Adventures in Toyland by Edith King Hall (1900)

Source.

Things Imagined for Malls

Source. 

Source.

Source.

Queens, NY. "Grace explained to me that the bronze statue we admired in the Mall “represents the Chinese cowboy. He’s depicted as a gentle, playful child, much different than the Macho Men of the American West.” Source.

Source.

Source.

Part of Mamilla Mall's Biblical Series. Source.

Source.

 Living Statue. Source.

Source.

Penny Dreadful Covers from The American Women's Dime Novel Project

Source.

Parkour's Thanksgiving Day Violent Baby Internet Round Up

Stories - Thornton Waldo Burgess (1874-1965)

Wikipedia
The Adventures of Buster Bear
The Adventures of Danny Meadow Mouse
The Adventures of Danny Meadow Mouse
The Adventures of Grandfather Frog
The Adventures of Jerry Muskrat

The Adventures of Jimmy Skunk
The Adventures of Johnny Chuck
The Adventures of Lightfoot the Deer
The Adventures of Mr. Mocker
The Adventures of Old Mr. Toad
The Adventures of Paddy Beaver
The Adventures of Paddy the Beaver
The Adventures of Poor Mrs. Quack
The Adventures of Prickly Porky
Adventures of Reddy Fox
The Adventures of Unc' Billy Possum
Blacky the Crow
Bowser the Hound
The Boy Scouts in A Trapper's Camp
The Burgess Animal Book for Children
The Burgess Animal Book for Children
The Burgess Bird Book for Children
The Burgess Bird Book for Children
Happy Jack
Lightfoot the Deer
Mother West Wind "How" Stories
Mother West Wind's Children
Mother West Wind "Where" Stories
Mother West Wind 'Why' Stories
Mrs. Peter Rabbit
Old Granny Fox
Old Mother West Wind
Whitefoot the Wood Mouse

Alphonse Mucha

Website of the Mucha Foundation
Website of Mucha Museum in Prague
The Slav Epic official site (EN)
The Slav Epic
Works by Alphonse Mucha at the Art Renewal Center
Painting by Mucha Graces Pisek, N. Dak., Church
Mucha Gallery at MuseumSyndicate
Alphonse Mucha – article on La Plume
Alphonse Mucha – illustrations from Le Pater

Peter Pan in Kensington gardens by J.M. Barrie ; with drawings by Arthur Rackham (1918 edition)

Source.

Illustrations and photos.

Han Christian Anderson Stories

"WHEN MERMAIDS DIE they turn to sea foam and cease to exist, while humans have an eternal soul that lives on in Heaven."

1835 The Tinder Box 1835 Little Claus and Big Claus 1835 The Princess and the Pea 1835 Little Ida’s Flowers 1835 Little Tiny or Thumbelina 1835 The Saucy Boy 1835 The Travelling Companion 1836 The Little Mermaid 1837 The Emperor’s New Suit 1838 The Goloshes of Fortune 1838 The Daisy 1838 The Brave Tin Soldier 1838 The Wild Swans 1838 The Garden of Paradise 1838 The Flying Trunk 1838 The Storks N1839 The Elf of the Rose 1840 What the Moon Saw 1840 The Wicked Prince 1842 The Metal Pig 1842 Shepherd’s Story  1842 A Rose from Homer’s Grave 1842 The Buckwheat 1842 Ole-Luk Oie, the Dream God 1842 The Swineherd 1844 The Angel 1844 The Nightingale 1844 The Ugly Duckling 1844 The Top and Ball 1845 The Fir Tree 1845 The Snow Queen 1845 The Little Elder Tree Mother 1845 The Elfin Hill 1845 The Red Shoes 1845 The Jumper 1845 The Shepherdess and the Sweep 1845 Holger Danske 1845 The Bell 1845 Grandmother 1846 The Darning Needle 1846 The Little Match Seller 1847 The Sunbeam and the Captive 1847 By the Almshouse Window 1847 The Old Street Lamp 1847 The Neighbouring Families 1847 Little Tuk 1847 The Shadow 1848 The Old House 1848 The Drop of Water 1848 The Happy Family 1848 The Story of a Mother 1848 The Shirt Collar

