THE PAPER GARDEN
An Artist Begins Her Life at 72
~ by Molly Peacock
October 1772,
Mary Delany happened to be watching as the petal of a geranium fell onto the
dark surface of a table. Nearby was a bit of paper of a similar color.
Inspired, she began her first collage. “I have invented a new way of imitating
flowers,” she explained. And she continued to do so, mixing pigments,
dissecting plants and occasionally adding parts of them to her compositions,
ultimately cutting and gluing together tens of thousands of “the tiniest dots,
squiggles, scoops, moons, slivers, islands and loops of brightly colored
paper.”
Delany
succeeded in creating a new art form, an early form of collage, and by the time
of her death at 87 (in 1788), had managed to produce 985 examples of her paper
marvels.
In the late 18th century, Mary Delany created nearly a
thousand breathtakingly beautiful and intricate paper “mosaicks” of flowers.
Glued onto black backgrounds, they were not only stunning but also botanically
precise. Today the collages reside in the British Museum.
This biography reads like a Jane Austen novel, describing in
great poetic detail, 18th-century English life. In addition to Delany's biography, the author, Molly
Peacock, includes her own life’s story
and what inspired her to write this book.
As an artist who uses collage as one of my mediums, I wanted to read about the first documented use of paper collage. The historical part of the story was move than I bargained for, I wanted more artsy stuff, but I did read the entire book. All in all, it was an inspiring story.
The book was packed with beautiful reproductions of Mary's collages.
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