Chaos or Freedom?

Alice in Wonderland ends in cards flying up into the air, while Through the Looking Glass ends in anarchy when Alice seizes the tablecloth at her banquet, sending Queens, plates, silverware and all flying into the air.

Alice and the Two Queens

Here Alice serves as a comfortable pillow for the two queens. The conclusion of Through The Looking glass tomorrow.

The Heavy Crown

Alice makes it across the chess board to her goal - becoming a queen. And yet, and yet... the weight of the crown is so oppressive.

@##$% Blogger - Currently unable to post photos or see some photos of other bloggers, about to go out. I need to download firefox again to try with a different browser, or possibly just wait to see if it's one of those waves of chaos that periodically pass through blogger...

Alice and the Red King #2

Alice reflected in mirror fragments...The aborigines say "There is a dream dreaming us".

I used a turn of the nineteenth century advertising card to represent Alice.

Alice and the White Knight #2

One of the sections of the book is titled "Mystery" and addresses some of the unanswerable questions Alice finds. Here is a quote from that section:

The White Knight, Carroll's representation of himself, deals with the dark woods around him by loading up his horse with more and more inventions. Of all the beings Alice encounters, he is the one who responds most conscientiously to multi-faceted reality, but he cannot quite keep up with his expanding universe. The truth seems to rest in uncertainty.

Big awwww here (tearing up warning).

In the Woods without Words

There's some text on this of which a version is in the book, see the original post here if you would like to see it.

The Mock Turtle and the Gryphon #2

One for the embroiderers... Appropriate, since the Mock Turtle's tale went around and around in verbal curlicues.

The Tweedles #1

What can you say about the Tweedles other than that they have a lot more convictions than brains?

The White Queen and Alice

The Red Queen's opposite number is the White Queen, who tells Alice to believe impossible things...

"When I was your age I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast..."

The figure I used above is one which survived the Berkeley Hills fire of 1991.

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Note to Deadwood fans: Timothy Olyphant is apparently reprising his role as the sheriff on that series in a movie of FX tonight. NOBODY does grim man-of-law determination like Timothy Olyphant. The link is internal, to a post in my first month on blogger, I did six posts of Deadwood characters as superhero trading cards.

The Red Queen and Alice

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

~The Second Coming, Willliam Butler Yeats

And they went so fast at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet ...

~ Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

In other news, Kaetlyn Wilcox has put her wonderful animal series up for sale on redbubble as cards and prints. Startling loveliness - check it out (by the way, redbubble has volume discounts if you buy more than four cards)!

The Garden of Talking Flowers

The talking flowers are cross-grained and dictatorial, they were in fact intended to satirize the flowers in Tennyson's poem "Maude" who were waiting longingly for an evocation of feminine grace, as opposed to the crazed red queen these flowers anticipate.

Alice the Brave

Alice is not overly blessed in the sense of humor department, but you can't fault her for courage and determination.

Seth Godin on a wonderful typo today.

Tea Party Tilt

Here Alice is the Ghost in the Machine. All amusement parks, even the tiniest (I worked at one once for a summer job) seem to have the Alice teacup ride.

I'm thinking about doing some fairly simple papercuts for Alice and have been looking at the beautiful work here.

....and here there be dragons.

The White Sheep's Shop

I'm interrupting the tea party with one from Looking Glass, the White Sheep's shop where "the large bright thing" keeps eluding Alice by mysteriously slipping from shelf to shelf. The tea party will resume in my second post today, but I wanted an excuse to link to two new shops:

Nature's Whisper Bazaar and HG Handmade

Check them out for beautifully sensuous textile art.

Strange Perspective

There's a little of William Blake's "The Crystal Cabinet" in this one, as Alice strives "to seize the inmost form". But as noted previously, these gems elude us, but continue to fascinate. The IllustrationFriday prompt is perspective.

I was very excited to see that Illustrator Oliver Flores is doing a Lost Series. I know some of my readers will be thrilled too.

And here's another take on Alice at Ambient Ink.

Linking to this just because, on Sara Lechner's blog. I remember pasting a pink cake in the shape of a lamb in a scrapbook when I was eight years old. It was simply the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and of course, it was a lamb and a cake at the same time. Take that, Roland Barthes!

Speriments

I picked up this glass bottle stopper - now I seem to have started an interactive series with the text. The (theoretical) book seems to be expanding. Is this avoidance of finishing the project on my part? Could be. I do like the divergent thinking part more than the convergent. Where will it end? I don't know, But I think I'm going to spend the evening doing something simple with thread, while watching the last of Season 4 of Doctor Who ( So long, David Tennant). Brain hurts.

Alice at Magellan's Window

Nemo Hill of the elsewhere blog sent me a number of wonderful images of Alice in Bangkok and Bali, also this one of Alice at Magellan's Window. I don't know what or where Magellan's window is...Nemo would have to explain.

Dr. Dee and Alice

Here is Queen Elizabeth's astrologer scrying in a crystal ball. this drawing was done with the help of visual reference provided by the very kind Coffee Messiah, who has featured Alice in a video featuring a visit to Kerr Lock in Indiana. 

Alice also recently visited the wonderful  American Visionary Art Museum, courtesy of Mouse Medicine. In the slide show for the AVAM, I spotted several of Paul Spooner's pieces which I saw at the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre in London, mentioned in Sunday's post.