1849 The Flax 1850 The Phoenix Bird 1851 A Story 1851 The Puppet Show Man 1851 The Dumb Book 1852 The Old Grave Stone 1852 The Conceited Apple Branch 1852 The Loveliest Rose in the World 1852 In a Thousand Years 1852 The Swan’s Nest 1852 The Story of the Year 1852 There Is No Doubt About It 1852 A Cheerful Temper 1853 A Great Grief 1853 Everything in the Right Place 1853 The Goblin and the Huckster 1853 Under the Willow Tree 1853 The Pea Blossom 1853 She Was Good for Nothing 1854 The Last Pearl 1854 Two Maidens 1855 Uttermost Parts of the Sea 1855 The Money Box 1855 A Leaf from Heaven 1855 Jack the Dullard 1855 Ib and Little Christina 1856 The Thorny Road of Honor 1856 The Jewish Maiden 1857 The Bell Deep 1858 The Bottle Neck 1858 Soup from a Sausage Skewer 1858 The Old Bachelor’s Nightcap 1858 Something 1858 Last Dream of the Old Oak 1858 The Marsh King’s Daughter 1858 The Races 1859 The Philosopher’s Stone 1859 The Story of the Wind 1859 The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf 1859 Ole the Tower Keeper 1859 Anne Lisbeth 1859 Children’s Prattle 1859 The Child in the Grave 1859 Two Brothers 1860 The Pen and the Inkstand 1860 The Farm Yard Cock  1860 Beauty of Form Beauty of Mind 1860 A Story from the Sand Hills 1860 Moving Day 1861 The Butterfly 1861 Bishop of Borglum 1861 The Mail Coach Passengers 1861 Beetle Who Went on Travels 1861 What the Old Man Does 1861 The Snow Man 1861 The Portuguese Duck 1861 The Ice Maiden 1861 The Psyche 1861 The Snail and the Rose Tree 1861 The Old Church Bell 1862 The Silver Shilling 1863 The Snowdrop 1865 The Bird of Popular Song 1865 The Will-o-the Wisp 1865 The Windmill 1865 In the Nursery 1865 The Golden Treasure 1865 The Storm Shakes the Shield 1866 Delaying Is Not Forgetting 1866 The Porter’s Son 1866 Our Aunt 1866 The Toad 1868 The Goblin and the Woman 1868 The Dryad 1869 The Court Cards 1869 Luck May Lie in a Pin 1869 Sunshine Stories 1869 What One Can Invent 1869 The Thistle’s Experiences 1869 Poultry Meg’s Family 1870 The Candles 1870 The Most Incredible Thing 1870 Danish Popular Legends 1871 The Great Sea Serpent 1871 The Gardener and the Manor 1872 The Cripple 1873 The Flea and the Professor

Henry Darger, The Vivian Girls and The Realms of the Unreal

At the folk art museum.
Hidden in Henry's Room: The Secret Life of a Janitor
Google Images.

"At the heart of Darger’s work is the massive tale, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. Begun around 1910, In the Realms of the Unreal took Darger over twenty years to complete and provided the foundation for his art for the rest of his life. The story follows the misadventures of his seven heroines—the Vivian sisters, aged five to eight—as they fight countless battles in a war of good against evil.

Through tracing, carbon copying, and collage, Darger appropriated elements of popular culture to create the mural-sized collages and drawings that illustrated the fantastical scenes of In the Realms of the Unreal . He lifted settings, figures, flora, and fauna from children’s books, comics, newspapers, and magazines. Breathing life info the figures, he added personalized touches that divorced them from their original contexts: little girls gained penises or were given bird or butterfly wings and ram horns to form “Blengiglomeanean Spirits,” creatures who aided the Vivian girls in battle.

Darger was a fervent collector, and his one bedroom apartment was filled with his writings, art, and source materials. His complex drawings, which were stitched together to form compositions up to nine and a half feet in length, were so large that they could not be opened in the small apartment. Instead, they were stored in a stack on the artist’s bed; Darger himself slept in a chair. Yet there was an underlying order to this seemingly chaotic environment. Darger’s attention to detail can be seen in the way he handled his supplies. He attached individual labels to small paint pots to identify the colors inside. He gave whittled down pencils extending devices so that every last stub could be used. He transformed coloring books or even city phonebooks into receptacles for his collected imagery, filling every page with clippings and bundling the scrapbooks in stacks bound by twine." Source.

