The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Hil:

It would be interesting to know the age of Sally Miller and the other girls who were at the Academy. Its generally thought that children move through four main stages in their artistic development: scribbling, pre-schematic, schematic, and the realistic. The abstract comes later as we become more adult. This is quite a nice timeline of that progression. I wonder if the 'clip art' aspect could possibly be an example of the schematic stage where the child has settled on a way of drawing a particular thing that they then repeat over and over. Although its evident in children aged about 6 through 10, schema can still be incorporated into the more realistic drawings that older kids progress to. Perspective drawing also starts for most kids at late primary school age, and its quite a complicated thing to become accomplished at, as is realistic representation. I suppose while we would expect children in times gone by to have gone through similar developmental patterns, under different cultural influences to ours the timing of the progression might have been different. Didn't puberty occur a bit later then?

I also wonder where this sits in relation to the changing history of our understanding of the concept of physical space. I've read that until about the 14th century physical space was not thought of as being a volume of nothingness, but instead the surrounding surface of objects (after Aristotle). So artists drew concrete objects with an illusion of depth, but not the intervening areas between objects. Then artists began developing linear perspective as a way of representing objects in 3-D space on a 2-D surface, giving an early expression to the scientific understandings of space being a physical void that came a bit later. I understand from Margaret Wertheim's book The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet the concept as a whole took some centuries to really become the accepted one that we know today. So I wonder how adept at perspective drawing teachers at a girls' academy would have been in 1811.

Oh Anacreon on high! by day and by night.

Re strange metallic things, are you familiar with Boilerplate and the History of Robots in the Victorian Era?

The discussion of unusual marriages reminded me of this article about Elizabeth Marston, wife of William Marston, the psychologist who created the comic Wonder Woman ('In your satin tights, fighting for your rights'). Besides apparently being a pocket rocket all her life, and inspiration for WW, she and William lived in a trio with another woman called Olive (there seems to be some discrepency in these accounts about her last name), the women had two children apiece, and when William died the two women continued living together until Olive's death.

A few years ago there was a woman here in Australia who had an art exhibition of knitted breasts of all shapes, sizes and colours. When I went googling to see if I could show you, I instead found that the Australian Breastfeeding Association now knits and sells them as instruction models.

I also found Eleanor Kent's knitted fractal designs and Freddie Robin's subversive sweaters, and was reminded of these sacred geometry exercises from a sunflower, a nautilus shell, a snowflake, a six-petalled flower.

Hi :-). I had no idea that we had so many unusual limes here in Australia!

Our present Valencia orange crop is the lightest in thirty years - mostly due to adverse weather, but also because farmers, losing out to cheap imports of frozen orange juice concentrate from Brazil, are turning to navels and mandarines. What valencias there are at the markets look rather shabby. We can get lovely navel oranges at the moment - but they come all the way from California.

Googling around about this I read that citrus are classified as a berry, because the seeds are held in the separate segments - another thing I didn't know before!

Oh, and lemon gelati rules...

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