beauty and then some

Academic peonage has its benefits as we are able to order piles of gorgeously colorful tomes and indulge every urge of our intellectual and creative ids.

I've loved stained glass as long as I could remember, but Harry Clarke took things to a whole other level. I really don't know how he languishes in such obscurity.





and the book illustrations! I wish I could draw with that kind of gorgeous detail.



In my late 20s, I've found that I've rediscovered things I loved in childhood that I didn't have access to after reading all the books in the library that looked interesting and not having access to things like OhioLink and the Internet.

My sister and I loved fairy tales as a kid, Perrault, Andersen, The Brothers Grimm, and Andrew Lang, and my grandparents had faded volumes with fraying cloth bindings and I loved the illustrations which had so much drama and detail and the more obscure tales, leading to reading lots of fantasy. I still have volumes of this stuff at home that I picked up at sundry booksales and such. I never realized that Russia had such amazing illustrators in the 19th century.

I wish there was an paint-by-number set, but I'm getting plates of these ones etched, even if the content seems a bit strange for hanging on the living room wall. That Art Nouveau sensibility while evoking illuminated manuscripts and folk art, it's just a beautiful thing.





Vasilisa the Beautiful is not just pretty, but she's smart too, and given that Halloween is three days from now, this feels somewhat appropriate.

I stumbled across Virginia Sterrett's work and it reminded me of that sense of wonder I had when I first started reading such things.





and of course, Dulac's take on Poe...





I also wanted to be a ballerina when I was seven, and jumped around my parents' living room to Tchaikovsky and roller-skated with my sister in the basement to those greatest hits classical records (Beethoven's Biggest Hits) slowly destroyed by a Fisher-Price turntable that my dad refused to let us put his records on. He's a smart man.

Vrubel's Swan Princess reminds me of the Trina Schart Hyman book of the folktale I got from the library when I was little, but more impressionistic...



And, as an arty kid with a religious bent, Victor Vasnetsov is a balm for my soul, an antidote for the Thomas Kinkades of the world.






Evelyn Paul's illustrations are lovely, understated and that medieval-evoking thing going on as well,





And Kay Nielsen, who died in poverty, leaving behind some incredible beauty as well.





And this, this is beautiful too.

respite

I haven't been good about posting pictures because I'm a PC person who owns a Mac, but these are from Dike 14 on Saturday, which is an awesome place.







I've been a mess these past few weeks, with everything going on, and the change of seasons, and the feeling of stasis. I went for a good two weeks of eating dinner alone unable to string two words together in conversation, but yesterday was beautiful even if it began feeling utterly overwhelmed and broken. Intangible divinity once again transcended at the moment of my leastness and deepest doubts in ways that are nearly impossible to explain, and it ended up being the first really good day I've had in months.

I meet up with Tangerine for the first time since this summer, and epic plans were altered to instead hang out at the cemetery because it was a beautiful day and it was close by. Lake View is massive and we went down the "nature walk" path and ended up somewhere completely different and somewhat deserted, with my nice camera getting lots of use.



I love this angel so much.



Shadows of leaves on the bronze doors of the tombs.



daddy long legs spiders guarding mildewing silk flowers. This crypt had this weird echo effect which meant we were saying all sorts of absurd things to hear the reverberation.



This one I'd never seen before and was in the middle of the woods.



Japanese maples turning colors, the way these branches bend is beautiful to me.



This was creepy enough from this angle, and then we realized from walking around to the other side that the little boys were naked, which is even creepier. I don't understand. By this time, we'd wandered around a lot and got hungry so we got pizza and gelato and sat at the little cafe tables on Murray Hill conversating until it started to rain and we both needed to get home anyway.

I got home later than I thought I would, and while buying earplugs at the drugstore for the show tonight, got a call from Muk, who was down at Edgewater and wanted to hang out. I didn't want to bother with opening acts for the show, so I joined him on the pier as we watched the waves break on the rocks and talked about everything until the park ranger started coming around and I had live music to go see.



Got to Peabody's about five minutes before Katatonia got onstage, got my much needed catharsis of moody rock and Swedish accents, the only sour note being the drunk blonde metalhead Snooki type who tried to start a pit and kept slamming into me ostensibly because I was about the same size and didn't have anyone with me. I'm too old for the mosh thing and didn't want to get into a chickfight when there's good music to get introspective to so I got out of her way after she grabbed my shirt by the bra straps and started pulling me, and found more chill people on the side (kids with their confused parents) to stand by.

Still, it was a good show, they played a long set and I was able to lose myself in sweet sounds and indulge my inner techie geek by checking out the chords, deciphering tunings and time signatures because I spent my teens reading guitar magazines instead of Seventeen. Most of the crowd except for the girls were chill. Seriously, ladies, you're doing us females who dig the heavy sounds a disfavor.

No pictures, as I had the little point and shoot and forgot to replace the memory card. Thankfully Randal's more organized than me and has the visuals.

refract and reflect

The drop in temperature is welcome, the rain picking up flecks of red light reflecting in puddles on the roof next door, the flickers of lightning, the thirsty garden watered.

I've been off-kilter the last couple days, a little more visibly cranky as opposed to the mercurial moodiness, brought on by the accumulation of small pet peeves and larger frustrations still minuscule in the great scheme of things. Tacky and catty women and pretentious wuss rockers are nothing compared to dealing with things that really suck, which is what the rest of the world has to deal with all the time.

But it's welcome to finally having a night of some degree of inspiration and time to execute after poring over piles of art books accumulating in the living room of gold covered icons and luminescent stained glass, illuminated manuscripts, architecture of Goa churches, and intricate jewelry from wilder parts of ancient Europe, not really sure why I've been inspired by the medieval and Arts and Crafts lately, maybe it's the abstraction and the richness in detail, the subject matter timeless, the intensity and translucence, the labors of love and sweat for patronage and devotion, great beauty made in dark and uncertain times.

Things have always been corrupt and lame and empires inevitably fall so I've checked out of the political debate, keeping up only enough to know what's going on but nothing more, because each side keeps blaming the other when both sides do the exact same thing especially when it comes to dealing with people on the other side of the world whose blood and lives are evidently considered less worthy than our own. My cousins are stocking up on silver and gold and I guess they have their reasons, but if the shit hits the fan, you can't eat it or wear it to stay warm or burn it for fuel. I don't know.

I've got three weeks left of enameling before the city moves that part of the arts center to the east side and the process of cleaning, scrubbing, filing off fire scale and sifting powders with names like 'flame' and 'wisteria' made of unknown quantities. After a few months of doing this, I can kind of figure out what I'm doing, but I don't do anything all that epic after the unsatisfying attempt at cloisonne, considering that beautiful and handmade Christmas gifts containing unknown amounts of lead and who knows what else may not be the best plan.

Theophilus in his 10th century text on the 'Divers Arts' describes the processes of metalworking, mixing paint, and constructing stained glass and enamelled pieces, and it was even more labor intensive, to keep the coals hot and the pieces melting at the right temperatures, making ones own bellows out of sheepskin and glue from the gooey bits of sturgeon and eel, pigments from mercury, sulphur, lead.

Being unvocationally trained and not affluent, I use canvases found in the closeout section of Marc's, Magic Markers to trace designs and fill in blank spaces. When mixed on gesso, spread by brush, they're forgiving and wonderful, especially when mixed with the wax of Prismacolor pencils. A late night tomorrow means finally getting to break out the acrylics. It's been too long.