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!
 

Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin

Christophe van Sichem...pious desires... 1628

Ex Libris... Milan Bauera

 

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 Milana Bauera website here

Ex Libris... Italo Zetti (1913-1978)...1947

Paolo Farinati...The Punishment of Marsyas...1573

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.

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.

Thomas S Moore

Dolorosa ... Self Portrait as Satyr...2012

Watercolour and Pencil 2012

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

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

  TheYoung Lovers

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.

Harry Crosby

Austin Osman Spare... Self Portrait... 1908

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 

Austin Osman Spare 1951

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.

 

 

 more illustrations here 

The Green Man ... Musick without Tears CD... artworks by Dolorosa... 2012

 

click on image for video

My pleasure to collaborate with some artwork in The Green Mans latest release Magick without Tears (feb 2012) ♥! enjoy the sounds here >

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Green-Man/260415889270

http://soundcloud.com/hrspqr/the-green-man-in-the-desert

http://www.thegreenmanband.com/

 

Ex Libris ...Franz von Byros

more here & here

Walter Tiemann... poster ...1913

 

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Alméry Lobel-Riche... Atlantis ...1922

previous Alméry Lobel-Riche

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.

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.”

 more Cecil Collins

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

Jusepe de Ribera 1591–1652... study drawing...Satyr

more  Satyrs

Dolorosa... watercolour artworks in print... Blood from Heaven ...2012

I have the pleasure of having 3 watercolours drawings in the first book published by Aeon Sophia Press a limited edition of 500, a novel written by a ranking priestess of TEMPLUM BABALONIS; E.J. Alvey. more here.

link to larger image here

Ex Libris... Hermann Bauer ... 1920s

1923

1920

Rosa Mundi a poem...excerpts...H.D. Carr (Aleister Crowley) & Auguste Rodin... 1905

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Limited edition, 488 copies printed with a full page watercolor drawing by Auguste Rodin signed in the plate.

pencil and wash design by Auguste Rodin

1. ROSE of the World!
Red glory of the secret heart of Love!
Red flame, rose-red, most subtly curled
Into its own infinite flower, all flowers above!
Its flower in its own perfumed passion,
Its faint sweet passion, folded and furled
In flower fashion;
And my deep spirit taking its pure part
Of that voluptuous heart
Of hidden happiness!

2. Arise, strong bow of the young child Eros!
(While the maddening moonlight, the memoried caress
Stolen of the scented rose
Stirs me and bids each racing pulse ache, ache!)
Bend into an agony of art
Whose cry is ever rapture, and whose tears
For their own purity's undivided sake
Are molten dew, as, on the lotus leaves
Sliver-coiled in the Sun
Into green girdled spheres
Purer than all a maiden's dream enweaves,
Lies the unutterable beauty of
The Waters. Yea, arise, divinest dove
Of the Idalian, on your crimson wings
And soft grey plumes, bear me to yon cool shrine
Of that most softly-spoken one,
Mine Aphrodite! Touch the imperfect strings,
Oh thou, immortal, throned above the moon!
Inspire a holy tune
Lighter and lovelier than flowers and wine
Offered in gracious gardens unto Pan
By any soul of man!

...

Matchless, serene, in sacred amplitudes
Of its own royal rapture, deaf and blind
To aught but its own mastery of song
And light, shown ever as silence and deep night
Secret as death and final. Let me long
Never again for aught! This great delight
Involves me, weaves me in its pattern of bliss,
Seals me with its own kiss,
Draws me to thee with every dream that glows,
Poet, each word! Maiden, each burden of snows
Extending beyond sunset, beyond dawn!
O Rose, inviolate, utterly withdrawn
In the truth: -- for this is truth: Love knows!
Ah! Rose of the World! Rose! Rose!

excerpts from Rosa Mundi by H. D. Carr (Aleister Crowley)

Hendrick Hondius... POST FUNERA VITA: AFTER BURIAL, LIFE..1690

Monograms of deceased artists on pyramids: AD (Albrecht Dürer) L (Lucas van Leyden)  MVH (Maarten van Heemskerk) AG (Heinrich Aldegrever) HS (Hans Schäufelein)

POST FUNERA VITA
Pallida Mors omnes petit.  huic parere necesse est.
     Non Color hic ullus, non juvat ullus Honos.
Qui bene vixerunt, horum est POST FUNERA VITA :
     Qui bene pinxerunt vivere Morte puta.
Ad vivum pictis tabulas nova vita paratur.
     Post mortem ut possit vivere quisque parent.

Translation:

Pale death¹ attacks all.  We have to obey it.  No colour or honour is of any help here.  For those who have lived well, there is life after burial. [As for] those who have painted well, consider that they live in death.  A new life is set out in lifelike paintings²: let each set out to be able to live after death.

1.     “pallida mors”: the phrase is from Horace, Odes 1.4.13.

2.    Reading "tabulis" for "tabula".

 

click HERE for closer details of image

Ex Libris... Michel Fingesten ... 1937

 this is saved from a while back from journey around my skull one of my  favourite graphic art blogs now 

 50 Watts

Chimera ...print 1905... Edward Okuń (1872-1945)

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Thomas Wright ...bookplate... Eye of Providence 1750

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Eye of Providence from ~ An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe 1750

“Here we may observe that as the human mind in its imeterial state, has a power of creating both imaginary matter & space so as in a moment to pass from one object to another though at an indefinite distance, so the immortal soul may also with the like facility pass from our state of existence to an other neither of which powers at present appear to be subject to our known ideas of either mater time or space.”  Thomas Wright

This passage seems to be inspired by Robert Fludd’s translation of an ancient hermetic text:
“…command thy soul, what thou pleasest, and it will fly sooner than thou commandest…nothing
will hinder her (not) the wheeling about of the starry orbs, nor yet the bodies of the other stars,
but piercing all these, it passeth quite through…”

Thomas Wright

Jan Svankmajer... Collages... Prodopis 1973