toadstool | love
Humans have had a long, non-culinary history with mushrooms. The ancient Aztecs and Mayans used them for religious rituals. Later, the Egyptians and Chinese used them for medicinal purposes. In the 1950s and 1960s mushrooms were a central part of the psychedelic drug culture, and today medical researchers are looking at properties of some mushroom varieties for cancer research.
It was the Victorians, who really took the appreciation of fungi to a different level. With their newly discovered passion for the beauty of the botanical world., they minutely detailed and catalogued new species to elevate them to artforms. Some Victorian artists also loved to play with allusions of forests and glades and their supernatural inhabitants From playful scenes of fairies and sprites frollicking among the toadstools, to Lewis Caroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the caterpillar that puffs his shisha atop a giant mushroom, the link between mushrooms and topsyturviness seems to have been there. And The Beatles and Jefferson Airplane, connected this toadstool imagery to themes central to the hippie philosophy ; a desire to lose sense of time and space and enter the realm of blurred boundaries and psychedic visions.
I love toadstools. They were one of the first things I liked to draw as a child. As well as eyes and high heeled shoes….Go figure! Here are some lovely depictions of toadstools…
