by May Sarton
The days are cold and brown,
Brown fields, no sign of green,
Brown twigs, not even swelling,
And dirty snow in the woods.
But as the dark flows in
The tree frogs begin
Their shrill sweet singing,
And we lie on our beds
Through the ecstatic night,
Wide awake, cracked open.
There will be no going back.
the first paragraph sums up my feelings now that the michael jackson auction is cancelled.
Gunta Stölzl was a German artist primarily known for her work with textiles and for being the only female master at the Bauhaus. There, she was responsible for the weaving workshop, which she helped transform from a somewhat traditional practice to something more akin to the Bauhaus philosophy:
Weaving is an old craft which has evolved principles upon which even the mechnical loom must still build today. A high degree of handcraft, dexterity, skill and understanding must be acquired, and these are not, as in the case of tapestry, to be nourished by imaginative power or artistic feeling. The coming of grips with the flat loom, as its natural result, the limitation of materials, the restriction of colour, the tying of the form to the weaving process.
The Gunta Stölzl website was created by her daughters and grandson, and contains a fantastic overview of her work, as well as scans of much more personal mementos– such as a book made in the 1930’s for her daughter.
Pictured above: Design for a Jacquard woven wall hanging (1927).
“I love it here,” he said, his gaze proudly moving from the checkered maroon and white ceiling to the purple and brown floral carpet on the walls to the coffee maker and microwave in the recording booth. “I even built the couch, stayed here last night, yeah mon,” he said in his soft Jamaican patois.
