Thursday, May 3, 2012

Augustus John ...Self Portrait...Tete Farouche... 1899-1900



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Alastair (Baron Hans Henning) & Harry Crosby... illustrations & poem



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  TheYoung Lovers

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The Passionate EmbraceThe Passionate Embrace
 The Passionate Embrace

more HERE


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



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click on image to enlarge


a scan from a new title by Fulgur

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 




Monday, April 30, 2012

ERNST BARLACH (1870-1938) ... illustrations...woodcuts...a happy Walpurgisnacht!



illustrations from

Goethes Walpurgisnacht

 

Terrible enchanted forms,
Dragon-women, men-wolf swarms!
Wilder yet the sounds are growing!
See, the archfiend comes, all-glowing!
From the ground
Hellish vapours rise around! 

from  THE FIRST WALPURGIS-NIGHT.

 

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 more illustrations here 



Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Indian Gouache... dancing girls




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This painting, which represents a mixture of Mughal and Rajput styles, depicts two Indian girls dancing. It is attributable to the twelfth century AH / eighteenth CE.



Monday, April 16, 2012

Cecil Collins... The fool...1944



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In his essay The Vision of the Fool (1947), Collins wrote that the Fool was the  "‘Saint, the artist, the poet’. 

 
"'The saint, the artist, and the poet are all one in the Fool, in him they live, in him the poetic imagination of life lives."
“The Fool is the poetic imagination of life, as inexplicable as the essence of life itself. This poetic life, born in all human beings, lives in them while they are children, but it is killed in them when they grow up by the abstract mechanization of contemporary society.”




Friday, April 13, 2012

Rosaleen Norton ... drawing & poem excerpt







...My home is the house of winds,
With great songs of Space ringing wild in my ears
Whose shouting heart leaps to their tune.
I mock at the shapes, plodding thickly, through lamplight:
stupid and cruel - or kind -
They are alien, Other, I'm touched with uneasiness...
Fear of these human.... and glide away sidelong:
Yet joying in fear, in my stealthy aloofness,
To know they are They and I'm I.
Towers of old cities are spiralling over me, Night-conjured,
rising from Time
And I hear, through the seething of luminous silence -
Secretive, vibrant, the sound of the Solitude -
Calling of others like me
Quietly they come, flitting softly as secrets; light-footed,
velvety, swift...
With eyes gleaming green, lambent flame of the Opal.
Kindred... we signal our quick recognition.
I am I ... but I know we are we
Panther of silence; god of Night; Lord of the wild inhuman
stars:
You are my own; teeming soul of solitude.
Here is no loneliness, secret Master -
You, Dark Spirit are with me.

from Pan's Daughter by Nevill Drury

previous Rosaleen Norton