Draper, Draping & Rags
Thursday, January 09, 2014
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| Glen Draper |
One of the advantages of being your own
publisher, editor, art director, writer and photographer is that you can do
what you want. But I know of a qualified art director who most of the time I
ever knew him he was a contrarian. If you told him, “Start the story with the
sexy picture,” He would do the opposite, which is exactly what I am doing now. Rick
Staehling would smile and agree.
But you must keep in consideration that the
highfalutin terms publisher, editor, art director, writer, photographer that I
use should be taken with a very small grain of salt. For me to publish is to
see something in print and an art director better be a graphic designer. That
must instantly reveal anybody here that I remember what dialing a phone was all
about. Thus my publishing is suspect. In the mid 60s, when I was in the
Argentine Navy, my friend Felipe Occhiuzzi and I would inwardly laugh at all
those officers above us who took their jobs as military men. They were amateurs in a third world country. We often used to
say, “Les gusta jugar a los soldaditos, or "They like to play with toy
soldiers." Little did we know that these rank amateurs would bring down
governments, disappear people and start a war with Great Britain.
This particular blog, in spite of soldiers and art
directors is all about drapers and draping. As far as I can tell the first experts in draping were Greek sculptors. From there Michelangelo took notice and created his Pietà in which Christ's robe is beautifully draped.
I have had contact with skilled drapers for
many of my best photographs but I had never met a real draper until sometime
around 1992. I am not sure if it was in a hot tub in Washington
DC or one in Atlanta. The man was Glen Draper. He was a
friendly, chubby man from Ogden,
Utah who had a constant smile and
a passion for growing beautiful hostas in his backyard. The hot tub was in one
of the many American Hosta Society National Conventions I attended in the 90s.
A few years later (soon after Draper was
killed in an automobile accident) his hosta “Northwest Textures” was given to
all of us who attended the National Convention in Spokane in 2002. This was a “thick skinned”
(in hosta parlance you would accurately say the leaves had substance) hosta
that was light green but turned yellow/gold as the summer progressed.
Most snobbish hosta people usually looked
down upon these freebies. I took two plants (smuggled into Canada when it used
to be safe) back home and every spring when I see Northwest Textures emerge I
think of the smiling man, Glen Draper whom I first met in a hot tub. From the picture here you can see that the
combination of Draper’s hosta and Kirengeshoma palmata is a great combination
which somehow reveals beautiful and elegant draping.
So now with that lead we can insert here
the sexy picture and write about draping. The elegant English word draper comes
from the Latin drappus, from there it becomes drap and drapier in old French to
draper in late Middle English.
In Spanish there is no equivalent to that
beautiful verb to drape. We satisfy ourselves with cubrir or cover. And yet
consider that from the French, that drap which meant cloth became that most
ordinary Spanish word trapo for rag. Since you use to use some sort of rag to
mop we have the relatively nice sounding trapear for mopping a floor.
For most of my magazine life when I had the
opportunity to photograph women for an article I always chose the avenue of the
least amount of clothing. My secret weapon was Inga Vollmer who did not only the
makeup but also the careful covering of stuff that should not be seen by the use
of silk, satin, velvet that was gracefully and artfully arranged (one word suffices
here drape). I believe she did the makeup for Madeleine Morris’s lips but also the
draping with the satin. Vollmer could also drape herself quite well. She was good with cats.
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| Madeleine Morris |
I will not place here another image, one taken
by a now dead Mexican photographer called El Trapo Negro. It has bits that
might offend a few. This is the link. He
took the picture when he was in his mid 80s (there is still hope for me). The trapo
in question is really a black rebozo or shawl. Notice the grace and elegance.
Next on my list are some pictures I took of
a beautiful and most well-endowed Lusitanian in which I used my mother’s red
Mexican rebozo to cover, just a bit. The rest I mostly cropped out so what you
see here is meant to not offend. And I was the draper.
