Aries Ascending

Kuba cloth, made by the Shoowa people in central Africa, is hand-woven using strands of raffia palm leaves which are dyed in a variety of earth tones using vegetable dyes. Men weave the base, undecorated, cloth and women produce the laborious surface embroidery.

There are two main types of Kuba cloth: cut pile cloths and flat-woven cloths with no pile which may include patchwork, embroidery, appliqué and embellishments.

The masterful abstract patterning displayed in Kuba cloth has inspired artists such as Klee, Picasso, and Braque. Matisse had an extensive collection, pieces of which he often displayed in his studio.

I was reminded by @explore-blog that Beatrix Potter (born 150 years and one day ago) wasn’t just a beloved children’s author and illustrator - she was an enthusiastic amateur mycologist. Before she drew Peter Rabbit, she drew mushrooms!

Source.

However, the source you cited (the very @explore-blog article I saw yesterday) is incorrect on a couple points. Potter didn’t actually think that lichen was an example of symbiosis - she thought it was a single organism (the belief of old-fashioned lichenologists). The claim that Potter was ahead of her time was popularized in Linda Lear’s nice biography “Beatrix Potter: A Life In Nature” (upon which the article you shared is based) and some other books.

However, since then, Lear has said, “My claims for Potter’s acceptance of symbiosis are both overstated and incorrect … We went back to the sources and I realized it was she who was an old fashioned lichenologist.”

The article also incorrectly implies that the paper she submitted to London’s Linnean Society was about the symbiosis question - it wasn’t.

I think it’s accurate to refer to Potter as an amateur mycologist because fungi wasn’t her main pursuit or focus or business. Lear told the BBC, “I don’t think she had any ambition to be a mycologist. She’s already been successful in selling some of her art work and when the research paper she wrote needed more work, she lost interest in favour of something that was more suited to what she was after.”