Decorative Arts in Canada | Les arts décoratifs au Canada SPRING | SUMMER 2014 $10.00 BOTANICAL ART Dye Plants and Design Emerald Ash Borer | Flowering Passion | Diaphanous Folds A Victorian Brooch Deconstructed Ornamentum Spring | Summer 2014 Volume 31 Number 1-2 Contents ORNAMENTUM Decorative Arts in Canada / Les arts décoratifs au Canada © copyright, the contributors Cover image: watercolour of cyclamen, by Jean Johnson. See page 6. Ornamentum defines decorative arts as creative work, frequently of a practical or useful nature, produced by an artist, craftsperson, or amateur, which has intrinsic aesthetic and/or historical value. These arts include interior design, furniture and furnishings, ceramics, glass, metalwork, graphics, textiles, theatre arts, aspects of architecture, industrial and landscape design. 14 Financial support for Ornamentum has been provided by the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada; the Ontario Arts Council; the Macdonald Stewart Foundation. 28 Cette publication a été réalisée grâce à l’appui du Conseil des Arts du Canada, qui a investi 20,1 millions de dollars l’an dernier dans les lettres et l’édition à travers le Canada; Le Conseil des arts de l’Ontario; la Fondation Macdonald Stewart. SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION Email [email protected], see www.ornamentum.ca or write to Box 235, Station Q, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4T 2M1. Annual subscription $20.00 (2 issues). 6 Publisher Harriet Bunting-Weld Editor John Fleming Managing and Associate Editor Lorraine Johnson 5 Editorial Botanical Art John Fleming Editorial Assistant Lindsay Rose-McLean 6 The Diaphanous Folds of Botanical Art: The Work of Jean Johnson Circulation Martha Wilder Art direction and design Adams + Associates John Fleming Design Consultants Inc. Pre-press and printing 10 The Colours of Nature: Dye Plants and Design The Lowe-Martin Group Thea Haines and Rachel MacHenry EDITORIAL ENQUIRY & ADVERTISING CORRESPONDENCE 14 Mining Material: The Emerald Ash Borer Noa Bronstein Please send advertising inquiries to [email protected]. 18 The Crying of Lot 222: A Victorian Brooch Deconstructed Unsolicited manuscripts will be considered for Donna Bilak publication. We publish in French and English. Articles accepted will be published in the language in which they are written. For submission guidelines 22 Linking Human to Nature and Hand to Machine: please contact Lorraine Johnson (416) 536-2325 or Marian Bantjes’s Designs Brian Donnelly download them from www.ornamentum.ca. Please send manuscripts, discs, photos and other editorial and advertising matter to: Ornamentum, 26 SPOTLIGHT ON THE COLLECTION: A Flowering Passion for Porcelain: Box 235, Station Q, Toronto, Ontario M4T 2M1. George and Helen Gardiner Rachel Gotlieb Deadline for next issue: 31 July 2014 Printed in Canada ISSN 1718-5211 28 Eye, Mind, and Hand in Evolution Sam Carter 34 WHAT TO SEE Decorative Arts Exhibitions across Canada Editorial Botanical Art John Fleming ALTHOUGH THE DECORATIVE IMPULSE in its earliest historic manifestations may be ascribed to human understanding of natural forms and forces as signs with mythic, religious, and spiritual meanings— sun discs, phases of the moon, wave-like repetitions, and the like— it seems generally accepted that the origins of botanical illustration arose as a technique of discovery and classification in the search for plants and flowers with medicinal properties. This practice of discovery and application through visual representations of the material world conveyed both a functional scientific content and a system of aesthetic markers necessary to the identification of that meaning: thus colours to attract certain insects, whether bees to pollinate flowers or other species to feed the insectivorous pitcher-plant. So too can images of a botanical nature be found in a multiplicity of other material produc- tions, in Aboriginal uses of plant materials for dyes, on pottery and ceramics that match contents with container, in still-life paintings and floral watercolours, on sculpted furniture, jewellery, graphics, and in language, as a complex lexicon of floral imagery constructed to express human emotions and rituals, traditionally described as “the language of flowers.” ornamentum | Spring Summer 2014 | 5 THE DIAPHANOUS FOLDS of BOTANICAL ART The Work of Jean Johnson John Fleming BOTANICAL ART HAS BEEN a life-long presence in Jean Johnson’s imagination. She recalls Left from early days recurring walks through fields and woods with her father, an avid gardener and Watercolour of orchid, by Jean Johnson amateur naturalist, who named as they went, in the well-established binomial system of Linnaeus, wildflowers, plants, and shrubs in both common and scientific