7-Imp’s 7 Kicks #513: Featuring Isabelle Arsenault
Sunday, December 11th, 2016
pink hawthorn, and sweet-smelling honeysuckle.
Along its banks, her father planted poplars.”
(Click to enlarge spread)
I’ve got some spreads today from Amy Novesky’s superb March picture book, Cloth Lullaby: The Woven Life of Louise Bourgeois (Abrams), illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault. This is an exquisite biography of Bourgeois, the French-American artist known for her sculpture and installation art.
The book opens with Louise as a young girl and places a particular emphasis on her close relationship with her mother, who restored tapestries and actively taught young Louise about the repair of fabrics and about “form and color and the various styles of textiles.” Novesky likens Louise’s mother to a spider, quoting Bourgeois who once said about her mother: “Deliberate … patient, soothing … subtle, indispensable … and as useful as an araignée.” The author also uses the river near Louise’s chilhood home as a theme in the book as well: “The river provided flowers and fruit, a lullaby, and a livelihood.” Read the rest of this entry �
“The tales come in so many different forms, and they deal with so many different topics. It was exceedingly difficult to choose just a few and still do justice to the sources. I wanted to give the reader a sense of the intricate and decorative nature of the structure of the whole, as well as an appreciation of the breadth of genres. But even more important than that was to select stories by the nature of what they would mean to Shah Rayar and how they could help him and Scheherazade expose their souls to one another.”
