spotsandstripes

Entertaining is Fun!

I wonder if anyone ever called Dorothy Draper, interior decorator extraordinaire and author of Entertaining is Fun: How to Be a Popular Hostess, "Dotty."

A Bad Case of Stripes

Sylvie reads A Bad Case of Stripes.

Strange But True: Dot-to-Dot Pornography

Erotic Dots, one of the few books in the odd and tiny genre of x-rated connect-the-dots.

The Devil's Cloth: A History of Stripes

From the first chapter of The Devil's Cloth : A History of Stripes:

In the medieval Western world, there are a great number of individuals — real or imaginary — whom society, literature, and iconography endow with striped clothing. In one way or another, they are all outcasts or reprobates, from the Jew and the heretic to the clown and the juggler, and including not only the leper, the hangman, and the prostitute but also the disloyal knight of the Round Table, the madman of the Book of Psalms, and the character of Judas. They all disturb or pervert the established order; they all have more or less to do with the devil.

[...]

In the Middle Ages, Fortune, who turns the wheel of destiny for man, often wears a striped robe. Today, on a playground, the schoolchildren in striped clothes always seem more active than the others.

Thanks to the frequent wearer of stripes, Rose Gowen.

Marilyn Monroe Polk-Dot Paper Doll

From Polka Dot Paper Dolls by David Wolfe, who has written a short history of the polka dot.

The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds

While he eats his lunch, Luke reads The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds. Vashti thinks she can't draw, until her art teacher tells her to "just make a mark" and sign it. She does, she makes one little dot in the middle of a blank page, and the next day she sees that her teacher has framed it in gold and displayed it behind her desk. Once Vashti's taken that first step, she becomes an inspired dot artist, an obsessed one even. This is a lovely story about creativity, inspiration, and hard work -- a good one for grown-ups as well as kids.

Majili Illustration Prints

Up in the Sky, The Reader, and The Princess and the Pea are illustration prints available at the etsy shop Majalin.

 

Craig Frazier's Lots of Dots

Craig Frazier's new children's book Lots of Dots has just been added to our wishlist. Frazier talks about the genesis of the book on his blog 36 Pages.

Damien Hirst's Spot Paintings and How to Dot It Yourself

Famed conceptual artist and provocateur Damien Hirst has said of his spot paintings: "I only ever made five... myself ... And my spots I painted are shite. ... The best person who ever painted spots for me was Rachel. She's brilliant. Absolutely fucking brilliant. The best spot painting you can have by me is one painted by Rachel." Rachel Howard was one of his assistants. There are around 1000 "Hirst" spot paintings, the first of which was painted directly onto a gallery wall, and they are supposedly popular in Japan and Korea. Two essential books by Hirst are On the Way to Work and I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now. Nice sentiment.

Here's a do-it-yourself (dot-it-yourself?) version:

Those circles were cut out of paper and applied with double-stick tape. The process took a couple of hours -- I suggest going one better and using stickers.

The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics

This is the film adaptation of Norman Juster's The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics, directed by Chuck Jones. It won an Academy Award for best animated film in 1965. Juster is better known for his classic children's book The Phantom Tollbooth. Laura Miller interviewed him about the two books back in 2001. Norton, who was born in 1929, is a retired architect and is still writing books -- his latest, The Odious Ogre was illustrated by Jules Ffeiffer and just came out at the beginning of September.