terms. Thus the bloodroot plant Above Watercolour of bloodroot, (Sanguinaria canadensis), described in Champlain’s Voyages et Explorations (1604) and also in by Jean Johnson Elizabeth Simcoe’s Diary (1792), took root in, and still frames, her botanical vision, through images that now express in her drawings and watercolours the diaphanous effects of the medium: “In the afternoon we entered a lake (Lac des Chênes) five leagues long and two wide, where there are very beautiful islands filled with vines, walnuts and other fine trees...The soil is sandy, and a root is found there which makes a crimson dye, with which the savages paint their faces... ; “…the leaf springs singly from a thick juicy fibrous root, which, on being broken, emits a quantity of liquor from its pores of a bright orange colour: this juice is used by the Indians as a dye, and also in the cure of rheumatic and cutaneous complaints.”1 ornamentum | Spring Summer 2014 | 7 It was at Northern Secondary School that the games, through many stages in the business Iris watercolour, Orchid watercolour, single visual look to take in the object and then from the 17th century on. As a member of the by Jean Johnson instinct and directions of a professional career and cultural worlds over the years, Jean by Jean Johnson allowing this first perception to develop freely Botanical Artists of Canada, Jean continues as a visual artist began to take shape during the Johnson’s enthusiasm for watercolours through unmediated imaginative impulses. to practise and promote the unique qualities four-year program in commercial art offered by persists. I asked her “why watercolours?” rather These are the thoughts of an artist whose of watercolour as a kind of antidote to the the school. The Group of Seven was in the air, than any of the other materials and techniques understanding of the medium is deeply felt and shrinking presence and fewer contacts we may and Canadian landscapes were on the walls of that had formed her background at Northern practised in a spirit of collaboration with paper, have with flowers and plants in a postmodern many Canadian homes. In tune with the times, Secondary in fonts, illustration, life drawing, pen or brush, and pigments. age of electronic distractions. market conditions, and personal inclination, painting, sculpture, etc. The answer was In addition to her activity as a watercolourist, Jean’s first chance of a job after graduation immediate and direct: watercolour supplies Jean Johnson is a lecturer and amateur John Fleming is Editor of Ornamentum. presented itself as a choice between dull lightness and delicacy of touch; it is luminous historian of botanical art in its scientific commercialism and working for Art and Design and colourful in effect; its innate fragility and beginnings, its medical, topographical, and Notes Studios, a company producing Captain Marvel apparent transience convey the essence of an aesthetic uses, and a proponent of the many 1 Mary Alice Downey and Mary Hamilton, ‘and some comics, owing to an embargo related to paper object such as botanicals; and it leaves an ways in which watercolour representations of brought flowers’ Plants in a New World (Toronto Buffalo shortages on U.S. comics entering Canada. impression with the viewer altogether more the natural world have left a compelling visual London: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 20. Drawing skills were the basic ingredient for this life-like and truthful than an image in oils. and encyclopaedic representation of early travel newcomer to the art scene, attaching character And, of course, there are the “lines,” that is, and contemporaneous scientific discoveries. heads provided by the company to bodies and the basic component of drawing—outlines, Of particular interest to her in recent years are action backgrounds to be created and called parts, profiles, composition, structure. Jean native plants, bulbs and perennials, inspired by to life by the talismanic “Shazam!” also spoke about “contact drawing,” a technique those childhood memories of botanizing with From these heroic beginnings in the age sometimes used to discover an aptitude for her father, and discovery of the many texts of of action comics, now revisited in our own drawing in a beginner, or by professionals, to early explorers and colonists who have left a electronic times in movies and computer create a more spontaneous image by using a record in words and often images, of local flora ornamentum | Spring Summer 2014 | 9 The COLOURS of NATURE Dye Plants and Design Thea Haines and Rachel MacHenry Photographs by APPLYING DECORATIVE COLOUR undertaken by colourists in these print houses, Thea Haines obtained from natural sources—plants, which resulted in natural dyes being used on