Posts Tagged Aesop

Alexander Calder and his circus

March 10, 2012 at 10:57 pm · Filed under film, Illustration, play, Tales ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Alexander Calder, Little Clown, the Trumpeteer, from Calder’s Circus, 1926–31. Wire, cloth, paint, yarn, thread, rhinestone buttons, electrical tape, rubber tubing, and metal horn, 12 × 3 1/2 × 3 in. (30.5 × 8.9 × 7.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from a public fundraising campaign in May 1982. One half of the funds were contributed by the Robert Wood Johnson Jr. Charitable Trust. Additional major donations were given by The Lauder Foundation, the Robert Lehman Foundation Inc., the Howard and Jean Lipman Foundation Inc., an anonymous donor, The T.M. Evans Foundation Inc., MacAndrews & Forbes Group Incorporated, the De Witt Wallace Fund Inc., Martin and Agneta Gruss, Anne Phillips, Mr. and Mrs. Laurance S. Rockefeller, the Simon Foundation Inc., Marylou Whitney, Bankers Trust Company, Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth N. Dayton, Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz, Irvin and Kenneth Feld, Flora Whitney Miller. More than 500 individuals from 26 states and abroad also contributed to the campaign  83.36.8a-d© 2009 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; photograph © Whitney Museum of American ArtRoll up! roll up! Come and see some amazing children’s picture books full of the creativity of artists and inventors….

Books like The Day-Glo Brothers about the two brothers that gave us Day-Glo paint:

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Or A River of Words about the poet William Carlos Williams:

I came across another recently. It’s called Sandy’s Circus, and it’s about the sculptor Alexander Calder:

This is about just one part of Calder’s amazing creativity – when he was in Paris and created a circus out of wire and bits and bobs. Here’s a video of him with the circus later in life:

 

 

As a boy, his parents always made sure “Sandy” had a workshop and tools.

He made his friends toys and jewellery from scraps of wood, leather and wire he would pick off the street. Sandy built his sister Peggy a castle for her doll – complete with a moat! He and Peggy made toy animals and played circus in the workshop.

…

The next year, 1926, he decided to go to Paris. Why Paris? Because that city was alive with art. And Sandy said, “In Paris it’s a compliment to be called crazy.” Sandy rode through the streets of Paris on his orange bicycle. He carried a roll of wire around his shoulder and a pair of pliers in his pocket.

When Sandy bumped into a friend, out came the wire and pliers. He would twist and bend and curl while he chatted. And before they said adieu, Sandy would give his friend a gift – voila! A small portrait of the person – made of wire.

The wire pictures are a bit like the ones he drew for a version of Aesop I have illustrated by him.

And I hadn’t realised that Alexander Calder invented the mobile (as in the hanging sculpture, not the portable telephone of course). It seems so ubiquitous and… obvious, that the thought of it being invented so recently is strange.

Here’s someone with a very long spoon actuating a couple of Calder’s mobiles:

And here’s one self-actuated:

“All Calders tend to make someone happy”:

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blowing hot and cold

June 7, 2011 at 8:26 pm · Filed under Illustration, Tales, Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , , , ,

Blowing hot and cold

A man and a Satyr once drank together in token of a bond of friendship between them. One very cold wintry day, as they talked, the man put his fingers to his mouth and blew on them. When the Satyr asked the reason for this, he told him that he did it to warm his hands because they were so cold.

Later on in the day they sat down to eat, and the food prepared was quite scalding. The Man raised one of the dishes a little towards his mouth and blew in it. When the Satyr again inquired the reason, he said that he did it to cool the meat, which was too hot.

‘I can no longer consider you as a friend,’ said the Satyr, ‘a fellow who with the same breath blows hot and cold.’

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cat’s paw

June 4, 2011 at 3:43 pm · Filed under Illustration, Tales ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

Reading one or two fables in spare moments (whiich there aren’t many of). The Moneky and the Cat came to my attention. It’s called an Aesop’s fable, but, like many, doesn’t seem to go back to Aesop. Where it comes from no-one seems to be sure.

The story itself is short, without the subtle humour and dialogue that Aesop’s fables often have:

Once  there was a small monkey who lived in the same household as a little cat. When he saw some chestnuts buried in the hearth, he began to brush the ash aside, but, afraid of the burning coals, he seized the foot of the sleeping cat and with it stole them out.

From this there is, apparently, the expression a “cat’s paw”: someone who does someone else’s dirty work (and not only doesn’t benefit but actually suffers for it).

These microfictions are so short they can be summed up with just a simple visual emblem, something like a hieroglyph of a situation.  Like the one here made for a little plate, one of twelve in the British Museum, based on the fable illustrations in a wonderful old book illustrated by Marcus Gheeraerts

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39 fables

February 15, 2011 at 11:19 pm · Filed under Illustration, play, Tales ·Tagged , , , , , ,

I always thought an installation with lots of Aesop’s fables would be good. But tonight I discovered that Louis XIV got there before me. He had a maze with 39 Aesop’s fables sculptures put into the Gardens at Versailles. I couldn’t really compete with him.

Here’s Charles Perrault’s wonderful guidebook to the fables and maze.

