Imagine a Mirror!

"No, but I used to like walking backwards", Rosemary said in response to my question if she used to walk around with mirrors held horizontal as a child, so as to imagine walking on the ceiling.  Ah yes, another way to experience sensory perceptions from a time long ago. Both required curiosity and courage. It does allow you to see things differently and gain a better perspective. Nice to see  the artist Anish Kapoor using the medium of mirrors in the lofty realm of fine art.

Sky Mirror

Rockefeller Center NYC 2006 

Anish Kapoor

photo by Brad Patrick at en.Wikipedia

To think that we started with gazing into a bowl of water in prehistoric times, we've come a long way baby.  But can you believe that it has been only 177 years that we've had mirrors as we are used to today? Prior to this, mirrors were enormously rare and expensive, so the populous had to make do with the puddle.  It was the old 1% deal.

Mirrors

 Obsidian 

6000 BC from Anatolia, Turkey

These polished and burnished slabs of rock may have been wetted to help with the reflection. Copper mirrors were found in 4000 BC Mesopotamia.  

Early Chinese octagon mirror, front and back

Bronze

Bronze followed suit in China and India c. 2000 BC, which required periodic polishing by the 99%.  

Egyptian,  New Kingdom (1550-1070 BC)

This one could use a little elbow grease, too!

Milo

43 x 81 cm

Homage to Carlo Mollino (1937)

www.Zanotta.it

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the fairest of them all? Have an instant great figure, courtesy of Venus de Milo!  Art and architecture made huge strides in ancient Greece, but a bronze hand-held mirror was likely all that Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty ever owned.

Mirror, Roman

Metal-coated glass was invented in modern-day Lebanon around 100 AD. Later, the Romans made the leap to using molten lead on blown glass. Cleopatra (69-30 BC) likely enjoyed reflecting her renowned beauty with this new technology via Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. 

Mirror, Middle Ages

People muddled with their murky mirrors in the middle ages until the big breakthrough of glass-blowing in the 14th century. Little pieces of broken blown glass were used as convex mirrors, which seemed an improvement over the unevenness of lumpy metal.  They didn't mind, probably because they had to worry about plague rather than obesity as we do nowadays! 

I like the connection those early mirrors have with modern day security mirrors, which I enjoy using in residential interiors. 

Girandole mirror

England/America 1800's

giltwood, mercury, gesso

4'11"h  x  11"d  x  45"w

David Skinner Antiques

Really, wasn't this just a fore-runner of the security mirrors commonplace at convenience markets today? Likely the homeowner was ensuring that the silver wasn't pocketed!

Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519) 

Vitruvian Man, 1487

shown with mirror writing

Leonardo was fascinated with mirrors.  He suggested that artists use mirrors to compare their work with the reflection of what they were painting from.  This was a technique that I was taught in art school, and I use it to look at my art or interiors with more objectivity.  It's like flipping your right brain with your left brain.  Leonardo frequently wrote backwards, in what is called 'mirror writing'.  It's easy to read if you hold it up to a mirror, as all schoolchildren know.

Venetian Giltwood Mirror c. 1685

112"h  x 48"h

Richard Shapiro Antiques and Works of Art

In the 16th century, the Italian island of Murano, near Venice, became the most important center of mirror production.  Methods were perfected using an amalgam of tin and mercury over ever larger sheets of glass. It was not until 1835, when Justus von Leibig discovered how to thinly layer silver onto glass, that we came to have the mirrors that we take for granted today! Nowadays less expensive processes and materials allow the mass-production of mirrors to the minions. 

The imperfect reflections of ancient mirrors are amusement for us today - we don't know how hard things were in the old days! These purposely warped mirrors are good to have around to keep your sense of humor intact -  doctors agree that a  good laugh is important to your physical and mental health!

vacuum deposited silver metal surface on polyester sheet

84" x 56"

Here's a cool, inexpensive product (about $170)  just ripe for imaginative minds.

hiroshi 

design Marta Laudani - Marco Romanelli

100 x 8 x 100 cm

Hanging mirror in 6mm - thick curved silver-backed glass 

Fiam Italia

This mirror would nicely accommodate someone with multiple personalities.  Or, the planes of glass could suggest a past, present, and a future. The largest central area could be the present, right now on April 16th, 2012. Indeed, walking backwards in time, we can see that we've come a long way since peering into a pool!

Through the Looking Glass

One of my favorite past times as a child was walking around with a mirror, held horizontally, and imagining that I was walking on the ceiling.  This gave me an entirely new perspective on the space in which I lived, and guaranteed endless entertainment. Grasping everything from a hand mirror to a picture size mirror so as to increase the effect, I would carefully step over door headers and ceiling beams, skirt around light fixtures and plunge into the abyss above a staircase. The magic of the mirror has never ceased to fascinate me.

Photograph by Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

The New Museum in New York recently hosted "Carsten Holler: Experience",  where you could don a pair of "upside-down-goggles" so that your eyes would do a back flip. The show was hailed as an art world amusement park and included corkscrew slides, a sensory deprivation tank, and light shows that would leave you hallucinating. Just my kind of show!  For those of you who missed it, I recommend the my old-fashioned method of walking around your home with as big a mirror as you can manage, an epsom salt bath, and some psychedelic drugs (Steve Jobs would approve). 

I was amazed to find this unique clothing boutique image in my files. I believe it may be in Paris, showing a room completely upside down. Just imagine how discombobulating but fun it must be! Just imagine the designer selling the concept to the client: "Let's make the showroom upside down"! The herringbone parquet installers might not have been so enthralled, but obviously the client took the bait.

Christie's auction of The Collection of Will Fisher, founder of Jamb

Otherwise, a safe, tamer and more affordable way of delving into the "other-world" of the mirror is simply to see what your wall mirrors are reflecting.  We can get "turned on" by how artfully the reflection is arranged.  It's a simple way for you to "make art".

Vicente Wolf

Vicente Wolf has been using large mirrors for years to tell a different story of what is typically reflected.  In this case, he calls attention to the interesting table legs and echoes the beckoning hand sculpture. The mirror is actually a three-dimensional piece of stainless steel, polished and framed with a satin finish bevel. He likes that there is a bit of distortion; that is when the fun begins!

IKEA

New mirrors are like children and teenagers. They are lucky to survive a generation, given the throw-away society that we now live in. Funny that Ikea included dinosaurs as props. These mirrors will be extinct, too, in no time flat.  But instead of being frozen, they'll be melted!

Caadre

design by Philippe Starck

Fiam Italia

Until that day of extinction comes, the more expensive and better quality new mirrors, as this one, will surely endure and be handed down by the generations, the equivalent of the computer age external hard drive, storing 21st century memories.

17th c. Italian giltwood mirror

Interior Design by Michael S. Smith

I am captivated by the souls and the history that antique mirrors contain.  What stories could they tell of the countless scenes that have unfolded in their presence?  How have they witnessed the aging of persons gazing into their never-ending depths?  I view mirrors with the greatest respect for the history that they hold within.  These old mirrors, with beautiful frames, silvered backing on thick glass, are a treasure, and perhaps someday their code of silence will be cracked and their secrets will spill forth. Perhaps someday the technology will allow them to be as a television History Channel. Just touch the mirror and be transported to another world!  

15 Minutes of Fame

For those of you who may not have been able to find the St. Louis Homes & Lifestyle magazine with the wonderful article featuring yours truly, here is the link for immediate gratification!

http://www.stlouishomesmag.com/St-Louis-Homes-and-Lifestyles/April-2010/Canvas-of-Color/