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.
Photographer Unknown, (Wet Red Trunks), Selfie
“In the weeks we’d been thrown together that summer, our lives had scarcely touched, but we had crossed to the other bank, where time stops and heaven reaches down to earth and gives us that ration of what is from birth divinely ours. We looked the other way. We spoke of everything but. But we’ve always known, and not saying anything now confirmed it all the more. We had found the stars, you and I. And this is given once only.”
―
The Spiral and the Glass Bead Game
“His way had therefore come full circle, or rather had taken the form of an ellipse or a spiral, following as ever no straight unbroken line, for the rectilinear belongs only to Geometry and not to Nature and Life.”
― Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
N.C. Wyeth, “The Battle at Glens Falls”, from “The Last of the Mohicans” by James Fenimore Cooper, NY: Scribner’s First Edition, 1919
“Each of the combatants threw all his energies into that effort, and the result was, that both tottered on the brink of the precipice.”
“The Last of the Mohicans” is set in 1757, during the French and Indian War, when France and Great Britain battled for control of North America. During this war, both the French and the British used Native American allies, but the French were particularly dependent, as they were outnumbered in the Northeast frontier areas by the more numerous British colonists.
The novel is primarily set in the upper New York wilderness, detailing the transport of the two daughters of Colonel Munro, Alice and Cora, to a safe destination at Fort William Henry. Among the caravan guarding the women are the frontiersman Natty Bumppo (known as Hawkeye), Major Duncan Heyward, and the Indians Chingachgook and his son Uncas. These characters are sometimes seen as a microcosm of the budding American society, particularly with regards to their racial composition.
Champloo, Computer Graphics, Anime Film Gifs
“A samurai chooses to serve a master and does it out of respect and love, not because they are forced. Service to them is not demeaning; service is an expression of their prowess and their pride; they serve because only they are strong enough to serve with such flawless perfection and such consummate ability. It is a source of pride to them.
Being a samurai is all about selfless service and if the lord abuses the servant, it is no longer a situation of service; it becomes the situation of a victim. It is never acceptable for a samurai to be a victim. It is never acceptable to allow a lord to abuse you or rob you of your dignity. In such a situation, it is acceptable to walk away.”
― Alexei Maxim Russell, Instruction Manual for the 21st Century Samurai
The Smashing Pumpkins, “The Fellowship”, from the Vampire Diaries Soundtrack
Photographers: Dave Milstead and Studio One Photos, “Jeremy Rowley”, Photo Shoots
Chisels
John Craxton, Title Unknown, (Blue Chair)
John Leith Craxton RA, was an English painter. He was sometimes called a neo-Romantic artist but he preferred to be known as a “kind of Arcadian”. His first solo exhibition was in London in 1942 at the Swiss Cottage Café, and his first major solo show at the Leicester Galleries in 1944. His work was seen as part of the neo-romantic revival, and his early pre-1945 work shows the influence of Sutherland and Samuel Palmer, and he was also heavily influenced by friend and patron Peter Watson.
He moved permanently to Crete from about 1970, and switched between living in Crete and in London. The writer Richard Olney remembered Craxton in Paris, en route to Greece during the summer of 1951; “Most nights, John Craxton, a young English painter, arrived to share my bed; we kept each other warm. He moved in a bucolic dreamworld, peopled with beautiful Greek goat herders. Soon he left for Greece.“
He was elected Royal Academician in 1993. Craxton lived and worked in both Chania, Crete and London. His love of Crete extended to his being one of the British Honorary Consuls there. In 2006, Craxton and his long-term partner Richard Riley were united in an official Civil Partnership. John Craxton died in 2009 at the age of eighty-seven, survived by his husband Richard.
Lois Dodd, Burning House Series
Lois Dodd, “White Catastrophe”, Oil on Masonite, 1980, Private Collection
Lois Dodd was educated at the Cooper Union in New York City from 1945–48. She was the only woman founder of the Tanager Gallery, which was integral to the Tenth Street-avant-garde scene of the 1950s where artists began running their own coop galleries. From 1971 to 1992, Dodd taught at Brooklyn College and at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, where she served on the Board beginning in 1980 and is now Governor Emerita.