Beyond the Cloud

Grainy, moving drawings of hyper-modern life in which film cells are like snapshots with back-lighting torqued to maximize presentation of the lyrical in everyday life. The halting, poetic dialogue. The generous silences. Exaggeration of sublime aspects of the present (tall buildings, military globalism, ideological division) to suggest the future. The elision of science and technological progress (treated thematically, not literally--i.e. this is not hard sci fi) with dreams. Those threshold times in life (high school, young love, summer break) echoed in epic, large scale: War, Progress. The focus on the small and intimate within this, often with a natural detailing: a butterfly on the hand of a character, the rustling of the grass.

c/f Anime Transcripts - The Place Promised in Our Early Days

19th Century Naturalist Ernst Haeckel - Holiday Greeting Cards with Tentacles

Source.

The Goblin's Christmas by Elizabeth Anderson (1908)

Available, in full.

Goblins, broomsticks, Christmas. 

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

In full, with original illustrations, at project Gutenberg.

I Down the Rabbit-Hole
II The Pool of Tears
III A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale
IV The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill
V Advice from a Caterpillar
VI Pig and Pepper
VII A Mad Tea-Party
VIII The Queen's Croquet-Ground
IX The Mock Turtle's Story
X The Lobster Quadrille
XI Who Stole the Tarts?
XII Alice's Evidence





c/f 1903 film version . . . . 

Shary Boyle: If I Had One Wish

Some Context:

Website

Why Feminist Art Still Matters | Hazlitt | Random House of Canada (Discussion with Shary Boyle, Vanessa Dunn, Aminah Sheikh)

Shary Boyle Represents Canada at 55th Venice Biennale

Everything under the Moon (with Christine Fellows) - A heartbreaking shadow play that achingly equates the show's illusory projections with vanishing peoples and species, the transitory symbols of art becoming the ghostly psychic debris of our terribly, evermore plausible extinction. And yet a children's story as well, a quest, a buddy movie, the story of friends around a campfire.

Canadian Artist Project (including commentary by Sholem Krishtalka).

New and Upcoming work.

Facebook (with art posts!).

One wishes, within the seemingly infinite crawl spaces and hobby-holes of the inter-web, that the site of a *lovvved* artist would represent all of their collected and studio work. The representative sample of Shary's work so inspires and gives voice to awkward, shapeless dodos of thought.

Below are a few of my own dodos.

- Sensitivity, skill in craft and imagination are pursued as peregrine themes in Shary Boyle's work. These three motivations are rarely pursued as separate from one another. Imagination is allowed a mischievous tentacle, transforming reality, not retreating from it.

- Sensitivity is sometimes a shying quality in the purveyor of commodities, as making commodities is a repetitive activity. In an artist, this often seems to lead to a heightened valuation of craft. The other route (not always exclusive, sometimes complimentary) is to become more machine-like. One could (arbitrarily) set up two default positions to illustrate the range of attitudes towards the art object and the commodity: the 19th Century Arts and Craft movement, at one pole, and Warhol, at the other.

- Shary's production schedule is regularly machine-like (Warhol). Each individual piece of work, however, has a great deal of particular patience and care put into it (Arts and Crafts).

- Art objects, knickknacks that demonstrate sensitivity in craft, now a rarer sight for a modern, resist the habitual quick scan of the senses. Such work is to involve one, imaginatively, sinuously, in the presented vignette. 

- Shary spends much effort digging up techniques of undervalued, outmoded (by the ever-efficient machines), excluded or forgotten artisanal practices. Among practices, thoughtfulness, sensibilities renewed in the twining, fluffy, shying-then-emboldening, leaky, leafy-lined aesthetic of Boyle's work is a generous array of stylistic preciousness.

