MME Designs's Weblog

Dragonfly in flower costume gets ready to go to the Butterfly’s Ball on Halloween. Design by Meredith Eliassen, 2018.

William Roscoe’s poem “The Butterfly’s Ball, and, The Grasshopper’s Feast” (1802) appeared in Gentlemen’s Magazine in 1807. Thomas Jefferson clipped this early nonsense rhyme about a party for insects and other small animals for his granddaughter Cornelia and soon it was considered to be the first purely entertaining verse for children.

In this image a dragonfly appears to to fly into a flower, both objects are drawn utilizing empty space, their vectors are in an apparent conversation. Eastern designers treat empty space like a positive mean and not as an entity that must be filled in or that is something spare. In Western design, this sensibility is known as Gestalt where objects and their environment are mutually defined.

The flower is grounded to the earth, whereas the iridescent dragonfly moves through the essence of change as a vector in the breeze where space is alive creating tension that gives way to the broader world of imagination.