Patch by Alexandra

Patch

Creator
Alexandra
Location
Story
My mother painted the headboard of my childhood bed and stationed it at the very top of a rundown house in Bradford-on-Avon, the creaky stairs littered with roly polies. On the days that I didn’t cry and ask to be carried up, I would race to bed and couch myself under Edward Lear’s lines:

Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.

The lines were built into the painting of a green-faced woman, eyes bright in the sea spray, sitting atop a sieve, and in those moments, that bed became my sieve-y sanctuary.

There are two tapestries in my parents' library that are scenes of the The Lady and the Unicorn. My grandmother made cross-stitches that I profess to be my first introduction to the Pre-Raphaelites, though I don’t know where these are now or if they were a product of my imagination. But the perfectly crafted diptych of a woman, standing tall, in a magical grove, remains.

Sometimes I wonder if my siblings and I are the Rossetti children reincarnated and every time I reread Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” it takes on new meaning.

I like Victorian art a lot, but now I like the work of Howardena Pindell and Rosie Wylie even more.

As an adult, I sense the profound affect that the design and craft of women has had on my aesthetic imagination, and that I still reach toward it in my professional and personal life.

So, the lines “far and few” mean to me the preciousness inherent in the simplest acts of making; that rare kind of aesthetic love that permeates your imagination and stays with you all your life long. That, to me, is an especial quality preserved by the creative ephemera cultured by the women in my family – that which is precious.
Rights Holder
Alexandra
Rights
All rights reserved.