Like a spider on the ceiling

photo: Le style et la matière

Seen in a waiting room for guided tours at the château of Versailles. 

Did that just happen - or did the designer do it on purpose? The spider is the very symbol of waiting. Happily, not one visitor was wrapped up as a meal before, during or after the tour.

Man Ray

No arachnophobe, but I'm not always completely relaxed around these creatures. 

nusch eluard par man ray

It's largely a question of their size, pilosity and proximity. 

late Victorian brooch from Pinterest

chanel brooch

monster Spider, sometimes called Maman by Louise Bourgeois
source

I can nonetheless appreciate what their form inspires in art 

Gallé vase Pinterest

Woodcut illustrations by GW Dijsselhoffrom
BibliOdyssey

Victorian purse Pinterest

Gareth Pugh

and very definitely, their own woven art form and its imitations.

black sprite flowers

There are spider-like flowers

golden orb spider posing as a flower

and flower-like spiders.

Odilon Redon

What are you, my friend?

odilon redon

"Why, just that, your friend," she grinned.

Bruno Freire ignat

Have you seen?

There seems to be a greater appreciation

Erik Griffioen Ragno

of arachnian geometry recently -

Romain Duclos Mini Ragno

and of the intricacies

© Studio Bouroullec
lighting in the escalier Gabriel
palais de Versailles

and ingenious harmony of their webs.

Friend or foe, it's their season now. They come in to warm their legs.
Everyone tells me that a house with spiders is a healthy house.
Shouldn't we celebrate?!


Pinterest photos here

More Animals at Christmas

Reindeer 

(Stag)

ox and donkey

To light the way

from Emery et cie

The Magic Lanterns of Ombre Portée

moebius

Perhaps more than anything else, the quality of light determines the atmosphere of an interior. Nothing could be worse than uniformity. Luckily in a three-dimensional room, complete uniformity is rare - though overhead lighting on its own can be ghastly. Certain decoration magazines suffer from uniformly lit photos  that give an impression of vacuum-packed air; suffocation is the penalty for looking too long.  Most real life rooms have the benefit of old Sol's caressing beam through a window for at least a few hours a day and so much the better if it angles through a tangle of branches or winks through a billowing curtain.

The objects I'm illustrating today can't exactly be called light fixtures. Rather than lighting a room, the dynamic of these objects is shadow play. Like the light that filters into a room through the swaying branches before the window pane, they compose lively, expressive shapes in their surroundings. They are made by Ombre Portée (Cast Shadow), a company founded in 1998 by Eric de Dormael et Sylvie Janvier to create sculpture based on light effects. Individually they are well-made, highly seductive objects whose purpose is not to provide light so much as it is to decorate. They cast shadows, send reflections, sheen and shimmer into the surrounding space from cleverly constucted structures.

leo-g sconce

These light sculptures are made by hand in the owner's Paris atelier. Quality and creativity are key; they are one-of-a-kind pieces or small limited edition series, each one a combination of light, poetry, and technology. Sculpture, including monumental pieces, can also be made to measure for particular architectural projects.

le cardinal

zwartepik 3 sconce

dulcinée

lunes

sagaie lineaire

bois dormant

Sometimes the lines between fine arts and decorative arts become blurred. An emotion is created and we end up seeing things in a new light.

The Ombre Portée site illustrates many more styles of their work.

All photos from the site Ombre Portée