Walking through my suburban neighborhood in the early night with an eye on the sky, I have seen the International Space Station dart across the horizon, and ghostly barn owls take silent flight from naked, wintry Oak branches, and I harbor a little envy for people who observed these night sky secrets throughout their childhoods, who grew up familiar with the ephemeral magic of meteor showers and migrating geese honking past a late fall moon. I think it would have embedded so many useful ideas in a child’s mind– things that could save an adult, like the normalcy of impermanence and the surprising counter-intuitive nature of nature. We can easily argue this very type of formative experience made the work of textile artist Louise Bourgeois an extraordinary interpretation of a rich childhood, an idea beautifully shared in Maria Popova’s Marginalian blog post, Spiderwoman’s Cloth Lullaby: The Illustrated Life of Artist Louise Bourgeois.
From this richly colored children’s book, Popova highlights a quote that introduces the childhood that contributed to this creative’s unique body of work.
Louise kept diaries of her days. And in a cloth tent pitched in the garden, she and her siblings would stay till the dark surprised them, the light from the house, and the sound of a Verdi opera, far away through the trees.
Sometimes, they’d spend the night, and Louise would study the web of stars, imagine her place in the universe, and weep, then fall asleep to the rhythmic rock and murmur of river water.
It’s not hard imagine how long spells of watching the night sky, how noting the “web of stars” would filter into one’s thoughts and creations over the decades to come, and how the fabrics rent upon her mother’s passing would eventually become one of the mediums her expressions used. The wisdoms embedded in the sumptuous gifts of a childhood spent soaking in nature would inform an artistic adulthood, a beautiful idea Popova highlights in her thoughtful review of “Cloth Lullaby”.