Wikipedia:

In 1665, André Le Nôtre planned a maze of unadorned paths in an area south of the Latona Fountain near the Orangerie. In 1669, Charles Perrault – author of the Mother Goose stories – advised Louis XIV to remodel the Labyrinthe in such a way as to serve the Dauphin’s education. Between 1672 and 1677 Le Nôtre redesigned the Labyrinthe to feature thirty-nine fountains that depicted stories from Aesop’s Fables. Each sculpture was accompanied by a plaque on which the fable was printed; from these plaques, Louis XIV’s son learned to read. Once completed in 1677 the Labyrinthe contained thirty-nine fountains with 333 painted metal animal sculptures. The water for the elaborate waterworks was conveyed from the Seine by the Machine de Marly. The Labyrinthe is said to have cost the equivalent of £8,000,000 and contained fourteen water-wheels driving 253 pumps, some of which worked at a distance of three-quarters of a mile.

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the fox and the crow

June 22, 2010 at 11:36 am · Filed under film, Illustration, Tales ·Tagged , , , , ,

The fable of the fox and the crow.

also:

http://us.penguingroup.com/static/packages/us/yreaders/aesop/index.html

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The Cat Metamorphosed Into A Woman

June 19, 2010 at 2:13 pm · Filed under Illustration, poem, Tales ·Tagged , , , , , , , ,

La chatte métamorphosée en femme

It was not happiness that came over her body
as you may have thought, but puzzlement
at the gradual elongation of trunk, the narrowing
into a waist, thinning of white fur until what
was left gave her face a peaked appearance,
like one stunned by a ghost.  But it was only the ghost
of herself she saw in the hall mirror as she slipped
the red blouse over her new breasts, stepped

into the red skirt that covered pubic mound
and spreading hips.  How awkward she was
in this unwanted body.  She sat on the Victorian
chair at the small pie crust-table,
her eyes red-rimmed, empty,
immeasurably sad, as she stared at us.
She leaned forward a bit on her arms.
She didn’t know what else to do with them.

Patricia Fargnoli

The story is from Aesop:

A young Fellow that was passionately in Love with a Cat made it his humble Suit to Venus to turn Puss into a Woman. The Transformation was wrought in the twinkling of an Eye, and out she comes, a very bucksome Lass. The doating Sot took her home to his Bed; and bad fair for a Litter of Kittens by her that Night: But as the loving Couple lay snugging together, a Toy took Venus in the Head, to try if the Cat had chang’d her Manners with her Shape; and so for Experiment, turn’d a Mouse loose into the Chamber. The Cat, upon this Temptation, started out of the Bed, and without any regard to the Marriage-Joys, made a leap at the Mouse, which Venus took for so high an Affront, that she turn’d the Madam into a Puss again.

THE MORAL. The extravagant Transports of Love, and the wonderful Force of Nature, are unaccountable; the one carries us out of our selves, and the other brings us back again.

THE ILLUSTRATIONS. Are from the fantastic Etchings of Marc Chagal.

JUST BECAUSE there’s a moral DOESN’T MEAN that change is impossible. REMEMBER this is just what happened to ONE CAT.

I LIKE THE IDEA of taking one of these Chagal pictures and the FABLE and stepping inside the subjects THOUGHTS and EMOTIONS at this time…

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a fable and an illustrator

November 20, 2009 at 5:30 pm · Filed under Illustration, poem, Tales ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Sam is nine and in a CM1 class at his école primaire. There’s a lot of memorising for homework, which seems like an old-fashioned sort of way of learning. With poems it’s OK, but with history, like the reigns of Clovis and Charlemagne, and long poetry like this fable of La Fontaine I’m not so sure:

—> LE LIÈVRE ET LA TORTUE

Rien ne sert de courir ; il faut partir à point.
Le Lièvre et la Tortue en sont un témoignage.
Gageons, dit celle-ci, que vous n’atteindrez point
Si tôt que moi ce but. Si tôt ? Êtes-vous sage ?
Repartit l’Animal léger.
Ma Commère, il vous faut purger
Avec quatre grains  d’ellébore.
Sage ou non, je parie encore.
Ainsi fut fait : et de tous deux
On mit près du but les enjeux.
Savoir quoi, ce n’est pas l’affaire ;
Ni de quel juge l’on convint. …

STOP!  That’s enough, Jean! Remember kids are going to have to learn this!

So let’s brighten things up a little with a favourite illustrator, Barbara Nascimbeni. You can see a couple of her illustrations of the same fable here:

When Sam was a toddler we had Noisy Ralph:

Later on we had Archie Hates Pink:

I like her way of painting, also the way things leap all over the place, the way the point of view seems to dance.

I like the books she chooses to illustrate too. The one above, though it is German, seems to be an Anansi story (translate it please!) She’s done some Aesop’s fables, like the hare and the tortoise of course. She seems to have managed to get published in all sorts of countries too.

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just a tiny story

May 4, 2009 at 1:54 pm · Filed under Tales ·Tagged , , , ,

then it’s time to sleep. OK?

