These are passing glimpses of but two of the art industries of the
Village. There are many others--enough to fill a book all by
themselves. There are the Villagers who hammer brass, and those who
carve wood; who make exquisite lace, who make furniture of quaint and
original design. There are the designers and decorators, whose brains
are full of graceful images and whose fingers are quick and facile to
carry them out. There are, in fact, numbers on numbers of enthusiastic
young people--they are nearly all of them young--who from sunrise to
sunset spend their lives in adding to the sum of beauty that there is
on earth.
The making of box furniture, for instance, sounds commonplace enough, but
it is really fascinating. There are places in the Village,--notably one
on Greenwich Avenue,--where these clever craftsmen make wonderful things
from cubic forms of wood, from boxes and sticks and laths and blocks.
They can make anything from a desk to a tall candlestick, and, softly
coloured, the square, wooden objects make a highly decorative effect. It
is a simple art but a striking one, and the aesthetic sense, the instinct
for balance and proportion and ultimate beauty of line and composition,
has a splendid outlet.
There is, too, the trade of the designer of garments: the word is
advisedly substituted for dresses. The real designer plans and
executes pictures, mood-expressions, character settings. She dreams
herself into the personalities of her clients, also the necessities
and the limitations! Do you think all the artistic costume-creating is
done in the Rue de la Paix? Try the Village!
And the florists! The flower shops of the Village are truly lovely,
one in particular, the Peculiar Flower Shop, which does not look at
all like a shop but like the corner of a country garden. The Village
loves flowers and understands them. Every Villager who can, grows
them. Believe me, you know nothing about flowers in an intimate sense
until you have talked with a flower-loving Villager!
Think of it--you outsiders who imagine that you are exhibiting a fine,
artistic tendency by going to an occasional exhibition, and in knowing
what colours can discreetly be worn together! Here is a small army of
vigourous idealists who live, breathe and create beauty; whose happy,
hard-working lives are filled with the exhilarating wine of art and
artistic expression; who, when night comes, never turn the keys of
their workshops without the knowledge that they have made one more
beautiful thing since dawn, one more concrete materialisation of the
art-dream in man, one more new creation to help to furnish pleasure
for a beauty-loving world!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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