Year: 2020

Daniel Graves

 

Daniel Graves, “The Power of Wisdom and Beauty”, 2013, Oil on Linen, 70 x 50 cm

Born in 1949, Daniel Graves graduated with honors in 1972 from Balimore’s Maryland Institute College of Art, where he studied anatomy and painting under painter  Joseph Sheppard and sculptor Frank Russell. He traveled to Florence, Italy, studying history painting and etching with classical artist Richard Serrin at Florence’s Villa Schifanoia Graduate School of Fine Art from 1972 to 1973.

Moving to Minneapolis, Minnesota, Daniel Graves studied in the atelier of classical realist painter Richard Lack from 1975 to 1976, where he associated with a thriving circle of classical realist painters trained by Lack and Ives Gammell, a classical realist painter of symbolic images. Graves moved to Florence in 1978, decided to remain there and began working under Nerina Simi, renowned painter and drawing teacher. During that time he became acquainted with portrait and fresco painter Pietro Annigoni, who has received praise for his classical portraits of Queen Elizabeth II.

In 1982, Daniel Graves, with his compatriot, painter and historian Charles H Cecil, a student of Ives Gammell, opened a teaching atelier in Florence which they operated together until 1990. Graves created the Florence Academy of Art in 1991 to train artists in the materials, techniques, and craftsmanship of figurative realism. Today the Academy operates ateliers in Jersey City, New Jersey, and in Mölndal, Sweden.

“When we look into the eyes of a Rembrandt self-portrait, how much closer can we get to knowing the soul of another human being? Rembrandt’s hands mixed the paint we see, but what is actually before us is a blend of his image with ours and that of every human. There is no substitute for this experience.”  —-Daniel Graves

Image reblogged with thanks to https://danielgravesart.com

The Florence Academy of Art’s website is https://www.florenceacademyofart.com

Dejan Stojanović: “The World is Always Open”

Photographers Unknown, A Collection; Th World is Always Open

“The world is always open, 

Waiting to be discovered.” 

—-Dejan Stojanović, Circling: 1978-1987

Born in March of 1959 in Peć, Serbia, Dejan Stojanović is a poet, writer, essayist, and former journalist. He attended the University of Pristina at Kosovo, earning a law degree although he was predominantly interested in the arts and philosophy. Stojanović began to privately write poetry in the late 1970s, not publishing any work until four years later in several Serbian literary magazines. In 1983, he joined his hometown literary club Karagać, first becoming its secretary and, later, its president.

Stojanović finished writing his first book of poetry,”Krugovanje (Circling)” in 1983; however, it was not published until 1993, with several poems replaced by newer ones. In early 1990, he joined the writing staff of the Serbian magazine Pogledi (Viewpoints), beginning a series of interviews with Serbian writers in Belgrade, including Momo Kapor and Nikola Milošević. 

In May and June of 1990, Stojanović conducted interviews in Paris with surrealist painter Ljubomir Popović and expressionist painter Petar Omčikus. In December of 1990, he traveled to the United States to do interviews with prominent American writers, including Saul Bellow. His series of interviews, published as “Conversations” in 1999 by the Belgrade publisher Književna Reč, won the Rastko Petrović Award, presented by the Association of Writers of Serbia.

Stojanović’s poetry collections are characterized by sequences of compact, dense poems, organized carefully in a simple yet complex structure. This is especially evident in his books, such as “The Sign and Its Children”, “Oblik”, and “The Creator”, in which a relatively small number of words are repeated in different contexts. Stojanović builds new perspectives and meanings to the topics in his poems, often placing them together with a level of absurdity and paradox. Some of his collections of poems, however, have common themes, making the books, in essence, on long poem.

Walker Kirtland Hancock

Photographer Unknown, “Walker Hancock Working on His Angel of the Resurrection”, 1950, Silver Gelatin Print

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1901, Walker Kirtland Hancock studied for one year at Washington University’s School of Fine Arts, before transferring to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where he studied under sculptor Charles Grafly from 1921 to 1925. Awarded the Prix de Rome fellowship, he studied at the American Academy in Rome from 1925 to 1928. Upon Grafly’s recommendation, Hancock became head of the sculpture department of the Pennsylvania Academy in 1929, a position he held until 1967, except for his military service and his years at the American Academy.

