9/1/2023 0 Comments Don featherstoneHis flamingo also got him into a movie, 2011’s “Gnomeo & Juliet,” distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. It ended up on a gift card that is still sold today, she said. One was a version of the painting called “The Bookworm,” which he submitted to a contest at the Fitchburg Public Library. Painting took a back seat.īut when he retired, he got back into painting, sharing his work only with her. He worked for Union Products for 43 years and made over 600 items for them, she said. “He particularly enjoyed sculpting and painting,” she said. “Donald had nine years of formal art training,” Nancy Featherstone said, adding that he was “an extremely talented artist.” “He got a kick out of it he enjoyed it,” she said, referring to the recognition he received for his creation.įeatherstone, born in Worcester and raised in Berlin, studied art at the Worcester Art Museum. Nancy said she’d tell people – often in Don’s presence – that her husband was the one who created the popular lawn ornament.Īnd they’d say, “I never knew someone actually did that.” And it was something for which he’d become famous throughout the world.īut it was never something he’d brag about or bring up on his own. Her husband, who died Monday at the age of 79, was the creator of the pink lawn flamingo. You see, the flamingo wasn’t a random gift. This piece was amended on 24 June 2015 Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, not Pink Flamingos was John Waters’s directoral debut.“Donald was thrilled with his bronze flamingo,” she said.“After they became a hipster thing and people would put a hundred of them on their lawn, I gave mine away.” That’s certainly the way Waters, who received dozens of them as gifts from fans, would like to see the pink flamingo garden ornament. “We have four wardrobes of twin outfits, hanging two by two, organised by season and occasion.”įeatherstone’s contribution was recognised in his home state in 1987 when the governor of Massachusetts proclaimed the plastic bird “an essential contribution to American folk art”. As critic David Thistlewood noted in Back to Postmodernity, in Polke’s critical rendering of a bird that had been “readily absorbed into the petit bourgeois domestic idyll, with its smug sense of being home-made”.įeatherstone and wife Nancy, who kept 57 birds in their back garden, seemed to poke fun at the avians, their plastic copies, and themselves when they described in the Guardian two years ago how, for 37 years, they had dressed alike. Sigmar Polke added the bird’s slender lines to his work. The pink bird was also adopted by aspirational postwar society in Germany. By 1970, Sears had replaced the bird with natural-looking fountains and rocks. In her 1999 exploration of the modern American relationship to nature, Flight Maps, Jennifer Price wrote at length about the flamingo phenomenon, concluding that “most common and everyday encounters with the natural world take place through mass-produced culture”.īut the counterculture of the 60s rejected the plastic pink flamingo of their parents’ generation and sales declined. There was the doo-wop group, the Flamingos the lawn ornament inspired “flocking”, in which charitable neighbours “flocked” to bird-free lawns with the ornaments. The 50s craze for bright colours, and of Florida as a winter destination, contributed to a boom of flamingo-themed hotels, motels, and lounges. We couldn’t even get one in the same frame.” “Of course, you can’t get near a pink flamingo. It was, he recalls, a fruitless undertaking. On one occasion, in Florida, Waters was invited to pose with a flock of real-life birds. Later the bird became associated with gay culture, bad taste and Waters himself. Divine was living in a trailer, retired and trying to write her memoirs in peace.” The flamingo, which ultimately melts when the trailer catches fire, symbolises urban tranquillity. “In my movie, weirdly, I was trying to show respect. People at the time were collecting 30s, not 50s kitsch. They were certainly not out there for irony.” His choice of title, then, was emphatically not designed to mock. “I thought they were touching folk art for modest people’s homes. Mostly he recalls, they were made of plaster, perhaps predating Featherstone’s plasticised variety, and often accompanied by a blue gazing ball – lately adopted by artist Jeff Koons – and a wishing well. Growing up, the director had seen the ornaments outside poor, country homes. “I gave it that title because the movie was so full of bad taste I wanted to have an innocuous, underplayed title,” Waters explains. Waters’ film, a memory-searing, garish romp through shock and schlock that, along with his Female Trouble, remains a staple of formative late-night teen viewing, is notorious for the closing scene in which Divine consumes freshly laid dogshit.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |