ann wood

I made the photo above for illustration friday , the theme is “theater’.

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This little white donkey is tiny - not much bigger than my thumbnail. I love taking his picture, this one makes me think of kaspar hauser.

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I noticed some things that landed in a way I liked this afternoon so I took a picture. The little box is a diorama I made a few years ago, I’m working on some new dioramas now.

Forest diorama - closer look - here and here.

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A little spider, out for a stroll among the mushrooms.

Away she goes, showing off her fancy posterior.

* learn how to make your own paper bag mushrooms here*

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The gjoa

and the little diorama it became part of.

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I finished my second cardboard castle and it’s in the window at Johnson at 179 Orchard street. There are also some doug rhodehamel style mushrooms and a couple little creatures roaming around. I had lots of fun making it and it was good thinking exercise for my sometimes too buttoned up brain. I took some pictures of it here before we brought it over.

The back of the castle has some little holes you can peek into. I couldn’t really properly photograph what you see inside, there are ghosts at a ball in one,

an enchanted horse in another and miss haversham is held prisoner in a tower (her picture didn’t turn out at all).

The castle will be in the window at Johnson until October 31st . Unfortunately this is my last window for Johnson, Mrs. Johnson is closing at the end of the month. I’ll really miss doing her window. I started doing it for fun and it ended up changing my life in interesting and good ways, Thank you MJ.

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in which the willet discovers a thimble in a snowy forest.

Happy Holidays and good wishes in general,

ann wood

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I sure do like making a little bird or something and then taking it’s picture
in a mini forest set. I sure do.

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A belated flea market report:
These were a present from my favorite Park Slope flea market man.

They’re perfect for the HairHut Diorama.

Now Pat can have a cookie while she decorates after hours for all eternity.

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I was poking around in my old half broken imac and found this picture of a ship diorama I got at the NYPL Picture Collection. The picture collection is one of my favorite places, it has saved me again and again; a little of it is online now. I love dioramas but I think I love photos of dioramas even more. This one has ships in it so what’s not to love? It’s sad and sweet, creepy, nostalgic and precious.

This quote from “Small World: Dioramas in Contemporary Art” talks about the fascination with miniaturization:

” The urge to create small worlds, however, is primordial. Humans seem genetically engineered to want to simulate the terrain of life and to see the world in miniature, or preserved as if in a time capsule. In dioramas, the concrete and the imaginary, the authentic and the artificial become magically intertwined. Writing about miniaturization in her book On Longing (Duke University Press, 1993), critic Susan Stewart notes that the atmosphere in a diorama is charged; mood and time are crystallized, and the viewer is given the extraordinary opportunity to step outside of his or her time and place to view life.”

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