During World War II, Hancock served with the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program formed under the Civil Affairs and Military Government Sections of the Allied Armies, to help protect cultural property and fine works of art located in the war areas. He was assigned to the French section, working alongside architect Captain Bancel LaFarge, preparing the list of monuments in France to be exempt from military use and to be considered for protection.

One of only ten MFAA officers attached to the British and American armies in northern Europe at the time, Walker Hancock located numerous hidden depositories of works of art, arranged for their safeguarding during combat, and evacuated their contents to collecting points run by the U.S. Army. Among the depositories discovered was the vast collection in a copper mine at Siegen in early April of 1945. This repository contained, among other artworks, the relics of Charlemagne from the Aachen Cathedral; these artworks were all evacuated and transferred safely under the direction of Hancock himself.

After the war, Hancock’s commissioned medallic works include the Army and Navy Air Medals and the U.S. Air Mail Flyers Medal. His numerous portrait sculptures include the statue of General Douglas MacArthur at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and a bust of President George H.W. Bush for the U.S. Capitol Building rotunda in Washington, DC. Hancock also sculpted the Angel Relief at the Battle Monument Chapel in St. Avold, France, and the Flight Memorial at the West Point Academy.

For his artwork, Walker Hancock received the George D. Widener Memorial Gold Medal from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1925, the Herbert Adams Medal of Honor from the National Sculpture Society in 1954, the National Medal of Art conferred by the President in 1989, and the Medal of Freedom in 1990. Hancock lived and worked in Gloucester, Massachusetts until his death on December 30, 1998.

Considered to be Walker Hancock’s masterpiece, the thirty-nine foot tall bronze monument “Angel of the Resurrection” is located in the main concourse of Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station. Dedicated by General Omar Bradley on August 10, 1952, the monument’s black granite pedestal bears the names of all 1,307 Pennsylvania Railroad employees who perished in World War II.

Insert Image: Walker Hancock, “Angel of the Resurrection”, 1952, Bronze Casting with Black Granite Base, 365.9 cm in Height, Main Concourse, 30th Street Station, Philadelphia

Elys Berroteràn, “Nicolas Quevedo”

Elys Berroteràn, “Nicolas Quevedo”, Photo Shoot for “Kaltblut.” Magazine, September, 2020

Born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1991, Elys Berroteràn is a photographer, fashion designer, model and actor. He started his career in fashion modeling and television commercial appearances. Deciding to make the fashion industry his career, Berroteràn formed Caracas Fashion in 2009, which, under his direction, is now one of the largest fashion showcases in Venezuela. One of his latest photography projects is “Moda Caracas Moda”, running the current fashion campaign “Born to be Wild”. 

Nicolas Quevedo is a model signed with the fashion and talent company Grupo 4 Colombia. 

Images reblogged with many thanks to the fashion magazine“Kaltblut.”, located online at https://www.kaltblut-magazine.com

Many thanks for inspiring this post to https://doctordee.tumblr.com

Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres

Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, “The Ambassadors of Agamemnon in the Tent of Achilles”, Detail and Full Canvas, 1801, Oil on Canvas, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts

The monumental history painter Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres was born in August of 1780 in the southern French town of Montauban. After receiving early instruction from his artist father, he was enrolled at the Academy of Toulouse, studying under neo-classical painter Guillaume-Joseph Roques. In 1797 Ingres left for Paris to study with Jacques-Louis David, who recognized his talent and allowed Ingres to assist on his “Portrait of Madame Récamier”.

Admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Ingres won the Rome Prize in 1801 with his first major work, “The Ambassadors of Agamemnon in the Tent of Achilles”. Living in Paris and studying medieval church sculptures and the works of early Italians and Flemings at the Louvre, Ingress drifted away from the classicism he studied under Roques and David. He developed a new style, intricately designed with nearly shadowless figures, formed of distinct areas of color. Ingress exhibited four works at the Salon of 1806; though three were ignored by the critics, his “Napoleon on the Imperial Throne”,with its hard Gothic-styled artificiality and symmetry, scandalized them.