As part of the wave of New York modernists to explore the coast of Maine just after the end of the second world war, Dodd helped to change the face of painting in the state. Along with Fairfield Porter, Rackstraw Downes, Alex Katz, and Neil Welliver, Dodd began spending her summers in the Mid-Coast region surrounding Penobscot Bay. Attracted by inexpensive but rambling old farmhouses, verdant fields, and the bright sunshine of a summer’s day, these artists sought both companionship and an escape from the demands of city life.
Photography by Viktorija Stapone
Viktorija Stapone is a photographer-witch from Lithuania.
“I was born and raised in the country, which is very high in suicide and depression numbers. I was born in a country in which to be weak and have personal fears is a phenomenon in the society. And if you talk about it out loud you can be misunderstood for opening your personal experience. Openness can be a weapon against you.
The series of photographs is my inner emotional experience. It’s about people who are quite distant from developed society and today’s standards.
These photos are psychological portraits of human inner demons, downfalls and the ups and most importantly phobias. It’s like evidence that all the people from time to time hit the wheel of fear and fear or going through such a period is not a madness.” – Viktorija Stapone
Photographs reblogged with thanks to http://www.viktorijastapone.com. Please credit him when reblogging images. Thanks
Photographer Unknown, “Jeremy Tang”, Photo Shoot
Thirteen Senses, “Into the Fire”
Thirteen Senses are a post-britpop band from Penzance, Cornwall. The group released the album “The Invitation” on 27 September 2004, along with several singles: “Thru the Glass”, “Do No Wrong”, “Into the Fire” and “The Salt Wound Routine”, of which the first three have reached the UK Top 40. Their second album, “Contact”, was released in April 2007. Thirteen Senses are the only Cornish band to have a Top 20 single.
Gerhard Richter, “Abstract Painting (613-3)”, Detail, Oil on Canvas, 1986, Collection of Preston H Haskell
The groundwork for pieces like Abstract Painting (613-3) was laid in the early 1970s, when Richter began a series of nonrepresentational paintings based on photographic enlargements of brushstrokes. Because they depict, in a highly illusionistic manner, reproductions of otherwise abstract marks, such paintings confuse the handmade and the technological, the original and the copy. Richter continued to duplicate brushstrokes until 1980, when he started to make actual abstract paintings, albeit in unconventional ways.
Abstract Painting (613-3) exemplifies the technique for which Richter is recognized today, one in which editing, subtraction, and cancellation play crucial roles. Here as elsewhere, the artist fleshed out a preliminary composition with ordinary brushes. As it was drying, he covered the hard edge of a squeegee with paint and dragged it across the surface of the canvas, an action that blended some layers but removed others, thereby revealing what was previously concealed. The resulting works are tapestries of abrasions and palimpsests, heterogeneous fields of visual incident.
Discontinuity is particularly evident in Abstract Painting (613-3), due to variations in the directionality of paint, the combination of cool and warm hues, and the presence of a vertical seam near the middle of the canvas. To the extent that it cedes some control to chance and introduces the specter of mechanicity, Richter’s process “muffles singular signs of personal expression” and trades existential drama for moderation, unlike the gestural, virtuosic canvases his paintings superficially resemble.
As with many of his abstractions after 1980, Abstract Painting (613-3)’s palette is bright and sumptuous in appearance but not necessarily in tone. For Richter, color does not signify “happiness,” he once said, but instead a “tense” or “artificial” “cheeriness” associated with “gritted teeth.”
Artist Unknown, (The Ascension of Man), Computer Graphics, Animation Gifs
“We must try to remember everything, every movement, every stretch, every convulsion that made us how we move as we readily grow in our outer body that encompasses the planets, the suns and the moons in every other body that we touch, in every other mouth that we kissed, in every other language that we try to comprehend; for they are not the outside of a stranger, nor are they just images of our psyche, but the very being of ourselves, the dimensional levels of our very existence weaving colours in the tapestry of creation, yet the very non-existence of the template is proof of consciousness, of ascension, of Life.”
― AainaA-Ridtz, The Sacred Key — Transcending Humanity