Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

The Webs We Weave

Last year, a spider built her web at our house in a very lucky spot: on one of the widows of our glassed in porch, affording her a smorgasboard of small insects drawn to our porch light. We watched her grow over the weeks and repair her web, a thing of beauty if ever I saw one. Textile maker Simon Peers obviously sees the beauty in spider webs, but he took it one step further. He paid local weavers to gather over a million spiders and "silk" them for what is called dragline silk, the strongest type of silk a spider makes. They make several types, did you know that? Me neither. Mr. Peers and his weavers created an 11 by 4 foot golden tapestry, now on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

This extraordinary story got me thinking about other ways we use animals in art, either as subjects or as objects themselves. Rarer, though, is the phenomenon of animals as artists. Monkey Painting is a serious look at monkeys, apes, and other non-human primates as creative beings. Thierry Lenain's volume explores attempts by researchers to connect the artistic abilities of primates to early art by humans. Monkey Painting also reproduces some of these works in full color. A delight to behold! Lest you think this is a tongue-in-cheek book, know that Mr. Lenain is a noted French writer of both art criticism and children's books.

A title that does play around a little bit is Why Paint Cats: the ethics of feline aesthetics. This is from the team that also brought us the original Why Cats Paint and later, Dancing With Cats, two titles that know how far to go in the pursuit of silliness. I'm sure some people took the phenomenon of cat painting very seriously as proof of cats' higher intelligence, but I'm not sure their intelligence can be vouched for if they were willing to sit still long enough for the creation of these startling images of cats painted as a butterfly, an American Flag, and a clown, among other things. Burton Silver and Heather Busch must be experts in the near impossible job of cat herders.

The first time I saw this book, I immediately sat down and started turning pages, despite the fact that at the time, I was supposed to be shelving books, not reading books. Outrageous colors, impossible shapes, and incredible animals fill the pages of Ernst Haeckel's Art Forms in Nature. I was sure these most of these creatures were imaginary, until I learned more about the man. He was a trained physician who changed careers when he read Darwin's Origin of Species and became an expert in comparative anatomy, specializing in invertebrates. These illustrations are now in the public domain and are available on several websites, but we also have a few versions of the book, including one that has a clip art CD-ROM so you can download the images to your computer.