OK

olivehole by simonsterg

A fox smelt a honey comb in a hole in an old tree. It squeezed in and devoured the honey. But now it was too fat to get out through the hole.

A cat passed by: ‘You will just have to stay in there until you get thin enough again to get out.’

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Anno and Mr Fox

February 7, 2009 at 2:48 pm · Filed under Illustration, Tales ·Tagged , , ,

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安野 光雅

I mentioned Mitsumasa Anno briefly before. And now, as I was thinking, wondering “What is the Fox doing in the Marketplace?” I turned to Anno’s Aesop (“A book of fables by Aesop and Mr Fox”)

At the foot of the Contents page is this forword to Mr Fox’s fables:

One day, at the edge of the forest, little Freddy Fox found something. He had never seen anything like it before. Perhaps someone had forgotten it, he thought. But it was rather dirty, so maybe it had fallen off the garbage truck. What could it be? Freddy picked it up and hurried home to show it to his fathe.

“That’s what is called a book, Freddy,” said his father. “Books are full of wonderful stories. People like to read them.”

“Oh, please read this book to me!” Freddy begged his father.

But his father only said, “I’m sleepy now. I’ll read it to you tomorrow.”

Maybe Mr Fox was just making excuses. Maybe he couldn’t read at all. But Freddy would not give up. He begged and begged for a story, so finally his father began to read out loud to him.

Some of the stores in this book are what Mr. Fox read to Freddy. Or was he just pretending to read? That’s Mr Fox’s secret! Let’s listen to his stories.

Then for each fable by Aesop there is Mr Fox’s reading of the fable at the bottom of the page.

It seems very clever to me to put these Mr Fox bits at the bottom of the pages. It makes a kind of book within a book. And it makes you think about interpretations, and misinterpretatations.

But Anno has a simpler idea:

“It often happens that what we have seen with our own eyes, or what we have felt in our hearts is closer to the truth than the knowledge we have gained from reading words on a page. A thing may look differently when seen from a different angle. And so, I believe that even a child who cannot yet read words can still learn many valuarble things by thinking ceatively about what he or she sees in the pictueres in this book, just as Freddy Fox does.

Because I travel so much, people often assume that I speak many foreign languages. Actually, however, this is not the case. But, even if I cannot read the words that are written on the signs when I am in a strange land, I can usually guess their meanings and find my way. And so I get along quite well, although, of course, I hope some day to study foreign languages and to be able to read and speak them properly.”

I like this picture of Anno travelling round, sketchbook in hand, in various countries. According to wikipedia he was born in 1926, so he would be, let me see, 83 this year. And he did his Anno’s Spain just five years back.

It seems a shame t hat lots of Anno’s books aren’t in print any more.*

*This is a shame with a lot of brilliant kids’ books. Maybe I will rant about this another time… something to look forward to! ;-)

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best and worst

January 16, 2008 at 2:18 pm · Filed under Tales ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

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Between heaven and earth there flies a red bird that is always wet. Can you tell me what it is?
There are 32 white stools ranged around the long red room where this old gossip lives.

Hugh Lupton’s  riddle book has a great Cuban tale in it that he heard from Mimi Barhélemey, called The Best and the Worst in All the World. I was pleased to discover that it is a descendant of a much older story told about Aesop:

Aesop, a slave to Xanthus on the island of Samos, was ordered one day to arrange the meal for a large banquet. He was to provide the choicest dainties that money could buy.
When the guests arrived they were treated to a starter of tongue, served with a variety of excellent sauces. The guests of course made a few jokes about this. But when the next course was tongue too, they were puzzled. And when the third and fourth courses turned out to be tongue too puzzlement turned to perplexity. Xanthus was embarrassed and turning to Aesop angrily demanded an explanation.
‘Didn’t I tell you to provide the best meat you could find?’
‘What could be better than the tongue?’ said Aesop. ‘It is the tongue that teaches and enlightens, the tongue that praises and entertains, it is the tongue that strikes bargains and makes promises.’
The guests liked what Aesop said and good feeling was restored to the meal.
Xanthus spoke up: ‘Well, perhaps all of you could do me the favour of coming again for another meal tomorrow?’ And turning to Aesop he added, ‘This time could you arrange a meal with the worst meat you can find?’
The guests liked the idea and returned the following evening. And, to their confusion, nothing but tongue was served again.
Xanthus seemed angry. ‘How,’ he said, ‘can you serve up tongue as the best possible meat one day, and then the worst meat the next?’
‘What,’ replied Aesop, ‘can be worse than the tongue? What evil is it not involved in? Violence, injustice and fraud are all debated and resolved upon and communicated by the tongue. It is the ruin of empires, cities and friendships.’
The guests were pleased by what Aesop had said, and pleaded with Xanthus to appreciate the wisdom of his slave.

I like the Aesop story, even though there is a slight feel of a sermon about it.
The characters in the Mimi Barthélemy version are crocodiles. It is spiced with riddles like the ones above. And it is, as the real Aesop of course was, more lyrical:

“It is the tongue – that can lull a baby to sleep, that can fill the ears and the heart with love and delight, that can make peace between two warring armies and can lead the world into truth. Truly it is the best thing of all.”

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