Home Page- As Time Goes By
There must have once been a time when there was more time available than there is now.
I’m reading this new book on Thomas Jefferson and the designing and building of
Monticello, and the conclusion I have come to is that he just had more time at his
disposal than we do now. (Actually I’m planning
to read it when / get some free tune, but! I.~’
read the dust jacket and looked at some of the pictures.)
Now there’s no question that Jefferson was a remarkable fellow. Well-read,
articulate and cultured, he was an amateur architect, inventor, botanist, landscape
designer, author, reader of seven languages, political theorist, avid rare book collector,
wine connoisseur, statesman, and, oh yes, president of the United States. And from all
accounts he entertained guests and relatives almost nightly. Even given that there was no
TV back then, the only way he could have accomplished all these things is if there were
more time in the past than there is today.
I can remember from my own childhood spending days doing nothing but annoying my little
sister and feeling no regret because I Knew there were buckets of time just lying around.
My friends and I spent one entire day catching tadpoles and putting them in a Coke can,
and we probably would still be there if one of my friends’ dad, who worked for the
phone company, had not come looking for us in his van after work. (The thrill of riding
in the back of that van with a/I that cool phone equipment
surrounding us was only mildly dampened by the knowledge that we were in Big Trouble.)
As I get older, however, I seem to have more and more trouble locating any extra time
at all. Before, I could just turn around and there it was, more time. Now it seems no one
can find the time to do anything anymore, despite all our modern, time-saving inventions.
Perhaps that’s why we’re so concerned with saving time now; we’re afraid
that there is going to be even less of it around in the future. |
printed in multiple
color combinations. After a few early "naturalistic" patterns of his own, Morris
rejected any attempt to create anything more than the shallowest of spaces in his papers,
designing instead a multitude of flat, conventionalized motifs, all derived from Nature,
and many bearing the names of flowers that Morris incorporated into the designs.
His first three papers, Trellis, Daisy and Pomegranate, still show traces of
the "French" penchant for naturalistic space, but with the next handful of
designs Morris would realize his mature style, creating bold, flat, stylized patterns with
a great deal of movement and energy. It is a testament to the success of Morris’s
designs that one or more of them have been in Continual production since their inception.
Another way that decoration could be added to walls in the Arts & Crafts interior was
through the use of stencils. In contrast to wallpaper, which presented a repeated pattern
in an overall "field", stencils could provide a much broader range of
effects. From the complex, multi-layered polychrome stencils Chicago architect Louis
Sullivan designed for the Trading Room of the Chicago Stock Exchange or the graphic,
almost painterly designs by Charles Rennie Mackintosh for the Willow Tea Rooms, to the
simple, sometimes monochromatic designs of Prairie School architect George Grant Elmslie
or even the flat, stylized patterns featured and promoted by Gustav Stickley,
stenciling offered an almost unlimited range of possibilities, both in design and
application. And again, unlike wallpapers, stencils could be used to create a continuous
running frieze pattern or used as a "spot stencil", to provide small notes of
color and pattern to an interior. And while wallpapers were applied over the wall, in
essence creating a second surface, stencil designs were applied directly to the wall,
becoming a part of the original surface and perhaps taking advantage of any irregularity
in the texture to create a visually interesting pattern that appeared to (continued
on page 4)
To see some of the stencils we have for sale please browse
the "stencil section" of our site. |