Between 1806 and 1814, Ingress spent his time painting in Italy, surviving on a four year stipend from the French Academy of Rome, painting portraits, before receiving patronage from, among others, Caroline Murat, sister of Emperor Napoleon and Queen of Naples. His works during this time includes “Oedipus and the Sphinx” and the “Valpincon Bather”, both executed in 1808 and now in the Louvre. Ingres was also among the painters charged with decorations for the Quirinale Palace, the residence of Napoleon’s infant son, king of Rome, producing two large paintings: the romantic 1813 “The Dream of Ossian” and the 1812 tempera painting “Romulus Victorious over Acron”.

Ingres received his first major commission from the Restorative government for two major works: an altar piece for the church of Santa Trinita dei Monti in Rome and, for the cathedral of Montauban, a painting to depict King Louis XIII’s vow to consecrate his kingdom to the Virgin Mary in Her Assumption. “The Vow of Louis XIII” achieved critical success at the Paris Salon of 1824, establishing Ingres’s reputation as the main classical artist. He was awarded the Legion of Honor and elected to the Royal Academy, staying in France and opening a teaching studio in 1825.

After the Revolution of 1830, Ingres received honors but little work from the liberal monarchy of Louis-Philippe. He labored for ten years on a commission for the Autun Cathedral entitled “Martydom of Saint Symphorian”, only to find dismissal from the critics at the 1834 Salon as outmoded in subject matter and style. Ingress departed for Rome, staying for six years, returning only after the popular success of his 1840 “Antiochus and Stratonice”, painted for the Duke of Orlénas, the king’s eldest son.  

In the 1840s and 1850s, despite spending much of his energy on large mural works, Ingress achieved his honors from his portraits of society women, including the portraits of “Baroness Rothschild” in 1948,;“Madame Moitessier” in 1851 and now in the National Gallery of Art; and “Princess de Broglie” in 1853. For the government of Napoleon III, he painted “Apotheosis of Napoleon I” and was honored with a retrospective exhibition at the Universal Exposition of 1855.

Ingress finished his painting “Turkish Bath” in 1862 at the age of eighty-two; in the same year, he was appointed to the French Senate. He died, after a brief illness, in January of 1867, of natural causes at the age of eighty-seven. His daring individual style, often criticized, was dedicated to an idea of beauty based on the relationship between forms, and harmonies in the use of line and color.

Gary Snyder: “The Blue Mountains March Out of the Sea”

Photographers Unknown, The Parts and Pieces Making a Whole: Set Nine

“The blue mountains are constantly walking.” Dōgen is quoting the Chan master Furong. — “If you doubt mountains walking you do not know your own walking.”

— Dōgen is not concerned with “sacred mountains” – or pilgrimages, or spirit allies, or wilderness as some special quality. His mountains and streams are the processes of this earth, all of existence, process, essence, action, absence; they roll being and non-being together. They are what we are, we are what they are. For those who would see directly into essential nature, the idea of the sacred is a delusion and an obstruction: it diverts us from seeing what is before our eyes: plain thusness. Roots, stems, and branches are all equally scratchy. No hierarchy, no equality. No occult and exoteric, no gifted kids and slow achievers. No wild and tame, no bound or free, no natural and artificial. Each totally its own frail self. Even though connected all which ways; even because connected all which ways. This, thusness, is the nature of the nature of nature. The wild in wild.

So the blue mountains walk to the kitchen and back to the shop, to the desk, to the stove. We sit on the park bench and let the wind and rain drench us. The blue mountains walk out to put another coin in the parking meter, and go down to the 7-Eleven. The blue mountains march out of the sea, shoulder the sky for a while, and slip back to into the waters.” 

—-Gary Snyder, Practice of the Wild

Mary Fraser Tytler-Watts

Mary Fraser Tytler-Watts, The Watts Mortuary Chapel, Compton, Surrey, England

Born in November of 1849 in India, Mary Seton Fraser Tytler was a Symbolist craftswoman, designer, and social reformer. She spent her early years in Scotland, being raised by her grandparents, before moving to England in the 1860s. In 1870 Tytler studied at the South Kensington School of Art, and later studied sculpture at the Slade School of Art in 1872 and 1873. Initially a portrait painter, she associated with the Freshwater art community on the Isle of Wight, becoming friends with Julia Margaret Cameron, a British photographer known for her soft-focus portraits of Victorian men.

