Lewis, himself a master of tales, captures something of the essence of what makes The Wind in the Willows such a loved text since its first publication in 1908 . An illustrator’s dream, it has been visualised by many over the years. Scholar Annie Gauger spent over 10 years researching the text and illustrations, including Oxford’s Bodleian library collection, to compile this wonderful annotated edition.

Curiously the question of anthropomorphising the main four characters, or of leaving them to their ‘natural’ animal attire, has had various treatments over the years. Kenneth Graham seems to have pictured them in their natural state, though the more recent the illustrations the more complex the ‘humanisation’ seems to be. Gauger’s edition is a must read for all who love the classic tale and it’s characters, delving into the text in such detail with personal, historical, and illustrative anecdotes. Having spent many a day rambling around Oxford’s canal and river banks it is delightful to think that Graham too was thinking of these places when writing the letters to his son ‘the Mouse’. Letters, which were to form the text of this great children’s classic with which I never tire. The illustrations below are by  self taught American illustrator Paul Bransom; the first to fully illustrate the text. They were reproduced using chromolithography in the 1913 edition, published by Scribners.

One of the most quoted books of all time it is full of delicious character moments such as these:

“All was a-shake and a-shiver—glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spell-bound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.”

…“There is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. In or out of ‘em, it doesn’t matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that’s the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don’t; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you’re always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you’ve done it there’s always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you’d much better not.”

…`Glorious, stirring sight!’ murmured Toad, never offering to move. `The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here to-day–in next week to-morrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped–always somebody else’s horizon! O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my!’

…’What are you always nagging at Toad for?’ inquired the Badger, rather peevishly. ‘What’s the matter with his English? It’s the same what I use myself, and if it’s good enough for me, it ought to be good enough for you!’

‘I’m very sorry,’ said the Rat humbly. ‘Only I think it ought to be “teach ‘em,” not “learn ‘em.”‘

‘But we don’t want to teach ‘em,’ replied the Badger. ‘We want tolearn ’em— learn ‘em, learn ‘em! And what’s more, we’re going to doit, too!’

Here you will find a gorgeous array of lyrical work splashing out from all angles by illustrator Mari Kanstad Johnsen. Her studio is full of a curious naive and sophisticated visual poetry straight from the heart of Norway. I love the bears peaking out of mountains in her Illustration for Norwegian outdoors-magazine Norrøna Magazine. As to the Manhattan girls; it’s just genius in a jovial brush or three.

The Illustrations for the childrensbook “Barbie-Nils og Pistolproblemet” (Barbie-Nils and the Problem with the Gun), written by Kari Tinnen, published by Gyldendal will make you want to go out tomorrow and learn Norwegian. And if you first pick up the childrensbook VIVALDI, written by Helge Torvund, published by MAGIKON the images are equally and whimsically poignant.

These old patterned eyelets are a stone’s throw from the Main, yet another of the world’s rivers currently swollen by a profusely weighty and wet atmosphere. It also sits beside the square Börsenplatz which survived the war. The shadows dance  and light bursts intermittently through various tints of old glass. It all hints at the warm glow of hearts within made merry on mead (or something along that vein). Stand outside and faces of the past stare back and across the cobbles in beautifully detailed, civic, stained glass. Gestern haben wir eine Kneipentour gemacht; yesterday we went bar hopping.

A German national and well-travelled intellectual and theologian, he was part of a group who attempted to assassinate Hitler. Many such dissenters took the opportunity to save their lives through exile but Bonhoeffer felt he could do more from within than without. The conspiracy was discovered and all were arrested. Bonheoffer was hanged in the concentration camp at Flossenburg a few days before it was liberated by allied forces. He was put to death alongside two of his brothers-in-law and several of his close associates at the age of 39, leaving behind a devoted fiancé and countless who loved him. Within the prison his indomitable character and unswerving kindness won him many friends; including the two Gestapo prison guards who so admired him that they smuggled his writings and poems to the outside.

There are numerous recently written works about him. The copy I am reading includes a memoir by G.Leibholz, which outlines this man’s courageous stand and includes some of his poetry:

Who am I? They often tell me

I stepped from my cell’s confinement

Calmly, cheerfully, firmly,

Like a squire from his country-house.

Who am I? They often tell me

I used to speak to my warders

Freely and friendly and clearly,

As though it were mine to command.

Who am I? They also tell me

I bore the days of misfortune

Equally, smilingly, proudly,

Like one accustomed to win.

Am I then really all that which other men tell of?

Or am I only what I myself know of myself?

Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,

Struggling for breath, as though hands were

compressing my throat,

Yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds,

Thirsting for words of kindness, for neighbourliness,

Tossing in expectation of great events,

Powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,

Weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,

Faint, and ready to say farewell to it all?

Who am I? This or the other?

Am I one person today and tomorrow another?

Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,

And before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?

Or is something within me still like a beaten army,

Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.

Whoever I am, Thou knowest, 0 God, I am Thine!

March 4,1946

The painting is by Wassily Kandinsky: Composition X (1939) who’s teaching post at the Bauhaus was closed down by the Gestapo in 1933; the same year that Bonhoeffer denounced the political system on the wireless, though he was not expelled from his lecturing position at Berlin University until 1936.

