provides a treasure trove of practical techniques and ingenious approaches. In this captivating guide, noted artist
Jane Freeman shows readers, step by step, how to use modified kit components, and found and handmade objects to create intensely detailed miniature constructions.
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April 1, 2006
The Cloisters
You get to the Cloisters by taking the A train to 190th Street. Underground, you enter a large old elevator faintly illumined by a flickering bulb. The door grates closed; the lift yanks upward like a tired old Clydesdale heaving to its tired old feet. The ascent is slow and jarring, with plenty of time to observe the cage, which is like a derelict room.
Hanging from a semi-detached wall-hook is a potted plant of indeterminate species, and not exactly thriving. Its sparse, trailing vines sway listlessly with each lurch of the lift. The steel walls are covered with faded photos of baby animals from Life and National Geographic, which ironically contribute to the sinister gloom.
The cage is dominated by a battered upholstered chair, whose cottony innards protrude from slashes in its dirty Naugahyde. Like the sullen bulb and the denatured plant, it too emits an indefinable air of dismay. The chair, it seems, is the personal property--and persona--of the elevator operator, who bears a pungent and reified likeness to it (the way people come to resemble pets through entropic, almost conjugal association). The distressed upholstery's oozing stuffing resembles the paunch of the operator that peeps from the button-gaps of his stiffly unwashed, brownish shirt. I imagine the man subsisting here, in his semi-furnished elevator room, which for all I know may be an antechamber to an extended Stygian world of boiler closets, shaftways, and the remotest tracks of the underground.
After a minute or so the elevator finally accomplishes a halt-gaited landing. With an audible shudder, it shimmies imprecisely to its berth.
Emerging from rank dimness into broad sunshine is a shock. The verdant expanse of Ft. Tryon Park looks artificially green, the sky like a painted theater flat. After a longish walk, I spot the Cloisters rearing from its pediment, which is a dun and craggy ledge like Sassetta's in “The Stigmatization of St. Francis.�
Within are stained-glass rondelles, Gothic tomb slabs, sepulchral effigies of youthful chevaliers, capitals carved with grotesqueries. The wallks are think and dank and perpetually cool. In the Unicorn Tapestry chamber, I try to parse the symbolism of Christ’s Incarnation. I suddenly remember, with a heady wave of dejas-vu, that all the colors in the tapestries came from just three plants. I wonder if I’d extracted, from tint-begetting botanicals, the hues in the weave, and if I’d once sat at the ancient loom.
I slip outside to survey the wrinkled and desultory Hudson, the gleaming bridge and majestic Palisades. In the colonnaded portico of the herb garden I play Hildegard von Bingen on my Walkman. All around are little wattled plots of pale-green herbs, and squat, gnarly quince trees, whose dwarfish proportions and clusters of unfamiliar fruit look like illuminations in a Books of Hours.
In the shop I browse among books piled on a long wood table. When I glance up from my reading, the visitors across from me look just like the saints and apostles in my hands.
Time to find some java. I look for a café but there’s only a concession stand that’s grubby, crowded, and out of almost everything. But they do have coffee, which I sip on my way back to the sepulchral elevator-reliquary, which will ferry me by fits and bumps to the 21st century via the IRT.
Posted by Jane on April 1, 2006 2:07 PM