- Here is a scrapbook note of what I imagine to be preciousness in her work: fairy tale or folklore sources; imaginative landscapes; animals and animal-people; fantastical flights of fancy; elfin and prepubescent bodies; daffy costumes; detailed depictions of cloth, material; gilt, decorative, flowery, ornate flourishes; a respect for field observation as in naturalism; brittle, dainty, breakable materials for the sculpture; delicate, complimentary colour palette for the paintings; drawer-ly pencil strokes and pencil textures for the drawings; arcane technologies (minded mostly in the service of creating wonder) for the projections (slide projectors, magic lanterns, manipulated, theatrically and moodily, in real time).

- The porcelain figurines also point to a further back historical source, in European rococo (I imagine the first originators of stylistic preciousness also sensed this continuity between the two practices, the delicate, aristocratically-refined rococo collectible on the one hand and the imaginative, industrial-democratic object of preciousness, on the other).

- No doubt the general dis-inclusion of preciousness from canonical museum art has--at least--socially patriarchal roots. Noting its remarkable influence on every nick and cranny of twentieth century creative output, glaring is the lopsided gender participation in either milieu's practitioners/members (museum=boys, preciousness=girls). Common from the Victorian era on, transmitted broadly via the pulp children's industries through the 20th then into our century, under Boyle's deft touch, preciousness has almost the appearance of a polemic; it also tests the redemptive quality of historically excluded material.

- I say "almost polemic" because so often the polemical tone in art leads to a certain brashness in presentation, broad strokes, blunted figurations, rhetorical outwardness. Again, sensitivity, the value which Boyle seems to place in preciousness, remains ice-cream-serene, supreme.

- However, Boyle's adoption of preciousness, is not in itself precious (if one is to mean by precious to be cloyingly taken with the sentimental, obsessively self-protected by the pretty and the quaint). Darkness, unsentimental frankness appears in this mythic retelling of the modern situation often, with a certain grounded literalness. And with humour.

- Darkness often comes in the form of a stylistic intrusion: the gothic, the grotesque, the violently flattened.

- Relatedly, despite the luster of pretty inherent in the materials and certain of the techniques (porcelain, ornament, floral patterning etc.), forms are often knotty, gnarled, organic in the way of old dead trees or mud.

- A lot of her illustrative qualities so reminiscent of children's picture story books, it is hard not to feel one is in the midst of a story. So, one makes up a story. Her figurines, also calling up qualities of toys (especially the off-limits-to-children toys of impeccable enchantment collected by grandparents) put one solidly over to a place of meaningful, fantastical, sentimental play.

- The stage is mythic, her girl children the heroes. Her girl children or also highly androgynous or effeminate boys; also near-hermaphrodites.

- Proportions or features of profiles, torsos, limbs, erogenous chassis, blemishes, blotches that lack ideal ratio or poise by corroboration of the beauty industries are studiously, lovingly attended to.

 - Departing from a gloomy Dickinsian suburbs of dingy interiors, looming, impersonal adults, coercive bullies, her heroes flee to take up residence in a savage and wonderful Never-Never Land. This land is frequently a woods or savanna-like. All of these locales possess an Edenic, private quality.

- Modern heroes, their adventures are complicated by embarrassment, awkwardness, genital compulsion, clumsiness.

- Heroes nonetheless, they are embarked upon a journey where they encounter as trials the strangeness of their bodies; evolving amorousness and/or self-pleasure; the compulsion of rituals; a battle with shyness and boldness before an implicit, all-present gaze (the gaze, in my mind, is a camera lens, the pose perhaps the remembered gesture of confinement during a vacation snapshot); a fight for equilibrium and fair footing within the catastrophes, excesses, self-sacrifice of desire; and the ever-present, lurking monsters of past trauma.

- Violence to the psyche is portrayed bodily (a severed head, a discombobulated anatomy).

- One suspects that the kaleidoscopes of fantasy start as nascent buds within the skin. Like leaves growing then falling from branches, these buds elaborate then self-shatter before the force and processes of the world. Responsible for these strange flowers and twirling vines, the literal crisis--its hard contours kept slightly off-frame-- is pictured in a transformed manner. The vignette is more bodily and remembered than based in the hard light of present perception.

 - Fate, the trans-formative point in stories, intervenes at moments of charged physicality, when a body seems in revolt against both environment and itself. The resulting, intimate metamorphoses convolute the flesh into endless, strange contusions and conjurations, often involving the return of spring-time or the appearance of animals. In these instances, the body can be like a disguise, an erratic shrub or sometimes a fountain.

