LOOK CLOSER

Recently landed: Look closer

Awoken during the middle of the night by some sound, some thought, who knows? I looked out the bedroom window and saw the beautiful, familiar profile of a Brushtail possum on the pitch of our roof. He or she was paused on the roof, their head lifted, smelling their surrounds. From my vantage point, against the lightness of the night sky, you could see the illuminated tall crane planted in the massive construction site behind the laneway of houses. Each night, this red, green, and white Christmas tree is in a different placement, near but far, with, depending upon the time and visibility, the flags which hang from its weighted cable, rippling in the wind. Looking at the possum, taking in the view before them, perhaps deciding which way they’ll go next, I thought about how much we ask of our wildlife, particularly in our urban areas and of those who seem so adjustable by necessity to living alongside humans. Possums are remarkably adaptable to living alongside us humans, however I’m sure they’d also like a hollow too.

Continuing reading on Marginalia.

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12th of July, 2025

Jan Van Kessel the Elder, Garden and house spiders with grass snakes and caterpillars contorted and entwined to spell the artist's name; A sprig of redcurrants with an elephant hawk moth, a ladybird, a millipede and other insects, one signed centre (with the bugs and animals): JoAn vAn/ Kessel and dated lower right: Fecit. Anno. 1657 .

Sotherby’s catalogue note: Jan van Kessel’s intimate cabinet paintings, which combine a minute observation of nature with a wonderfully decorative design, have always been the most prized of his works. Perfectly exemplifying the spirit of the age of enquiry from which they stem, and reflecting the recent invention of magnification that allowed the miniature to be examined and admired in detail, they are all inventive, hyper-realist, and wonderfully attractive; the copper panel comprising one of this pair of pictures however, in which Van Kessel has spelled out his name with a variety of grass snakes and caterpillars, is unquestionably the most innovative of all.

In it a plethora of caterpillars, large and small, real and imaginary, worm their way out of an earthy corner into the picture itself, contorting and arranging themselves around and precariously close to a hungry-looking grass snake, to honour their creator by spelling out his name. Van Kessel's celebration of his own name writ-large in bugs is not however an act of self-aggrandisement; it is rather a witty and self deprecating jeux d'esprit, its humour emphasised by the miniscule Fecit and date that follow in the lower right corner.