Weblog 178
July 05, 2009~ 12:00am
This holiday weekend has brought a respite from 'things as usual'. Other than a visit with my daughter and her family on my vacation day on Friday, I've pretty much holed up here, sleeping... reading... and surfing websites looking at art dolls. Dolls FASCINATE me. But particularly the one-of-a-kind, terribly expensive hand-made lovelies that more often than not seem to come from Japanese doll-makers. The prices are prohibitive, but the artists are very generous in allowing folks to simply look at them, marveling in their eerie, lifelike features and over-arching sadness.
Look at those EYES! My goodness....looks like she's lost her mother, her only puppy... and home itself. These dollmakers are geniuses at capturing pathos. Why is it the dolls are always sad? Is it a way to tug at the heart and make us want to rescue them- take them into our homes and keep them safe?
Those pouty, down-turned lips just cry out for someone to offer ice cream or take them to a circus.
Dolls are, by their very nature, sad, possibly because when very, very lifelike, they are saying over and over, "I'm not alive. I may look it, but I'm not alive." No matter how beautiful their clothes or how dewy their skin - how liquidy moist their luminous, glass-eyed splendor....
they are substitutes frozen in time, who never change. Ah! I just had an insight here! I think (at least for me) dolls like this represent the loss of childhood, so a melancholy sadness is always be present when I look at them.
I sit staring at these incomparably beautiful faces, and I am confronted with the past....with all that's disappeared and will never come again. That round-cheeked, open-eyed glowing wonder, the dimpled limbs... shows the nascency of life to be lived. Dolls are our own past - at least for women, and in them we can see the children we were, and every sadness. We see the physical past left behind, frozen in memory
and some of it is heart-rending beyond measure. Some of it cannot, and never did smile, ever. These dolls are our pain made manifest. They haunt us, poignant in their perfectly arrested beauty. These iconic dolls were never meant to be dragged behind a child in the playground -- they are totems as well as art.
July 05, 2009~ 9:00pm
Enough sad dolls! LOL! (I am psyching myself up to go back to work tomorrow, which is not an easy task after 3 days off)- so I've been looking at silly stuff. Stuff that delights me, such as this weird, 'ugly/cute' creature known as the New Guinea Echinda.
It's a close relative of the platypus, but they parted genetic ways 25 million years ago. He's a long-nailed, long-nosed cutie, if you ask me...he's shy, and he burrows. Also, the echidna's young are called "puggles"- which delights me!
I think any creature that nurses its young for seven months is pretty damn dependable. Strong family ties, there. (And honestly, the way these characters look, they do well to stay together.) Reminds me of the Ogdan Nash poem about the Hippopotomus...."Peace, peace, thou hippopotamus! We really look alright to us. As you, no doubt, delight the eye Of other hippopotami." LOL!
Sometimes, something is just so goofy-looking, it's cute!
And here is a happy character for ya'......the BANANA LADY!
Don't know if this is an old Busby Berkeley show gal or what....but she sure makes me happy just looking at her. How about you?
Returning now to my bedroom to delve back into a novel about a 12th Century child-killer and the little lady who tracks him down, ala 'Kay Scarpetta'. It's called "Mistress Of The Art Of Death" by Ariana Franklin, and it's terrifically captivating. (Seems I just can't can't shrug off my morbidity no matter how many Banana Ladies are around! It's my brooding, Celtic side. I never deviate very far from that. 'Tis a lurking curse, it is.)
***
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This holiday weekend has brought a respite from 'things as usual'. Other than a visit with my daughter and her family on my vacation day on Friday, I've pretty much holed up here, sleeping... reading... and surfing websites looking at art dolls. Dolls FASCINATE me. But particularly the one-of-a-kind, terribly expensive hand-made lovelies that more often than not seem to come from Japanese doll-makers. The prices are prohibitive, but the artists are very generous in allowing folks to simply look at them, marveling in their eerie, lifelike features and over-arching sadness.
Look at those EYES! My goodness....looks like she's lost her mother, her only puppy... and home itself. These dollmakers are geniuses at capturing pathos. Why is it the dolls are always sad? Is it a way to tug at the heart and make us want to rescue them- take them into our homes and keep them safe?
Those pouty, down-turned lips just cry out for someone to offer ice cream or take them to a circus.
Dolls are, by their very nature, sad, possibly because when very, very lifelike, they are saying over and over, "I'm not alive. I may look it, but I'm not alive." No matter how beautiful their clothes or how dewy their skin - how liquidy moist their luminous, glass-eyed splendor....
they are substitutes frozen in time, who never change. Ah! I just had an insight here! I think (at least for me) dolls like this represent the loss of childhood, so a melancholy sadness is always be present when I look at them.
I sit staring at these incomparably beautiful faces, and I am confronted with the past....with all that's disappeared and will never come again. That round-cheeked, open-eyed glowing wonder, the dimpled limbs... shows the nascency of life to be lived. Dolls are our own past - at least for women, and in them we can see the children we were, and every sadness. We see the physical past left behind, frozen in memory
and some of it is heart-rending beyond measure. Some of it cannot, and never did smile, ever. These dolls are our pain made manifest. They haunt us, poignant in their perfectly arrested beauty. These iconic dolls were never meant to be dragged behind a child in the playground -- they are totems as well as art.
July 05, 2009~ 9:00pm
Enough sad dolls! LOL! (I am psyching myself up to go back to work tomorrow, which is not an easy task after 3 days off)- so I've been looking at silly stuff. Stuff that delights me, such as this weird, 'ugly/cute' creature known as the New Guinea Echinda.
It's a close relative of the platypus, but they parted genetic ways 25 million years ago. He's a long-nailed, long-nosed cutie, if you ask me...he's shy, and he burrows. Also, the echidna's young are called "puggles"- which delights me!
"Echidnas (both long- and short-beaked) lay a single egg, which the female holds in a sticky pouch. The hatchling (known as a "puggle") resides in the pouch for between 40-50 days and receives milk from two mammary patches (echidnas have no teats).
Once the puggle develops spines, the mother digs a nursery den that becomes the puggle's new home; the mother returns every five days to nurse the puggle. The baby is weaned in seven months."
I think any creature that nurses its young for seven months is pretty damn dependable. Strong family ties, there. (And honestly, the way these characters look, they do well to stay together.) Reminds me of the Ogdan Nash poem about the Hippopotomus...."Peace, peace, thou hippopotamus! We really look alright to us. As you, no doubt, delight the eye Of other hippopotami." LOL!
Sometimes, something is just so goofy-looking, it's cute!
And here is a happy character for ya'......the BANANA LADY!
Don't know if this is an old Busby Berkeley show gal or what....but she sure makes me happy just looking at her. How about you?
Returning now to my bedroom to delve back into a novel about a 12th Century child-killer and the little lady who tracks him down, ala 'Kay Scarpetta'. It's called "Mistress Of The Art Of Death" by Ariana Franklin, and it's terrifically captivating. (Seems I just can't can't shrug off my morbidity no matter how many Banana Ladies are around! It's my brooding, Celtic side. I never deviate very far from that. 'Tis a lurking curse, it is.)
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