- Otherworld Uprising (the title of Boyle's *really* good art book) is a designation which seems to refer to the condition of a literal spirit world. In the revolt, spirits, nature, body overlap one anothers' conventionally separate outlines.

- The just-below-the-surface, (half) presence of this Otherworld, its portals and rabbitholes located in bodily orifices, throws subjective turmoil and psychical discomfort in ribbons of stress against a semi-solid yet also fugitive, fleeing screen. This screen, made up of dreams and of shadows, often stands as a protective shield between two figures encountering one another, forestalling or warning off their first meeting. This outcome of these meetings is often either reconciliation/camaraderie or assault-dismemberment.

- I suspect the ectoplasm of this spirit world is made up of bodily juices.

- Poised together on a small pedestal of turf, possible murderers, potential companions, yet many times the figures stay half disinterested in one another, with the retiring tendency of shy but busily assessing, curious children.

- The contrast or collusion of gender roles (the same, different) is helpful in drawing out possible secretive meanings lodged in these frozen confrontations. Meaning plays out many ways: as fantasy fulfillment; as revenge; as appreciation and gauge of difference; as fetishistic worship; as friendship, fulfilling, joyful and intimate, but also brutal or conspiratorial; as wistful compensation; as jokey-making-fun; as critique; as ceremonial renewal; as violence. But, also, sometimes, inscrutably.

In the prolific stories of her art, Boyle seems attracted to rituals of visionary questing more usual to those swept aside, the misfits, the crackpots, the obsessive hobbyists, the shut ins (i.e. Blake, Darger). The import managed within each strange vacation slide or cameo often gives the sense of secrets within secrets, fleshed out in private and in locations of quiet, a remembrance of a remembrance (possibly dangerous), gaining not just velocity over time but also structure and a skeleton.

- Ever so often, with the kind of concentrated, slow pacing capable of affecting a shift in scene without hemorrhaging continuity or narrative sweep, Boyle's turbulent frame switches to almost-fulfillment and near-certitude in the sublime. The characters are alone, holding hands, with a planet to themselves, a planet worthy of the naturalistic raptures on the pages of a speculative edition of National Geographic. Within the context of Boyle's art, this is sublime in a heroic, personal sense, haunting one with the juxtaposition of the human with inhuman, and, in a sense, the unrepresentable landscape: Nature. It is not the sublime of the modern architect for whom the sublime is the habitat-equivalent of military shock and awe (Derived from Fredrick Jameson, the more habitual invocation of the word).

A Moral Alphabet by Hilaire Belloc

A Moral Alphabet by Hilaire Belloc.

Excerpt:

For a Family

taking a walk

In Arcadia Terrace, no doubt:

The parents indulge in intelligent talk,

While the children they gambol about.

At a quarter-past six they return to their tea,
Of a kind that would hardly be tempting to me,

Though my appetite passes belief.

There is jam, Ginger Beer, Buttered Toast, Marmalade,
With a Cold Leg of Mutton and Warm Lemonade,

And a large Pigeon Pie very skillfully made

To consist almost wholly of Beef.

MORAL

A Respectable Family taking the air

Is a subject on which I could dwell;

It contains all the morals that ever there were,

And it sets an example as well.

Jessie Willcox Smith

Water Babies exhibition.

Charles Kingsely's Fairy Tale, with the illustrations in context.

"Dear Grandpater -- Have you seen a Waterbaby? 
Did you put it in a bottle? 
Did it wonder if it could get out? 
Could I see it some day? -- Your loving Julian."

A gifted illustrator certainly of preciousness, also of whimsy, Jessie Wilcox Smith is the artist of this fantastical series, from Kingsley's original Water Babies edition.

Laura Albert

From New York magazine: Who is the Real JT LeRoy? A search for the true identity of a great literary hustler.

 

When I first read J. T. LeRoy, for whatever reason, I plain didn't buy it.
 

Then, when the news broke that J. T. Leroy was the persona and deftly crafted literary hoax by one Laura Albert, I was hooked on the para-literature that emerged devoted to unmasking the jig.

 
Here is a writer whose relationship to reality was specifically that of a liar, hustler and thief.