Mary Tytler met painter George Frederic Watts, who was thirty-three years her senior, and married him in November of 1886 in Epsom, Surrey. After her marriage, Mary Watts worked in the fields of Celtic and Art Nouveau, producing pottery, bas-reliefs, metalwork, and textiles. Watts exhibited her work in The Woman’s Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago, Illinois. Through the Home Arts and Industries Association, she created employment in the rural communities; she also trained workers in clay modeling, which led to the establishment of the Compton Potters’ Guild in 1899.

Mary Watts designed, built, and maintained the Watts Mortuary Chapel in Compton from 1895 to 1904. It is a chapel in an Art Nouveau version of the Celtic Revival style. The main structure is inspired by the 11th and 12th-century Romanesque architecture; but the terracotta relief carving and painting is Celtic Revival. Virtually every village resident was involved in the chapel’s construction, with local villagers, under Watt’s guidance decorating the interior with a fusion of art nouveau and Celtic influences. George Watts, Mary’s husband, paid for the entire project and painted the allegorical “The All-Prevading” for the altar just three months before he died in July of 1904. 

Mary Watts strongly supported the revival of the Celtic style, the indigenous artistic expression of Scotland and Ireland. In 1899, she began designing rugs in this style for the carpet company Alexander Morton & Company, which was Liberty & Company’s, the luxury department store, main producer of fabrics. Watts pioneered the department store’s Celtic style with designs for the Celtic Revival textiles, carpets, book-bindings, and metal work.

Mary Watts was President of the Godalming and District National Union of Women’s Suffrage Society and convened at least one women’s suffrage meeting in Compton, Surrey. A firm believer that everyone should have a craft with which they could express themselves, Mary Watts died at Limnerslease, her home in Compton, on the sixth of September in 1938. Her remains are buried in the Watts Mortuary Chapel.

Note: The Watts Mortuary Chapel at Compton, Surrey, is managed by the nearby Watts Gallery, dedicated to the paintings and sculptures of George Frederic Watts. The chapel is open Monday to Friday (8AM to 5PM) and Saturday to Sunday (10AM to 5:30PM). There is no entrance charge.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “The Lived and Preceived Worlds”

 

Photographer Unknown, (The Lived and Perceived Worlds)

“Everything that I know about the world, even through science, I know from a perspective that is my own or from an experience of the world without which scientific symbols would be meaningless. The entire universe of science is constructed upon the lived world, and if we wish to think science rigorously, to appreciate precisely its sense and its scope, we must first awaken that experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression. Science neither has, nor ever will have the same ontological sense as the perceived world for the simple reason that science is a determination or an explanation of that world.

Scientific perspectives … always imply, without mentioning it, that other perspective – the perspective of consciousness – by which a world first arranges itself around me and begins to exist for me. To return to the things themselves is to return to this world prior to knowledge, this world of which knowledge always speaks, and this world with regard to which every scientific determination is abstract, signitive, and dependent, just like geography with regard to the landscape where we first learned what a forest, a meadow, or a river is.”

—-Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Preception

Carl Friedrich Johannes Unger

 

Carl Friedrich Johannes Unger, “Salomé (Portrayed by Eva von der Osten)”, 1917. Oil on Canvas, 135 x 90 cm, Museen der Stadt Dresden

Born in 1872 at Bautzen, a hill-top town in Germany, Carl Friedrich Johannes Unger was a painter, who during his lifetime, was a highly respected Art Nouveau  and Symbolist artist. In 1887, he took an apprenticeship as a decoration-painter in Bautzen; but later, between 1888 and 1893 studied painting in the Royal Dresden Court Theater. Unger continued his studies at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, under land and seascape painter Friedrich Preller the Younger and historical painter and sculptor Hermann Prell. 

After making a series of watercolors on the island Bornholm in the Baltic Sea, Unger effectively launched his international career in 1896 with his “Plakat” poster for the Dresden-based organ manufacturer Estey. In 1897, his painting “Die Muse (The Muse)” was eagerly purchased by the Old Masters Gallery, part of the Dresden State Art Collections. Unger continued his studies at the Académie Julian in Paris from October 1897 to March of 1898, under the tutorage of painters Tony-Robert Fleury and Jules Lefebvre.

