Chronicle Books

2010 Wall Calendar: Anne Taintor

admin — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:50:00 +0000

“She was one cocktail away from proving his mother right” is the text accompanying a modestly dressed, yet sexily posed, 1950s woman that adorns the cover of the 2010 Wall Calendar by Anne Taintor. Why is it that these satirical sentences bring a smile to our faces? Why does it give us such pleasure to poke fun at these Leave it to Beaver prototypes? Whatever the analysis, it works. It’s downright funny, as is Taintor’s calendar.

When you open up to January, two “perfect” housewives are looking at a ham that is fresh from the oven. “Ta-daa! Now let’s have a cocktail...” reads the caption. I can just imagine my college roommate, now a few decades later, saying the same thing. Although I’m not sure she’d wait until the ham finished baking.

The Women’s History Month scene is hysterical: “If by ‘happy’ you mean 'trapped with no means of escape' then yes, I’m happy.” I suppose considering marriage a trap is women's equivalent of men calling their wives a ball and chain. Marriage, of course, isn’t the trap it used to be, but there are some who would like to wind back time to when it was—perish the thought!

Turning the pages of the calendar, I am most amused at the jokes centered on drinking (“Why do dishes when you can do daiquiris?"), and I decided to take a look at Taintor’s web site. The tag line—“Making smart people smile since 1985”—greets me on her home page. Wow, in a split second I’m feeling like a smart woman who laughs at drinking, domesticity, and dumbness.

While I love the retro images paired with witty captions, I have to point out that the calendar isn’t very functional. The size allotted for the days of the month is small, and it doesn’t allow much room to write notes, like I usually do. The fonts for the days and holidays are also very small. While it’s a large wall calendar with full size images, the calendar itself has a lot of white space that could have been better utilized. That said, I expect a full year of laughs to compensate for this shortcoming, a problem which could easily be solved by pairing it with Anne Taintor's 2010 Engagement Calendar.

Written by: Joan Dawson, November 5th 2009

100 Girls on Cheap Paper: Drawings by Tina Berning

admin — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:55:00 +0000

By Tina Berning

Chronicle Books

100 Girls on Cheap Paper is, to put it simply, a beautiful collection of illustrations featuring women. As the title explains it, there are 100 different images. What the title does not explain, however, is the expressiveness found in each page. The artist, Tina Berning, creates lovely drawings in various media—watercolors, acrylics, ink, tempera—each mixture revealing a unique woman—the paper a mere platform, a second skin.

Tina Berning’s illustrations are accompanied by an intriguing introduction by Claudia Seidel, which makes the experience even richer. Flipping through the pages, it can be noted that 100 Girls on Cheap Paper is a mixture of fine art and fashion. Delicately drawn eyes peer enchantingly from portraits; seductive nudes draw attention to the simple beauty of the girls, the colors in the pages blend naturally, only to be transformed by the deliberate strokes used to create the image of what seems deliberately and effortlessly feminine.

Take one of the girls. Her head and neck are formed by thick strokes of paint along with fine lines that create her delicate features and expressive eyes. The thickness of black paint delineates the shadow that forms her hair and heavy eyelids. She has no body, she doesn’t need it, her neck and shoulders are mere support for her face, a face controlled by dominating eyes peering at the viewer. This particular girl is not framed by much color: the paleness of the paper, the dark strokes of black paint, her light blushing cheeks and a rich green light adorning the right side of her face are enough to convey one of the 100 expressive women Berning depicts. This is the creative agility with which Berning fills her book.

Other than noting the richness in color used, it is mesmerizing to find the pages filled with the faces of women staring back, their eyes narrating an individual story. Perhaps this making 100 Girls on Cheap Paper so enchanting and provocative; the fact is, as static as the paper the project is drawn on, Tina Berning creates a femininity that radiates with life on it.

Written by: Jessica Sánchez, October 22nd 2009

Garden Anywhere: How to Grow Gorgeous Container Gardens, Herb Gardens, and More—Without Spending a Fortune

admin — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 00:05:00 +0000

By Alys Fowler

Chronicle Books

Gardens are a form of autobiography. - Sydney Eddison

Alys Fowler is British. Her book, The Thrifty Gardener, has been a hit in England. Garden Anywhere, the re-titled North American version, deserves the same success in Canada and the U.S. as it has across the pond.

Fowler started gardening as a teenager. Now roughly 30, she goes against the grain of British gardening—or so it seems. Her sartorial look—given to shades, plimsolls without socks, and a print shift that a First Nations artist might have designed—is somewhat neo-hippie. A shot or two of her dumpster diving for salvage to fashion into, say, a cold frame—a handiwork at which she demonstrates her grace and mastery of the power drill—captures her method and manner. This is very distant from Better Homes and Gardens.

As unorthodox as Fowler might seem, she’s no Sunday putterer. Trained at the Royal Horticultural Society, The New York Botanical Gardens, and the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, she’s earned her gardening rep. Currently, she’s head gardener for the BBC’s TV programme Gardener’s World. That’s a cornucopia of gardening bona fides.

Garden Anywhere therefore contains ace gardening knowledge, such as “Knowing your light conditions is half the battle,” and “The single key to a stylish garden is love—it’s that simple.” Other information and advice abound, from dealing with pests (organically!) to hand and power tools to building a worm box to surviving the garden centre (“never spend money where it’s not needed”) to pruning and composting. One of my favourite tips, because of its sheer joie de vivre, is to “avoid dull municipal planting” and instead “plant bedding annuals in great masses and allow them to run riot”. Her advice on sowing drifts of bulbs shares the same spirit.

However unconventional she may seem on first glance, this spirit places Fowler in the tradition of British horticulture, with its roots in early-modern Romantic thought, and in American practice of the period, which strongly influenced British gardeners. The result is tend the garden, sure, but let it grow thither and yon, too, as its vegetal imagination shapes it. This view is contrary to the controlled French outlook, monumentalized at Versailles, wherein reason and order are the objects of verdant desire. I confess to a general Francophilia (movies, paintings, street demonstrations). Yet when it comes to gardens, the British way, which encourages the surprising and unpredictable, is, IMO, the superior path.

Fowler’s persona, prose style, and content are all a serious delight. Plus the book is au courant _in its contribution to the slow food movement. This makes _Garden Anywhere of great use and pleasure and puts its author right up there with such British heroines as Jane Austen and Vanessa Redgrave. In addition, the book is creatively designed by Carl Hodson. Its pages are variously intermingled pastel colours: olive green, pink, lavender, blue—just like a garden. The illustrations by Aaron Blecher are friendly. The many photographs by Simon Wheeler serve to illustrate the text while often being artistic, notably a helicopter shot of Fowler hard at work and nearly lost in her garden.

Is there a shortfall to this book? If you live in dry conditions and need to xeriscape, that genre isn’t covered. Fowler’s British, after all, and has gardened there and in New York. Other than this desert lacuna, Garden Anywhere is as chockablock as anyone could expect. If you need one gardening reference, or if you have many, this excellent book belongs on your shelf—or rather, in your soil-encrusted hands while you ponder whether to plant bush beans or pole beans in that wedge of dirt over in the corner near the forget-me-nots beside the wild rose behind the chard.

Written by: Neil Flowers, September 26th 2009