Sexy Ida
“Don’t give your love to sexy Ida
‘Cause she’s the sister of a black widow spider’
—from Sexy Ida, by Ike & Tina Turner, 1974. I heard this on my AM radio just this evening. Man, I tell ya, AM 1260, Baton Rouge, rocks!
A smooth, closely shaven surface of green
“A smooth, closely shaven surface of green is by far the most essential element of beauty on the grounds of a suburban house.”
—Frank Jesup Scott, from The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds of Small Extent, 1870. As quoted in Poplorica by Martin J. Smith and Patrick J. Kiger, 2004.
velveteen
“It was sometime between 1930 and 1933, in the city of Papeete on the island of Tahiti, when an American expatriate painter named Edgar Leeteg walked into a shop that sold art supplies. . . . As was Leeteg’s habit, he flirted with the young Chinese woman behind the counter. Then he asked her to sell him some monk’s cloth, a type of canvas. ‘I need it to paint on,’ he explained.
‘We’re all out of monk’s cloth,’ the clerk told him. . . .
Then the clerk, on the verge of losing a sale, suddenly remembered that the shop’s owner had been pushing her to unload an overstock of another type of fabric. ‘How about some velveteen?’ she asked. ‘Could you paint on that?’”
—Martin J. Smith and Patrick J. Kiger, from Poplorica, 2004.
black velvet
“The Chinese used the plush fabric as an art medium as far back as the 1200s, and a century later, Marco Polo saw black velvet paintings in India. In Victorian England, black-velvet painting became a pleasant diversion for society matrons. . . . Few serious modern artists worked with it, in part because velvet had a tendency to soak up paint like a sponge and then cake grotesquely, until a landscape or scene started to resemble an aging hooker’s makeup. But [Edgar] Leteg, who as a youth in Illinois had seen a few Renaissance-era velvet paintings in a museum, had an epiphany. He figured out that thin, light strokes scross the fabric would keep the paint from soaking in too deep. His first efforts were female nudes, which had obvious appeal to his drunken-sailor clientele.”
—Martin J. Smith and Patrick J. Kiger, from Poplorica, 2004.
they are the brownest of all the brown elves
“They live ’neath the curtain
Of fir woods and heather,
And never take hurt in
The wildest of weather,
But best they love Autumn—she’s brown as themselves’
And they are the brownest of all the brown elves.”
—Patrick Chalmers, from The Puk-Wudjies, a poem published in Punch in 1910. According to Priscilla Johnston in Edward Johnston, 1958, Edward Johnston loved this poem and even created his own toy puk-wudjies.
“Only daily-work art is worth a button”
“‘Only daily-work art is worth a button,’ said [W.R.] Lethaby. ‘The craftsman must be a workman,’ said [Edward] Johnston, and [Eric] Gill, in his writings, never ceased to proclaim that the artist must be an ordinary man and not ‘a hot-house plant.’”
—Priscilla Johnston, from Edward Johnston, 1958. W.R. Lethaby was Johnston’s primary professor at the Royal College of Art. Eric Gill was a friend and fellow student.
reds and blues and greens
“The most remarkable of [Edward Johnston’s recurrent childhood] dreams was one that he came to connect with the lifelong fascination exerted upon him by the mysterious recurrences in mathematical series. He dreamed that he climbed a great brass chain till he found himself in a scale pan. There he saw the Trinity throned in glory, surrounded by the Apostles. Their robes were of the most intense and brilliant colours, reds and blues and greens. The whose scene was one of the greatest splendour and yet, as he gazed at it, he had the felling that, wonderful as it was, this was not quite it, not the ultimate and final vision. With this thought he looked up and there was another great brass chain. Again he climbed and reached another scale pan and again there was the vision but even more brilliant than before. The colours filled him with delight yet still he knew that this was not quite what he sought. So he continued to climb up and up and each time the vision increased in brilliance until at last he reached a scale pan where the colours almost vanished in pure light and he knew that he had reached his goal.
Afterwards, when he began to be fascinated by the illuminations in early manuscripts he found again what seemed the very colors that he had seen in his dream, and recognized them with a thrill of joy.”
—Priscilla Johnston, from Edward Johnston, 1958. Priscilla was the daughter of the great calligrapher and type designer. (You may not know his name, but if you read English you have seen his type and felt his influence.)
a skyblue day
“. . . it was a skyblue day in December sixty-nine (the nineteen silent). . . .
A skyblue Plymouth, with the sun in its tailfins, sped past young rice fields and old rubber trees on its way to Cochin.”
—Arundhati Roy, from The God of Small Things, 1997. (The first ellipsis is hers, it opens a chapter. The second is mine.)
black cat—shaped holes in the Universe
“With the certitude of a true believer, Vellya Paapen had assured the twins that there was no such thing in the world as a black cat. He said that there were only black cat—shaped holes in the Universe.”
—Arundhati Roy, from The God of Small Things, 1997.
Glass beads
“[Glass] was probably accidentally discovered by Egyptian or Mesopotamian potters while they were firing their wares. The first glass was in the form of a glaze, a mixture of sand and minerals fused onto the surface of stone or ceramic objects in an oven, producing a hard, shiny, outer layer. Later it was found that if the glaze were thick enough, it would stand by itself—the first solid glass. . . . Glass beads were highly prized in the ancient East. Some were mounted in gold, like precious stones—and some have even been used, in parts of the world, as money.”
—from The Corning Glass Center, published by Corning Glass Works in 1958.