A fine art, film, history and literature site oriented to, but not exclusively for, the gay community. Please be aware that there is mature content on this blog. Information on images and links to sources will be provided if known. Enjoy your visit and please subscribe.
German/Polish Winged Lobster-Tailed Burgonet, circa 1700
One-piece skull embossed with six ridges and riveted visor, adjustable nasal bar and neck-guard of four lames. On the sides, two riveted heart-shaped wings embellished with geometric openwork. Attached cheek-pieces pierced with seven holes each (leather strap of the cheek-pieces an later addition). Height ca. 39 cm. Sold at auction: 7,200 Euros.
Photographer Unknown, What Lies in the Corner
Appearance, not reality, is what the clever dog grasps at in these clever days. We spurn the dull-brown solid earth; we build our lives and homes in the fair-seeming rainbow-land of shadow and chimera.
― Jerome K. Jerome, Clocks
Artist Unknown, Perpetual Leaping Frogs, Computer Graphics, Animation Gifs
“In quickness is truth. The more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping.”
~ Ray Bradbury
John Singer Sargent, “Study of a Young Man (Seated)”, 1895, Lithograph, Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University
In October 1895, Galerie Rapp in Paris organized one section of a large exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts that marked the hundredth anniversary of the invention of lithography by Aloys Senefelder. The British printer Frederick Goulding, who had developed an improved transfer paper for lithography, was involved in the show, and he encouraged Sargent and other London artists to participate, even offering to supply them with materials and print their work.
Sargent created six lithographs at this time; he selected the above print for the Paris exhibition, which moved on in November to the Rembrandt Gallery in London. This is the most developed of composition, and demonstrates the artist’s progressive engagement with tone. To form strong highlights falling across the sitter’s shoulders and some of the drapery folds, portions of the paper have been left in reserve, in a manner that echoes Sargent’s brilliant handling of watercolor.
Caitlind Brown and Wayne Garrett, “New Moon”, 2014
New Moon is an interactive shadow and light sculpture from artists Caitlind Brown and Wayne Garrett that was installed twice in Lexington, Kentucky in February of 2014. Built from 5,500 burnt out incandescent bulbs donated by the community, the sculpture allows viewers to manipulate phases of the moon using a large turnstyle.
Artist Unknown, (The Darkness of the Deep), Computer Graphics, Film Gifs
“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”
-Edgar Allen Poe
Photographer Unknown, (The Darkness)
“It cannot be seen, cannot be felt,
Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt,
It lies behind stars and under hills,
And empty holes it fills,
It comes first and follows after,
Ends life, kills laughter.”
-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
Paul Woods, “Gallipoli”, Oil on Canvas, 2015
Paul Woods is an Irish artist who graduated from Limerick School of Art and Design with a BA Honours Degree in fine art painting. He has exhibited in Ireland, America and Poland. His artwork up to date is a visual compendium and evaluation of the tragedy of life lost in warfare. Woods paints about personal, collective and universal histories.
Paul Woods’s work is about the past and memory, and war –or, to use Wilfred Owen’s phrase, “the pity of war” –a theme to which he continually returns. Often on a large scale, his artworks combine painting and photographic techniques to produce multi-layered images. Through his work, Woods intends to stimulate a dialogue on the role of art in the process of familiarizing and contextualizing history and its cyclical nature.
Paul Woods has traveled and researched extensively on the subject matter of war and conflict, from battlefields in Europe, Asia and North America, Auschwitz in Poland to the Kwai River in Thailand
Paintings by Ronald Mevs, Haitian Artist
Self taught Haitian master, Ronald Mevs was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1945. His works include print making, acrylic on canvas, and sculptures from metal and wood. Mevs cultivates in his work intimate relations with religion, and popular and traditional roots of the Haitian culture, which he describes as a syncretism, an amalgam of European, African, and native Indian influences.
Artists Unknown, (That Cold Rain), Computer Graphics, Animation Gifs
Photographer Unknown, (Let It Be Known), Photo Shoot, Model Unknown
“If you love sex, let it be known. You don’t have to walk around downtown naked or have some flyers printed up, but definitely don’t be shy about your love (or obsession) for sex.”
-Roberto Hogue
Musette de Cour: Maker Unknown: ca.1700; France; Leather, Ivory, Silk, Wood, Silver, and Iron; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
The musette is a refined form of bagpipe with a bellows that generates wind to inflate the bag and sound a chanter and a bourdon. The bourdon is a device to play the drones. This musette is one of the luxurious pieces used in French aristocratic circles between 1620 and 1760. The instrument features a double chanter, a novelty that emerged soon after 1670, and a bourdon for three double reeds and four sliders. The sliders allow the play of one, two, or three drones. The double chanter operates with only one double reed.
