Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(About art and illustration rather than language.)

In a catalog for publisher David R. Godine that came today, an offer of a set of notecards from Mary Azarian’s Farmer’s Alphabet of  1981 (Apple, Dog, Farm, Jump, Neighbor, Underwear). The Z item in her Gardener’s Alphabet of 2000:

(On zinnias, see here.) Azarian’s chosen medium is the woodcut, which gives her work a deliberately old-fashioned appearance.

Azarian in Wikipedia:

Mary Azarian (born 1940) is an American woodcut artist and children’s book illustrator. In 1999 she won the Caldecott Medal for her book, Snowflake Bentley, a picture book of the life of Wilson Bentley [one of the first known photographers of snowflakes].

More on her own website, where she tells us:

I was determined to make my work depict the landscape surrounding my home on our hill farm in Vermont and the work (and play) that are required to sustain a rural life.

Alphabets are natural for her chosen medium. So are scenes with a medieval look to them. Of her Medieval Prints series, she says:

Medieval manuscript painting, especially the art in the margins of the richly ornamented psaltery depicting peasant life, inspired this series.

Two entertaining items from this series, which I think of as The Gardener of Eden and The Archangel Electrolux:

(And there grew a garden of an amazing beauty and surpassing lushness.)

(And when she arose from her nap the house was miraculously tidy.)

This entry was posted on November 10, 2012 at 7:51 pm and is filed under Art/lit/music/film, Language and plants, Not about language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.