As it is due to set wedding flower trends for the next ten years, I thought I'd post a detailed account of what the new princess Catherine Middleton carried on her wedding day.

























The bouquet is a shield-shaped wired bouquet of myrtle, lily-of-the-valley, sweet William and hyacinth. The bouquet was designed by Shane Connolly and draws on the traditions of flowers of significance for the Royal Family, the Middleton family and on the Language of Flowers.

The flowers’ meanings in the bouquet are:

Lily-of-the-valley – Return of happiness

Sweet William – Gallantry

Hyacinth – Constancy of love

Ivy: Fidelity; marriage; wedded love; friendship; affection

Myrtle: the emblem of marriage; love.

The bouquet contains stems from a myrtle planted at Osborne House, Isle of Wight, by Queen Victoria in 1845, and a sprig from a plant grown from the myrtle used in The Queen’s wedding bouquet of 1947.

The tradition of carrying myrtle began after Queen Victoria was given a nosegay containing myrtle by Prince Albert’s grandmother during a visit to Gotha in Germany. In the same year, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert bought Osborne House as a family retreat, and a sprig from the posy was planted against the terrace walls, where it continues to thrive today.

The myrtle was first carried by Queen Victoria eldest daughter, Princess Victoria, when she married in 1858, and was used to signify the traditional innocence of a bride.


Many of these flowers are not widely or easily available in Canada, and if are available are very limited by season. The trend to watch is shield shape (finally, an end to round bouquets!) and the mixture of white delicate flowers. The scent of the bouquet would be lovely as these are primarily garden flowers and the Lily of the Valley in particular would smell sweet and fresh. I've already starting thinking about what substitutes I could use in a bouquet to create this same look and feel with flowers more widely available. 

Edward Hopper

Judy Chicago

My column in this week's paper is out and it talks about art in current and historical terms. Friends of mine have been surprised when I tell them about some of my favourite artists.

I really enjoy figurative work and have always had an interest in feminist and erotic art. I think this might be what you would expect if you know me personally. Here are examples of favourites by Hopper , Modigliani and Chicago.

Amedeo Modigiliani

However other artists I enjoy you might not expect. One such artist is James Tissot.

James Tissot was a French painter who spent much of his career in England. Often discounted as a painter of banal subjects who focussed too much on decorative and flattering portraits, Tissot refused alignment with the Impressionists who were his contemporaries. I first fell in love with Tissot's work after seeing his painting The Shop Girl at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. I found it to be mesmerizing and endlessly interesting to look at. I could stare at it for hours appreciating the detailed fabrics and notions. It is in the permanent collection of the AGO.

James Tissot - The Shop Girl

It is unusual for me to be so fascinated with work of this style. Typically I enjoy more modern or contemporary work that is conceptual or haunting in some way.

The work of Tissot however is fascinating to me, so much so that I did a road trip to Buffalo to see an exhibition of his work a few years ago. I had to drag along some of my contemporary art-loving friends but once they saw his work in person, their minds were changed.

It's over-sized and filled with spectacular detailing, so rich you feel as if you could reach into the frame and feel the texture of the fabrics. The historical details are interesting too, for example in the image at left you can get a sense of fashion history and the role of women in the era.






There is something in the eyes of the shop girl that has always stuck with me and left me feeling as if I connect with her, especially having worked in retail for so many years. She's happy to open that door for you to leave the store. I can relate to that.

This brings me to my Oshawa Express column this week which addresses current exhibitions at the RMG.
While there is great divide between historical exhibitions and contemporary conceptual installations we shouldn't forget that learning about our past is as important and relevant as thinking about our future. Even if conceptual art or historical art doesn't interest you in the slightest, there is still value to going out and seeing it in person. The experience of viewing art in real life can't be compared to sitting and viewing it at home on a screen or even reading about it in a book. The detail, colour and size are never properly expressed in other formats. Further to that, the beauty of experiencing art is person is that you can see art that you would never bring home with you. Would I ever bring a Tissot home with me? Well....ok, I would if it was offered, but it's not what I would choose if I was spending the money. While I love to look at it, it's not what I would want to surround myself with for the long term. Art can be interesting and challenging and still something that you don't love and want in your life forever. That's part of the fun of going to galleries. It's an experience, a moment, a fleeting immersion in a world you might never be able to enter again.

Here's my article for this week.

