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 5, 2006
The Lifetime of Flowers and Towers
Today began drizzly, grizzled and chilly. An hour ago it briefly snowed flakes like magnolia petals. I heard that two minutes and a few seconds past one o’clock the time will be 01-02-03-04-05-06, a sequence that won’t occur again for another thousand years.
To herald this fleetest of seasons are flowering pear trees and other budders and bloomers. Dim green things, not there yesterday, today are poking up through pavements and in remnant soil from last year’s flower pots. Restaurants brandish long branches of quince and forsythia. Impromptu daffodils appear in coffee cans (or Steuben vases), glaring from smudged (or dazzling) windows in rent-stabilized walk-ups (or million-dollar lofts). The caustic yellow splotches outshine the red, superannuated light bulbs that still linger in industrial shaftways.
This particular lover of rubble, at home in glass and steel, has a renewed interest in nature. During winter, I forget about it (cognitive dissonance?) or regard it as frivolous, a garnish on a plate. Now I appreciate every chance ailanthus beginning to green the parking lots, and the queues of curbside ghinkos. Verdure chants “rebirth� in public parks. Outdoor markets offer sprouts in pots. Bookstores headline gardening books to leaf through, pardon the pun. Here comes the sun.
In a small park, on a damp wood-slat bench, I sit amid a prolix accretion of little flower plots not unlike miniature graves. The wind duets with the hum of traffic. From a clutch of seed packets has sprung a miscellany of thready growth, jumbled like the wrong side of an embroidered tablecloth. Come summer there'll be unwieldy, tremulous hollyhocks; fulsome peonies in tissuey wads; day lilies & tiger lilies; marigolds, daisies. And rows of indeterminate chartreuse wicks, trussed to unwieldy bamboo spindles. And sunflowers big enough to stitch into gowns. And baleful furry blooms in heavy browns and violets: velvet-clad doyennes of matinees, with petals drooping like downcast eyelashes; all hinting at the paradox of indomitable fragility.
I wander to the river, which looks viscous and muscular; flexes and ripples like a snail’s foot. A girl hobbles by in a black nylon slip worn like a dress. Her leg is in a cast painted black. Small, flinty boys on skateboards ricochet off stone berms. Tides of visitors flow in and out of ferries. Those boats blast diesel smoke, arc wide as hoop skirts, straighten course, diminish, vanish . . . in the apparent cycle of emergence and demise.
Embryonic skyscrapers teeter in construction sites like tall-necked dinosaurs raising ungainly heads. The sky is gored with trusses, punctured by skeletel lifts and bright red cranes. At the boatless marina, I suddenly remember . . . Sept. 10, 2001. I'd stood here, looking up and thinking: One thing for sure--the towers will outlive me.
Posted by Jane on April 5, 2006 2:29 PM
