Leonor Fini... etching 1957

The Witches' Sabbath Resurrected

previous FINI

Herbert Grass...Thoughts on Love and Religion 1912

Ex Libris... P Wolbrand

Suniti Namjoshi ....Building Babel..The Black Piglet

from Building Babel by Suniti Namjoshi

Every retelling of a myth is a reworking of it. Every hearing or reading of a myth is a recreation of it. It is only when we engage with a myth that it resonates, becomes charged and recharged with meaning...

Suniti Namjoshi ...poem excerpts

Theres sunshine in the garden

there are flowers in the hall

at your gate a lovesick beast

is breaking down the wall...

from poem ~ Courtship

Why did you make a hole in the sky,
Breaking the backdrop of placid blue days?
The black crow are flapping wildly in my head
While the blue air has closed about your absence.
from poem ~ In Three Tenses



Suniti Namjoshi

Hans Bellmer...print.... undated

"At the source of the most intensely black and scandalous works...we believe there exists this sort of passage from passion to action, a secret need for equilibrium, the urge to create an imaginary evil from which we may take pleasure within the excesses of intellectual passion, in order to cure ourselves of the real evil we're suffering"

from Scandal with a Secret Face - an Essay by Nora Mitrani 1950

previous Bellmer

Horst Haack ... print... Genderles Being 1969

Horst Haack was born in 1940 in Neubrandenburg. He lived in Lübeck from 1945 to 1959 before moving to West Berlin to study painting at the Berlin Academy of Art. Painting "light"! As of 1967, he lived and worked for 12 years on the island of Ibiza (Spain). From there, in 1979 he moved to Paris where he started in 1981 "Chronographie Terrestre (Work in Progress)", without at the time realizing this was his future life's work. It is a painted, drawn and panel-mounted diary that he has continued to work on ever since. At present he lives in Darmstadt (Germany) and Paris.

Secret Games.. the Prose and Art of J Karl Bogartte... part 1

The WONDERful prose of J K Bogartte...excerpts...

Secret Games is Book II in the ongoing series of prose poems exploring the sense of the marvelous mating of science and erotic metamorphosis as a form of landscape in which the real becomes imaginary, and forces itself into visible nature.....

In that place where life and death pass by unnoticed, the Messengers without their shadows light up the fabric of unauthorized expectations, like vague recollections of thoughts that were never yours, or another form of magic, or perfidious logic, when it multiplies your body out of the space that occupies your body, out of the circle of your ageless metamorphosis within a further space more paradoxical than the others, when you follow the births and funerals of a consciousness that resembles the sea, like a fire-propagating game of chance...

~~~

The Paradoxical Game of Night

La noche es la quema de agua...

~~~

The pure fruit of an emergency landing, is a last ditch effort, a glowing hunger strung up by its ankles from the rafters, and impersonating the sputtering compass when it loses all sense of direction, kneels and licks your precious feet... then dashes off, exhilarated and beside itself. There is humor in the word: “precious.” The fruit is a night-light for the children who walk in their sleep––and therefore, the night is a narcissistic diversion... an act of irony that makes for intimate conversation between total strangers, when hidden meanings are always appreciated... when no one is present.

Reality is the amorous disruption of the wedding night, its fables and narratives in the black glass of the zookeepers’ promiscuous twin, the leopard’s robe of ingenious escapes, and the promenade of wonders...

Love is subversion of the senses, the negative light of magnetic sensations that cover you with the black dust of wings in the continuous vessel that reproduces your presence, and overflows. A singular plurality out of which are coaxed the drops of poison, of light, or words, a language of dew in the early morning, the dangerous clairvoyance of the body that swims in the bright water of its own two-way mirror. The psychosomatic eggs of an open window. Black honey, a pure black stone with a faithless heart of fire. Illusive and impeccable intervention.

 When the laws of nature intercede on her behalf, footprints are sent scurrying in every direction, and when the coordinates mimic the exact measurements needed to trigger the alchemical vessels that seduce the weather, that whir and hum like simian lanterns held up to warn of impending dangers and invisible locks, she enters the forest from behind, where the spirits speak only Spanish and the nights are without equal. It is necessary to harness these wonders. The minerals of distraction, molecules of light.

Her flesh of poppies reflects the sun while her shadow impersonates the moon. The history of perversions is the gold of science. She is an endlessly bathing light.

Amethyst of exchanging blood that ravages equality in the mother tongue, when the moon is a cat’s cradle in the sea of consciousness, of civil war in the telepathy of rebellious spirits, lovers in the fields of lunacy...

She was conscious of the purity of revenge, and he, the color of Central Asia at noon, always knew the mirror of her arousal. Together they avoided detection. Together, they were distant treasures.....

from Soluble Language 

Art WORKS - photomorphoses

Jean Gabriel Daragnes (French, 1886-1950)...Woodcuts...Satyr

two scans from a favourite book "The Modern Woodcut" by Herbert Furst

on  one of my favourite obsessions... Le Satyre

Here illustrating Paul Claudel's "Protee"

Daragnes also illustrated Oscar Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol" Gerard de Nerval's "Main Enchantee" and Poe's "Raven" to name a few

.

..let there be darkness as I await my portion in which will be created from my soul the drop ready to fall in its greatest heaviness. Let me offer a libation to you in the shadows, like the mountain spring that offers drink to the Ocean in its little shell!

Paul Claudel

more woodcuts & satyr 

Ex libris...Franz von Bayros

previous Bayros

Robert Mapplethorpe... Erotica ...Collage 1972

previous Mapplethorpe


" My approach to photographing a flower is not much different than photographing a cock. Basically, it's the same thing." RM

Max Klinger..nude study... 1902

previous Max Klinger