In 1899, Hans Unger exhibited his work at the German Art Exhibition in Dresden; his “Self Portrait in a Sweater” and his landscape “Farewell” were displayed among his other works. At the 1900 Paris World’s Fair, he won the bronze medal for his exhibited works. After becoming a member of the newly established German Artists Union, Unger traveled the North Sea and Baltic areas, visited Italy and Egypt, producing pastel paintings and watercolors. For his work exhibited at the St. Louis 1904 World’s Fair, he won another bronze medal.

During 1917 and 1918, Hans Unger participated in several major Dresden exhibitions, including the 1918 Dresden Art Exhibition, with eleven paintings and ten drawings, and the Dresden Artists Society exhibition, where he entered six paintings and designed the catalogue’s cover image. With the cultural change in Germany after the loss of the war in 1918, Unger’s works of idealized women in pastoral landscapes fell out of popularity. Still a wealthy man, he continued to travel through Europe and Africa, visiting Egypt, exhibiting, and becoming an artist under the patronage of King Fuad I of Egypt. 

An exhibition for Hans Unger’s sixtieth birthday was organized by the Art Association of Saxony in 1933. After this celebration Unger’s health steadily deteriorated, with a late diagnosis of kidney disease. He died at his home in Loschwitz, Dresden, on the 9th of August in 1936, and was buried in Loschwitz Cemetery. The resurgence of interest in Jugendstil decorative art of Germany in the 1960s brought Hans Unger’s work back to the attention of the art world, resulting in an increase in popularity and several museum retrospectives.  

Note: Hans Unger’s 1917 “Salomé”, a portrait of German suprano opera singer Eva von der Osten in her performance as Salomé, was exhibited at the 1917 exhibition of the Dresdner Kunstgenossenschaft, Dresden Artists Society.

Sid Avery

 

Sid Avery, “Rock Hudson at Home in North Hollywood”, Date Unknown, 1950-1979, Silver Gelatin Print

Sid Avery, a Hollywood photographer, was known for capturing the private moments of stars like Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean and Audrey Hepburn. His work in the 1950’s and 60’s was a departure from the glamorized, soft-focus portraits of an earlier Hollywood era when images of the stars were tightly controlled by the major studios. He showed celebrities on the movie set between takes and away from the job, relaxing with the family or engaged in household chores. Among his candid photographs are ones of Marlon Brando taking out the garbage, Rock Hudson emerging from the shower to take a phone call, and Audrey Hepburn riding her bike at Paramount Studios with a shaggy Yorkshire terrier in the basket.

The established stars, used to the old system, were not easily convinced to let a photographer document them in their unvarnished private lives, but Avery succeeded where others failed—he managed to get in where no one else could—and he soon became the man magazine editors and art directors called on for their candid photo layouts. Avery’s most effective tool was not his technical skill as a photographer, but his personality. His friendly, unassuming style put his subjects at ease and made them open up.

Among Avery’s first odd jobs as a young man was that of taking glamour shots of the chorus girls at Earl Carroll’s Vanities and the Florentine Gardens. When drafted into the Army, Avery was assigned to the Signal Corps and selected to receive six months of training at LIFE in New York before being sent overseas. Stationed in London, he was placed in charge of the Army Pictorial Service Laboratory, where all the still and combat footage coming out of the European theater passed through his hands. When Avery returned to Hollywood after the war, he was ready for the photo journalism boom. Avery eventually became one of the top advertising photographers in Los Angeles, moving from still photography into directing television commercials and receiving numerous awards.

In the eighties, Avery redirected his energies toward preserving the history of Hollywood as depicted in still photography, founding the non-profit Hollywood Photographers Archive which was donated to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts. Avery then rebuilt the collection which still thrives today, the Motion Picture and Television Photo Archive (mptv Images), representing over fifty of Hollywood’s best-known photographers. Avery’s photographs have been exhibited all over the world, from Australia to Japan to England and throughout Europe.

