laura zindel.

My sister and her friend have often amused me by quoting a phrase from a sketch based television show called Portlandia. It's a phrase that seemed to pretty succinctly sum up an indefinitive trend whose origins are ambiguous, but which has become undeniably chic. That phrase is "put a bird on it". The catchy tag line is plucked from the mouths of two shop owners whose cure-all tactic for sprucing up previously unfabulous items is to simply... yup that's right, put a bird on it!

This relatively pain-free makover turns even the blandest of shop goods into covetable objects that score high in the hot-right-now department. And despite the actors' out-and-out camp delivery, its an eerie truth that in today's market the application of various winged specimens has become a kind of hipster shorthand for clever design.

And though mockery on national television certainly hails that this trend  has arrived at Port Obnoxious, whenever I  encounter products that do put a bird to good use I can't help but feeling a little warm and fuzzy inside. On a recent trip to the Baltimore Museum of Art I came across the work of Laura Zindel, an illustrator and ceramist who started out sketching straight onto clay with a pencil. After an afternoon of Matisse et al. it turned out to be these little pieces tucked away in the back of the gift shop which caught my attention. Perhaps it was the noir-ish blackbirds which drew me in, or the way in which the bulbous curves of each vase seemed to mimic the puffed and feathered forms of each of the various fowls. Either way I kept lurking around the display table, turning circles, willing myself not to like it as much as I did. "She only put a bird on it," I thought to myself. Ah well, in the words of R Kelly, "My minds telling me no. But my body... my body's telling me yessss!"

Bottom line is, best not to judge yourself too harshly. These handmade pieces are truly lovely. Have a look:

find more: http://laurazindel.com/home


all images ©  Laura Zindel

prints. and their past.

Le Jardin Fruitier, France, 1821

Welcome to The Small Galleon.

I'd like to begin with a brief tribute to the naturalist print, a longstanding love of mine, and quite a niche art form not usually granted attention outside of science history museums and collectors shops. 

Botanical prints are the earliest examples of this genre of art, which can be dated back to the fifteenth century. During this era, so called “herbals”, books containing medicinal and culinary uses for plants, called for scientifically accurate illustrations of the plants described, usually made with wood-cut prints. 

Belser Hortus, 16th Century

Matteaus Plataerius, 15th Century

Throughout the Renaissance period and the flowering of aestheticism, art for art’s sake, naturalist print making moved from pure functionality to cater to a more aesthetic market. Commissions for works of “florigia”, expensive books cataloging exotic fruits and flowers, flourished in the 17^th century. Advancements in techniques such as engraving and etching lead to greater fineness and experimentation.       

Indian Sugar Cane

Jatropha (Rubber Tree)

By the 18^th and 19^th century the popularity of botanical prints had reached its heights, while mass printing and lithograph allowed this demand to flourish. In 1787 William Curtis published the first issue of The Botanical Magazine, a platform for both illustrators and naturalists. This, the oldest journal of its kind, is still published today by The Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, London. 

(following images from Curtis' Botanical Magazine, 1807)

In the modern world, the naturalist print feels full of nostalgia, intrigue, and exotica. In a pre-photographic era, the print itself was part curiosity, part travelogue, part historical record. As an artistic object, it cradles the thrill of the newly observed. Like peaking through the slit of an antiquated kinetoscope, the feeling is one of looking back upon a world still discovering itself. Despite its origins as an informational tool, the naturalist print somehow never truly feels like a work of pure realism. Partial to artistic temperaments, romantic saturation of colour, and imaginative situations, to the modern eye they more closely resemble drawings in a children’s fantasy story than any sort of hard scientific evidence. For me, these depictions of flora and fauna will always evoke a sense of bespoke quirkiness that’s often un-retained in photography, now the premier medium for cataloging the natural world. 

Gang Gang Cockatoo, 1884

England, 1860

Germany, 1894

 So here were a lovely few to get us started. I’ll be featuring new examples whenever the fancy strikes me, grouped by categorical or thematic similarities.