This season’s collection, Totem, sees the infusion of South Pacific totem-pole imagery into digitally printed and tightly defined silhouettes. She is never afraid of colour or pattern and uses it to express the very rhythm of a culture; repeating or bursting forth on a central bodice panel or imaginitively cut construction. Totem also draws on the influence of the Modern Primitive and Bauhaus movements. In 2008 it was Afghanistan and Zarafshan native textiles that we saw as accents on the body. This most recent story seems to carry on directly from her 2009 collection; Polyrhythms. In drumming this term describes an African drum sound where different rhythms are played together to make one sound and it is this, along with Miles Davis and African textiles, which inspired that collection.

In Tina’s own words about Polyrhythms:

I wanted to create a playful collection where all the styles looked like they belonged to the same family but they all had their own quirks and eccentricities. I suppose playing with unity and diversity at the same time. I love multiculturalism and designing this collection was like getting a bunch of people from different social classes and cultural backgrounds and putting them into one harmonious space.

Last year’s first showing by the 24 year old garnered this reaction from Godfrey Deeny, Fashion Wire Daily; “…the best debut collection by any designer on the planet this year… this was the type of debut performance that would win a standing ovation in Milan or Paris and the sort of show that designers in their mid-thirties very, very occasionally turn out after working 70 hour weeks for 15 years with Miuccia Prada or John Galliano.”

In growing his aesthetic this season there is much cross wrapping of the body and extensive draping. It’s also great to see the continuing evolution of the digitally manipulated print. There are echoes of the glories of Fortuny‘s ‘delphos’ gown, casting a contemporary Australian beach-side sensibility upon a resplendently classical theme. It also alludes to the idea of banding around the body; as in classic 80′s Leger.

When I visited I stayed overnight on one of the Sound’s few charter vessels, went kayaking on the still water and sat on the deck afterwards. This image is not far removed from the view that we watched as the day faded into night; and must have been taken around the same time of year – September, early spring. It was avalanche season and the four hour bus trip from Te Anou crescendo-ed when we emerged through that final long tunnel on the road and began making our ascent down to the water’s edge. I think next time I’d like to attempt the Milford Track; a four day hike through the Fiordland National Park. Another friend has done it; after lengthy preparations over four months.

The visual memory of that fiord between buttressing outcrops and peeks is enduring in the mind’s eye, as is the peace of the reflected sky when the Sound is still.

There is the quality of life springing from these works, which are created using myriad coloured stitches that play upon a plain ground cloth; typically white remnants of garments, or rags. These were transformed into celebratory quilts for special family events. The stitches are tiny and prolific, and create beautiful surface textures in addition to providing colour and shape.

Most of the pieces in this show are from the nineteenth century. Motifs are often, but not always, either of vegetation or religious subjects; Hindu and Islam. Sometimes the pattern has grown directly out of the imagination of it’s maker; whimsical drawings revealing the occasional creature-with-character, people or whimsical story-lines amongst the flowers.

Many other works in the show failed to hold my attention. Perhaps this was due to a sense of dissociation, detachment and what I might describe as hollow affectation. Broadly speaking they felt lacking in any real personal content or emotionally honest response; deliberately so for various reasons. Stephanie Sinclair‘s photojournalism documenting female self-immolation was a shock, and an exception of course; a harrowing insight that is burned into my brain, and I’m sure everyone’s who has seen the work, and rightly so. The Whitney site has some great links discussing it further. I’ll touch on it enough to say that her work broaches various great divides, not least the divide between journalism and art.

Overall, and excluding the works I mention here, there is something in The Time’s estimation of the show; that it was “tweak-intensive …, abstraction’s old content — utopian ideals, personal expression — is squeezed out. What’s left? Décor? Expensive busywork? The catalog refers to such painting as “personal” modernism, though the opposite seems to be true. It’s plain old product, and proud.” And for those of us with a foot in the commercial world it left us wondering why? Why, when you have a chance to pour your guts out without a commercial reality staring you in the face, would you not take the opportunity to connect to internals, be raw and, above all, be at the least a little bit wild and brave. Alternatively we have yet another commodity here that is suffering from current economics.

Substance again, to bring up the rear, could be found in Pae White’s simple but delightful textile work of cotton tapestry (above) pretending to be smoke; “cotton’s dream of becoming something other than itself”.

The reduction of shapes in this fragment, especially when contrasted with the gold/turquoise brocade fragment, references a paring down of motifs to their geometric basics. It’s interesting to see this idea in renaissance cloth, the idea has certainly proliferated in textile patterning; not just since the 1920′s (Bauhaus and Art Deco), but certainly from the ‘Biedermeier’ era – which is earlier c.1815 – 1845. Here I’m thinking of Milwaukee Museum’s 2007 heralded exhibition covering the Biedermeier ethic; and the much acclaimed catalogue in which the era is described as the great perpetrator, in European textiles, of the ‘invention’ of simplicity.

Whether it is an invention, or more of a revival could do with further clarity for me. One just has to look at Coptic fragments (from around 450AD onwards) to see beautiful simplicity both in form and colour and whether this was an invention of simplified forms or an unconscious simplification is not entirely clear to me; and may be beside the point since the Copts were in Northern Africa. In European textiles complexity-of-motif seems to have grown exponentially at the hand of textile artists since the late medieval era. This is indicative of the textiles of Europe only, and of a demographic of producers whose clients could afford such cloth. It largely skirts around European folk and ethnic textile motifs.

As one looks at the development up to today the logic of simplicity begetting simplicity eventually must end in a white space, which we have certainly seen. Alternatively tomorrow’s Printsource and Directions shows should once again engulf us all with revivals and extrapolations – both pumped up or pared down – of all manner of eras and cultures at every turn and in every manner of regurgitation; some working the balance well, some not so much.