Avant-garde and old guard in Oshawa

April 27, 2011 By Jacquie Severs/Columnist Contemporary art is often conceptual and therefore challenging to understand, even for those of us who love art and visit galleries often. To some, this is a welcome test, one that creates new thoughts and brings forward ideas about how to perceive the world, our self and our culture. Avant-garde works, or those that are experimental or innovative, push boundaries and ignore the norm. The Robert McLaughlin Gallery (RMG) regularly presents art that is avant-garde and there is no exception in the work of sound installation artist Gordon Monahan. Monahan is a Canadian composer of experimental music and he also creates fantastical sound machines using everything from abandoned pianos to midi-controlled computer sound systems. His current installation at the gallery creates an eerie, immersive experience that creates a sonic environment that couldn’t accurately be called musical and instead is called sound artistry. A piano, stationed at one end of the large north gallery and tethered to walls at either end with cables, will create pause for any visitor. Where is all that sound coming from exactly? Is the piano playing itself? Some of the artist’s best-known performances are his speaker-swinging events, which were performance pieces that used speakers, cables, a large room and a lot of muscle power. See and hear Monahan in action as he presents a live sound performance at the gallery as a part of their First Fridays series on May 6 at 7 p.m. In striking contrast to this thoroughly contemporary art experience the RMG is also presenting a historical exhibition of portraits on loan from the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. These fanciful portraits depict hairstyles and fashion of society women that date from 1790 to 1860. Accompanied by silver and gold pieces, photographs, jewelry and furnishings from the era, these portraits provide a glimpse into the public and private worlds that the sophisticated class of Lower Canada inhabited. It is through these portraits that we can look at our country and culture from a historical perspective but with a fashionable eye. Traditional decorative arts and fine art portraits pair well with the RMG’s showing of selections from their Thomas Bouckley Collection of photos of women in Oshawa from 1890-1940. Titled “Oshawa’s Fashion History,” the exhibit includes artifacts on loan from The Oshawa Community Museum. Items loaned from their collection create context and help bring to life these fashionable garments captured on film. On Mother’s Day, Sunday, May 8 at 1 p.m., the RMG, in partnership with the Oshawa Community Museum, present a free lecture on Oshawa’s fashion history. What links to our cultural identity can be found between a sonic experience and a visual fashion feast? The RMG’s presentation of these exhibitions alongside each other is an opportunity to seek knowledge from the past while imagining a world of the future. These early-May exhibitions stretch across our cultural landscape bridging a gap between the old guard and the avant-garde.

This spring I can't get over an urge to find perfect v-neck tshirts. I want white, heather grey, cobalt blue and green. Essentially anything but black, which is the virtual opposite of any tshirt lusting I've ever done in the past.
Here's a polyvore set I did, thinking about wearing grey tshirts this spring.

tshirt: urban outfitters

I searched for some style pics featuring great vneck tshirts and here you go! I've listed the where-to-buy if I could find it.

tshirt: gap

Dress it up or down, wear with a blazer or a skirt, wear over a bathing suit or with cut off jeans. It's perfect for every scenario.

alternative apparel

I'm not ashamed to admit I picked up a couple for myself this week at Walmart, for a whopping $7. Hard to resist at that price, but who knows how they'll hold up in the wash. I'm hoping to find some better quality perfect-tees in the next while.

More reading:
Blog dedicated to tshirts - tcritic
Blog dedicated to tshirt addiction - taddict

Awesome Graphic T's
Threadless
Busted Tee's
Brooklyn Industries

Local T's (Ontario)
66 Thieves

Yesterday I went over to the new city hall to see the unveiling of a new sculpture by artist Ron Baird called Oshawa Rising. It's pretty and reflective and the artist is such a charming, jovial fellow that you can't help but be thrilled he won the contest I mention in my article this month.

Here it is.

Reflecting city growth

The Lakeridge Health mobile was designed by Ron Baird, whose work will also be featured at City Hall. By Jacquie Severs/Columnist Evidence of various metals being used to create sculptural forms dates back thousands of years. The art form evolved from a functional artisan trade used to cast weapons and coins to the decorative arts over time. The oldest decorative item in existence (a cast copper frog) dates to 3200 BC, but evidence of the Egyptians using cast metal for sculpture dates back at least 300 years before that. Many of the best decorative examples were likely destroyed during times of war when the metals were melted down to create weapons. In modern times, metal sculpture has become familiar as a defining element of urban landscapes and interiors. The Robert McLaughlin Gallery (RMG) has a collection of metal sculptures that are primarily contemporary and minimal in style. These works are currently on display in an RMG exhibition titled ‘MetaLogic.’ The exhibition explores space and the relation an object has to its surroundings. A sculpture alters the feeling you have when entering a space. Walking through MetaLogic one senses their place within the space of the gallery in a different way than possible when looking at two-dimensional works on the wall. This is something you may have experienced in the atrium of the gallery, where one of the best-known works in the RMG collection is on permanent display.  The ‘Silent Bells’ hang in the upper atrium space and rotate at a slow, methodical speed, creating a space that is fluid, full of movement and reflected light. Mesmerizing and monumental, the Silent Bells define the space they are displayed in dramatic fashion. The Bells were donated to the gallery by artist Ron Baird, who recently won the Oshawa City Hall art commission with his sculpture Oshawa Rising. Visitors will see themselves reflected in the polished stars of the sculpture, which in turn reflect each other and the movement and colours of the day. The work symbolizes a growing city built on a solid historical foundation, while reflecting light onto walls, ceilings and stairs. The five metre high work is designed to define a space that Oshawa residents will come to know well. A graduate of the Ontario College of Art and member of the Royal Canadian Academy, Baird has completed more than 150 public commissions and installations of his dynamic metal works. Among those is his breathtaking mobile, found at the Lakeridge Health Oshawa Hospital entrance. The mobile shimmers through the air like a flock of birds or is perhaps reminiscent of a sun-spotted lake surface, suited to the namesake of the hospital. Whatever the interpretation of sculptural works, they animate the space surrounding them simply with their presence. The City Hall sculpture is to be unveiled in a ceremony at hosted by Greg Murphy, dean of the School of Media, Art and Design at Durham College, on Tuesday, April 12 at 1 p.m.