click on image to enlarge
Print after William Hogarth
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
William Blake... A Devil or Satyr... c1810
click on image to enlarge
from the Robert H. Taylor art collection at the
Princeton University Library
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Chamunda, the Horrific Destroyer of Evil...India... 10th–11th century
This is a fragment of a full-length sculpture portraying the ferocious
Hindu goddess Kali in the form of Chamunda, an epithet derived from her
act of decapitating the demons Chanda and Munda. Chamunda embodies
bareness and decay. Her hair is piled up into a chignon decorated with a
tiara of skulls and a crescent moon. She scowls, baring her teeth, and
enormous eyeballs protrude menacingly from sunken sockets in her
skeletal face. As a necklace, she wears a snake whose coils echo the
rings of decaying flesh that sag beneath her collarbone. Just above her
navel on her emaciated torso is a scorpion, a symbol of sickness and
death. She presumably once held lethal objects in the hands of her
twelve missing arms.
Saturday, May 26, 2012
Alchemy: The Golden Art...
The alchemist who has achieved illumination.
From Andrea de Pascalis,
Alchemy: The Golden Art. The Secrets of the Oldest Enigma
Alchemy: The Golden Art. The Secrets of the Oldest Enigma
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Monday, May 21, 2012
Vladimira Milashevskago...illustrations ...Zanaveshennye kartinki (Curtained pictures) ...1920
Poems by Mikhail Kuzmin, Illustrated by Vladimir Milashevsky 1920
Sun, Sun
Sun, sun,
divine Ra-Helios,
you delight
the hearts of kings and heroes,
sacred horses neigh to you,
in Heliopolis they sing hymns to you;
when you shine,
lizards crawl out onto rocks
and boys go laughing
to swim in the Nile.
Sun, sun,
I am a pale scribbler,
a library recluse,
but I love you, sun, no less
than a tanned sailor
smelling of fish and salt water,
and no less
than his accustomed heart
rejoices
at your royal rising
from the ocean,
my heart trembles,
when your dusty, but flaming ray
slips
through the narrow window by the ceiling
onto my filled page
and my thin, yellowish hand,
writing out in vermilion
the first letter of a hymn to you,
O Ra-Helios sun!
divine Ra-Helios,
you delight
the hearts of kings and heroes,
sacred horses neigh to you,
in Heliopolis they sing hymns to you;
when you shine,
lizards crawl out onto rocks
and boys go laughing
to swim in the Nile.
Sun, sun,
I am a pale scribbler,
a library recluse,
but I love you, sun, no less
than a tanned sailor
smelling of fish and salt water,
and no less
than his accustomed heart
rejoices
at your royal rising
from the ocean,
my heart trembles,
when your dusty, but flaming ray
slips
through the narrow window by the ceiling
onto my filled page
and my thin, yellowish hand,
writing out in vermilion
the first letter of a hymn to you,
O Ra-Helios sun!
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Saturday, May 12, 2012
Paolo Farinati...The Punishment of Marsyas...1573
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Agathias (c. 536-582 AD)
translated by Richard Garnett
Satyr, whose listening ear so low is bent
Breathes with spontaneous strain thine instrument?
Smiling and silent thou remainest bound
In silvery fetters of delightful sound;
For sure that lifelong figure here doth dwell
Fixed not by Painting's, but by Music's spell.
translated by Richard Garnett
Satyr, whose listening ear so low is bent
Breathes with spontaneous strain thine instrument?
Smiling and silent thou remainest bound
In silvery fetters of delightful sound;
For sure that lifelong figure here doth dwell
Fixed not by Painting's, but by Music's spell.
Thomas Sturge Moore... wood engravings & poem
The Centaur's first love
Bookplate of Campbell Dodgson
a small collection HERE
Value and Extent
The more they peer through lenses at the night,
The finer they split the rays of stellar light,
The vaster their estimates
Of distances, of movements, and of weights!
The stupor of this unimagined size
Like a mole’s eyelid palls the keenest eyes.
Yea, like unearthed moles,
We, by truth tortured, writhe outside those holes…
Dark homely galleries of confined thought,
Whose utmost reach must now be held as naught
Compared with that grand space
Which those unlike us may superbly grace.
Substance more subtle, forms of comelier growth,
Diviner minds, nothing but mental sloth
Prevents me thus to bid
Against the size revealed, with worth still hid.
No reason can be urged why all this room
Should hold no more life than, within a tomb,
The first small worm that stirs;
For all known life is less in the universe.
Undreamable communications, sun
To sun, may be the hourly routes they run,
Swifter even than light,
On business purer than a child’s delight!
But that I can, like scornful Plato, fear
Our fine things but poor copies of true worth;
Proportioned to this earth,
There thrill and shape small genuine glories here.
The more they peer through lenses at the night,
The finer they split the rays of stellar light,
The vaster their estimates
Of distances, of movements, and of weights!
The stupor of this unimagined size
Like a mole’s eyelid palls the keenest eyes.
Yea, like unearthed moles,
We, by truth tortured, writhe outside those holes…
Dark homely galleries of confined thought,
Whose utmost reach must now be held as naught
Compared with that grand space
Which those unlike us may superbly grace.
Substance more subtle, forms of comelier growth,
Diviner minds, nothing but mental sloth
Prevents me thus to bid
Against the size revealed, with worth still hid.
No reason can be urged why all this room
Should hold no more life than, within a tomb,
The first small worm that stirs;
For all known life is less in the universe.
Undreamable communications, sun
To sun, may be the hourly routes they run,
Swifter even than light,
On business purer than a child’s delight!
But that I can, like scornful Plato, fear
Our fine things but poor copies of true worth;
Proportioned to this earth,
There thrill and shape small genuine glories here.
Thomas S Moore
Saturday, May 5, 2012
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Alastair (Baron Hans Henning) & Harry Crosby... illustrations & poem
TheYoung
Lovers
Lit de Mort
I shall not die within a mad man's cell
Or in the city of unconquered pain
Nor on the ocean in a cockle shell
When mad March winds are blowing hurricane.
I shall not die among the multitude
Or as a martyr tortured at the stake,
I shall not die in business servitude
Nor as a soldier for my country's sake;
But i shall die within my lady's arms
And from her mouth drink down the purple wine
And tremble at the touch of naked charms
With silver fingers seeking to entwine.
My dying words shall be a lover's sighs
Beyond the last faint rhythm of her thighs.
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Austin Osman Spare... Self Portrait... 1908
click on image to enlarge
The Exhibition Catalogues of Austin O. Spare
compiled and edited by Robert Ansell
As an Individual I resent this cant re "self -expression." a catch phrase to hide every form of delinquency -- the excuse to perpetuate the worst whithin us at other's expense.
"Looking within, to the depths of one's Soul" is another inverse cliche: personally, my experience of "looking within" has been exactly like looking into an empty bucket!
As an inveterate believer in the Soul, I have experienced the "Touch"... and all stimuli of inspiration at any level are an effulgent refraction from something we have glimpsed from without and excreated from the machine within. So far
we have made a sorry mess of the Anatomy of the Mind. The Soul is apart--becoming
tactual of sincerity when our level of values is near equity -- its language is a baffling symbolism to all untruth: human nature being the most unstable thing known -- correspondance is rare
Austin Osman Spare 1951
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