My thanks to Becker-Minty for the information on Sid Avery: https://www.beckerminty.com/art/

 

Kevin Desabrais

 

Kevin Desabrais, “The Ragged Man”, 2009, From the Album “Nothin’ But the Road”

The song”The Ragged Man”, written and sung by Kevin Desabrais, was released in September of 2009 on the album “Nothin But the Road” by the label Boy and The Bear Records. The album contains twelve songs that are available on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music. A great song by a talented artist.

Kevin Desabrais’s website is located at: https://kevindesabrais.com/home

Any information on this artist would be greatly appreciated.

 

Rateb Seddik

 

Rateb Seddik, “Sans Titre”, 1940. Oil on Wood, 120 x 220 cm, Musee Rateb Seddik Le Caire, Egypt

Founded in December of 1938, the Art et Liberté group in Egypt provided a young generation of intellectuals, artists and activists with a platform for promoting political and cultural reform, with the members playing an active role in the network of the Surrealist movement. At the start of the second World War, the Art et Liberté became part of the international movement defying fascism, nationalism, colonialism, including the British colonial domination of Egypt.

In line with Surrealism’s rejection of the alignment of art with political propaganda, the Art et Liberté rebelled against the merging of art and national sentiment. With their December 1938 manifesto entitled “Vive L’Art Dégéneré (Long Live Degenerate Art)”, the group declared their opposition to the reactionary attacks on art in Hitler’s Germany, epitomized by Munich’s 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibition which ridiculed modern art,  and attacks elsewhere, notably in Vienna and Rome.

Rateb Seddik completed his formal artistic education at Chelsea College of Art in London, where he was a student of the English surrealist painter Robert Medley, and later continued his studies in Cairo. Seddik became a member of the Art et Liberté and participated in the group’s fourth exhibition, entitled “For Independent Art”, that was held on May 12, 1944, at the Lyceé Francais School in Cairo. Despite obstacles that occurred, the show was able to exhibit 150 works of art, including painting, sculpture and photography.

Rateb Seddik’s 1940 “Sans Titre (Untitled)” combines his passions for opera and ancient Egyptian art. The oil-on-wood painting depicts a group of diversely featured human beings who are all equally united by a white cloth symbolizing death or suffering. While the scene resembles a Turkish bathhouse, it also references Stravinsky’s opera of the tragedy of Oedipus Rex. This surrealist masterpiece is a prime example of an artwork that is at once locally rooted and universally informed.

Fabrizio Campanella

Fabrizio Campanella, “Painting of a Young Man”, 1980, Oil on Canvas, 91 x 61 cm, Private Collection

Born in 1965 in Rome, abstract artist Fabrizio Campanella’s creative work was primarily inspired by the culturally tumultuous period of the 1980s. The Neo Geo and The Pictures Generation became prominent art movements during this decade, alongside Neo-Expressionism which became well-known in Germany, France and Italy. Currently living and working in Rome, Campanella is  a member of Art Club International, the independent artistic association founded by Italian abstractionist painter Piero Dorazio in 1995.

Campanella had his first solo exhibition in 1992 at the La Gradiva Gallery in Rome. He has subsequently had solo shows at Studio Soligo in Rome, Palazzo Collicola Visual Arts in Spoleto in 2012,  Palazzo Ca Bonvicini in Venice in 2013, and at the Officina delle Zattere in Venice in 2014. His works have also been shown in many international exhibitions, including the XIV Rome Quadriennale and  the “Hommage à Vlado Gotovac” second exhibition at the Klovicevi Dvori Gallery in Zagreb.

The “Painting of a Young Man” is one of several 1980s figurative works by Campanella painted before he began his abstractions in the 1990s. 

William Gay: “An Infinite Number of Lives”

Photographers Unknown, (An Infinite Number of Lives)

“Down fabled roads reverting now to woods Winer felt himself imprisoned by the dark beyond the carlights and by the compulsive timbre of Motormouth’s voice, a drone obsessed with spewing out words without regard for truth or even for coherence, as if he must spit out vast quantities of them and rearrange them for his liking, step back, and admire the various patterns he could construct: these old tales of love and betrayal had no truth beyond his retelling of them, for each retelling shaped his past, made him immortal, gave him an infinite number of lives.”
― William Gay, The Long Home