monday: Fritillarias

February 29, 2016August 20, 2017 Cindy at enclos*ure11 Comments

Potted Fritillaria meleagris in our living room this week.

The plants are 13″ to 15″ tall.

I love the checkered pattern on the blooms.

Right now, almost all the supermarkets and florists here are selling small plastic pots of three or four blooming or almost-blooming spring bulbs (about €3.30 each — cheaper than a lot of cut flowers).

I replanted these into two purple ceramic pots that I had from a previous plant purchase. Then, to catch the excess water, I also put them down in blue pottery teacups from Rwanda’s Gatagara Cooperative.

I covered the soil with seashell chips.

The yellow-blue sake pitcher and cups in the photos above were made by American ceramics artist Hayne Bayless. They were purchased years ago at the Smithsonian Craft Show — which will be held this year from April 21 to 24 at the National Building Museum* in Washington, D.C. If you plan to be in the D.C. area that week, you can buy advance (discounted) tickets here.

To see what other gardeners have put in a vase today, visit Cathy at Rambling in the Garden.

*The Oehme/van Sweden exhibit will still be there.

The Sunday porch: Frankfurt

January 31, 2016August 20, 2017 Cindy at enclos*ure4 Comments

“Big Trees” (Pohon Besar) by Joko Avianto of Indonesia, on the facade of the Frankfurter Kunstverein (Frankfurt Art Club), Frankfurt, Germany.

The sculpture was created in 2015 for the exhibition Roots: Indonesian Contemporary Art at the Kunstverein.

[“Big Trees”] consists of 1525 woven stalks of bamboo imported from plantations in West Java. Bamboo is historically associated with traditional craft. . . . [Avianto] borrows and reinterprets traditional Sundanese (West Java) weaving techniques to construct his exaggerated sculptural forms. His innovative process of breaking the long compact fibres of the columns between each node of the bamboo stalk makes it pliable while maintaining its strength. This allows for the bamboo to be manipulated, bent and woven into soft curvilinear lines. An underlying concern for Avianto is the changing socio-economic and cultural values associated with bamboo cultivation. This includes the decline of village owned and cultivated bamboo forests in West Java due to a new wave of global industrialisation, and the aggressive monoculture of the palm oil industry.

— from the sculpture’s label at the Kunstverein

You can watch a 4 1/2 minute video of its construction here.

detail3, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, 2016, enclos*uree