la specola

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay.

2010-09-02T14:36:00.000-07:00

Leon Bonnat
Rodin, portraits of Victor Hugo

Maria Wiik

Golucho

Flesh and blood, fish and fowl

2010-09-01T12:01:00.000-07:00

Van Gogh
Antonio Lopez-Garcia
Andrea Lazarov

Chardin
Gallen-Kallela
Stanhope Forbes

This post following on from the last makes me seem a bit obsessed with carcasses. Maybe I am. I never met a picture of a dead fish I didn't like. But I think the quality that attracts is not the desire for horror or gore but the near sympathetic, clear-sighted observation of small things which were once alive. Of course this is all intermingled with the Dutch passion for showing off the sheer volume of seafood they could afford to pile onto one buffet table, and then the clunkingly metaphorical vanitas genre. But I think there is something truer, a kind of honesty towards life and death without crowing or crying about one or the other.

Fearful symmetry.

2009-06-10T12:34:00.000-07:00

Henri Rousseau, 1844-1910

Antonio Ligabue, 1899-1965
I just came across that first Rousseau painting last week, and suddenly remembered being shown it as a five or six year old in an art lesson, we had to draw our own versions. Bless you, forgotten primary school teacher! The sensations all flooded back as strong on seeing it again. The lithe, calligraphic rhythm of a beast's body. And Ligabue, too, what hypnotising paintings, unbearably intense in person. Found the last drawing floating around on my hard drive, did it a few years back.

The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.

2009-06-02T13:13:00.000-07:00

Rembrandt, 1606-1669Chardin 1699-1779

Soutine, 1893-1943

Francis Bacon, 1909-1992

Jenny Saville, born 1970.

It's strange to me that for all his consummate language of the grotesque, Bacon was the most lighthanded and insubstantial painters of his own namesake. He seems only able to really invest in human flesh, I think the overt carcass in his work is a weaker symbol, almost too easy. Of all of them, Saville strikes me as cold, but Bacon as the least visceral. In fact, Chardin, for all his delicate 18th century domesticity, is appealingly, repugnantly meaty in comparison. Though I'm not sure anyone could ever outdo Soutine.

2009-06-02T12:41:00.000-07:00

Oh man in need of sleep lately. Brain going -

You're about as femme fatale as an after dinner mint!

2009-06-01T13:14:00.000-07:00

Otto Dix, 1891-1969

Max Beckmann, 1884-1950

George Grosz, 1893-1959

La femme et la fauve.

2009-05-26T12:31:00.000-07:00

Henri Matisse, 1869-1954 Pierre Bonnard, 1867 –1947 Walter Sickert 1860-1942

Matthew Smith, 1879-1959

2009-05-25T12:29:00.000-07:00

I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

The slick of seeing.

2009-05-16T10:07:00.000-07:00

Velasquez, 1599-1660 - The Weavers.

John Singer Sargent, 1856-1925Abram Arkhipov, 1862-1930

2009-04-07T12:56:00.000-07:00

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

Dylan Thomas

2009-03-01T06:27:00.000-08:00

"The rest of my days I'm going to spend on the sea. And when I die, I'm going to die on the sea. You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape. One day out on the ocean I will die--with my hand in the hand of some nice looking ship's doctor, a very young one with a small blond moustache and a big silver watch. "Poor lady," they'll say, "The quinine did her no good. That unwashed grape has transported her soul to heaven."
-Blanche Dubois

2009-03-01T06:14:00.000-08:00

2009-02-26T12:37:00.000-08:00

"I'll drink it! Let's have a bottle of rum!" shouted Pierre, banging the
table with a determined and drunken gesture and preparing to climb out
of the window.

They seized him by his arms; but he was so strong that everyone who
touched him was sent flying.

"No, you'll never manage him that way," said Anatole. "Wait a bit and
I'll get round him.... Listen! I'll take your bet tomorrow, but now we
are all going to ----'s."

"Come on then," cried Pierre. "Come on!... And we'll take Bruin with
us."

And he caught the bear, took it in his arms, lifted it from the ground,
and began dancing round the room with it.

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy.

2008-12-20T13:16:00.000-08:00

2008-12-18T15:59:00.000-08:00

2008-12-18T06:11:00.000-08:00