BPA

Graham Hamilton

Info: »Everything is Leaf…«

 

Like Rousseau, Goethe botanized.

 

At the 2013 De l’Allemagne show at the Louvre, pages from Goethe’s 1790 herbarium were exhibited alongside Paul Klee’s, from 1924. Nearby were his ink-wash sketches of clouds; a series of small watercolour studies for Theory of Colours; and a five-foot-diameter octagonal piece called Grand écran de la théorie des couleurs constructed of colored paper squares pasted over canvas, in 1791–92. I was attracted to the vulnerability of the 225 year-old dry, pressed plant material pasted down with little blue paper strips in the herbarium. It made me think of the pressed and delicately mended sea-foam embroidered silk 1930’s lingerie once belonging to my grandmother, sent to me in the mail by my mother that year. I should make of it an herbarium page. (…)