Sculpture Installations by Chiharu Shiota
Chiharu Shiota (塩田 千春 Shiota Chiharu?) is a Japanese installation artist born in 1972 in Osaka. She has been living and working in Berlin since 1996. Shiota studied at the Seika University in Kyoto and at various schools in Germany and is represented by ARNDT in Berlin and Galerie Daniel Templon in Paris.
Shiota’s oeuvre contains various art performances and installations, in which she uses various everyday objects such as beds, windows, dresses, shoes and suitcases. She explores the relationships between past and present, living and dying, and memories of people implanted into objects. To these Shiota adds intricate, web-like threads of black and red.
Artist Unknown, “Russell Tovey”, Computer Graphics, Gay Film Gifs
The Artwork of Pavel Tchelitchev
Born in October of 1898 in Dubrovka, a settlement of the Russian Empire, Pavel Tchelitchev was a surrealist painter and a costume and set designer. He was an exponent of the Neo-Romantic movement, a group which included French fashion designer 
and illustrator Christian Bérard and the Russian painters Eugène and Leonid Berman. This group, active in Paris during the 1920’s, drew their inspiration from Picasso’s ‘Blue’ and ‘Pink’ periods and the metaphysical paintings of de Chirico.
The only son of an aristocratic landowning family, Tchelitchev was educated by private tutors and expressed an early interest in art and ballet. After the 1917 revolution, his family was forced to flee Russia and settled in Ukraine. Tchelitchev studied at the Kiev Academy and at the studio of painter Aleksandra Ekster, one of the most experimental women of the avant-garde Art Deco movement. After graduation, he worked from 1920 to 1923 as a designer and builder of theater sets in both Odessa and Berlin.
During the early 1920s, Pavel Tchelitchev, who was openly homosexual, met American pianist Allen Tanner in Berlin; the two men became lovers and moved together to Paris in 1923 to pursue the artistic careers. That year in Paris, Tchelitchev became acquainted with Gertrud Stein, who introduced him to the 
Sitwell sisters and the Gorer family, both wealthy families who supported the arts. He developed a long-standing close friendship with Edith Sitwell, which led to frequent correspondence between them and the painting of six portraits of Sitwell.
In Paris, Tchelitchev created multimedia painting, film and dance experiences that led to collaborative works with choreographer George Balanchine, later the founder of the New York City Ballet, and ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who founded the preeminent Ballets Russes. Tchelitchev’s first show in the United States was a group exhibition at New York’s newly opened Museum of Modern Art in which he showed his drawings. In 1934, he left his lover Allen Tanner and moved to New York City with his new partner, poet Charles Henri Ford, whom he had met in 1933 shortly after Ford’s arrival in Paris.
Pavel Tchelitchev continued to collaborate with choreographer Balanchine and was introduced to writer and co-founder of the New York City Ballet, Lincoln Kirstein, who became Tchelitchev’s greatest patron. For seven years tarting in 1940, Tchelitchev produced illustrations for the literary and art magazine “View”, whose coverage
of the avant-garde and surrealist art scene was published by Ford and gay poet and film critic Parker Tyler.
Tchelitchev’s earliest paintings, abstract in style, were influenced by his study in Kiev with Ekster and by the Russian Constructivist and Italian Futurist movements. With his move to Paris in the 1920s, he became influenced by the assertive emotions contained within the brushstrokes of the French Neo-Romantic artists. Tchelitchev continued to experiment with new styles throughout his career and eventually incorporated elements of fantasy and surrealism with multiple perspectives into his body of work.
Pavel Tchelitchev became a United States citizen in 1952 and moved to Italy with Charles Henri Ford in 1949. He died, with his partner by his side, in July of 1957 in Grottaferrata, Italy. His body is buried in Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery. Tchelitchew’s works can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His correspondence, writings, photographs and printed material are housed in the Archives at Yale University.
Note: For those interested in a more comprehensive study of Tchelitchew’s life and work, I recommend James Thrall Soby’s 1942 “Tchelitchew: Paintings, Drawings” published by New York’s Museum of Modern Art. This volume in its entirety can be found at: https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_3117_300061977.pdf
Top Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Pavel Tchelitchew”, circa 1930s, Bromide Print, 22 x 18.7 cm, National Portrait Gallry, Washington DC
Second Insert Image: Pavel Tchelitchew, “Fallen Man”, Date Unknown, Gouache on Paper, 65 x 50 cm, Private Collection
Bottom Insert Image: Pavel Tchelitchew, “Study for Bathers”, 1938, Ink on Paper, 44.5 x 28 cm, Private Collection