i is for 'it girl'

and cinematically speaking, there was only one... miss clara bow. i'm pretty tired, so i know i probably won't do the marvelous miss bow justice with the tribute tonight, and for that i apologize. i had read about clara in old books from the library long before i ever saw her on film. but once i saw the 1927 classic romantic romp 'it,' i realized her reputation was richly deserved. she was a glittering delight... like a female rudolph valentino, she could quicken the heart and flutter the breath with nothing more than a smirk or raised eyebrow. she's in almost every shot of 'it,' where she played the coquettish-but-broke shopgirl betty lou spence. if you've never seen it, its a lot of fun. gary cooper even shows up as a walk-on reporter. clara was at her prettiest peak in 'it.' every bit as bewitching as garbo, but in a more playful, girl-next-door sort of way. (incidentally, this photo wasn't taken from 'it,'... i just found it like, 20 minutes ago and posted it because i'd never seen it before.)

cute salute

i've had some positive feedback recently on a collage i posted a while back featuring silent screen legend louise brooks. but i must confess, my heart really belongs to clara bow. here's a lovely lavender slice of notebook art jean-lucien made using one of my older clara bow tributes as part of the background. i should know more about clara. i'm not sure if that's even her real name. her life was a long train of mixed blessings... which was not uncommon amongst hollywood darlings around that time. in any case, i wanted a swath of something purple so i dug this up. even though its small and quite a few years old, i still think its gorgeous. so, here's to you, miss clara.

clara kisses

here's a slice of notebook art i found after some digging around. on the left is a punch-colored treatment of mick jagger and anita pallenberg from 'performance,' and on the right is the glimmering black and white miss clara bow kissing some guy i don't recognize. overall, i think the entire slide is brilliant. and as usual, the colors just seem to like, tango. so dig it.

cool wave

this is an older note embellishment made by jean-lucien. the color and the composition are, as usual, faultless. it features a watercolor lip gloss chart in the background... and, as if that weren't cool enough, there's also a short-haired first-season davy jones and an inset of the legendary 'it girl' clara bow. i should make time to sing her praises later. but for now, dig on this. imagine, all the hundreds of thousands of bland and boring notebook pages out there, and my darling jean-lucien takes pains to deocorate almost every single page with color and cutting such as this. soooo cool.