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Showing posts from August, 2013

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Le Ballon (1870)

At the beginning the World is created without a plan. The globe simply emerges, out of an infinite void that cannot be defined as darkness, and without much stir it dwells like a Great Tome, or an age-old rock, on which mosses run riot. We have no memories of how we arrived on this earth, nor do we know how we gained awareness of the surrounding, how we opened our eyes and got accustomed to a world composed solely of Light and Sands. From time to time we witness men rising from out of the soil with much difficulty, like sprout trying to yank itself up amidst a roaring storm, and thus we deduce how in the self-same fashion we were born. Drawing a cross before our hearts we express gratitude to the Divine Someone, for robbing us of every vestige of our memories, for willing us to forget the pain and the agony experienced through the laborious process of our Genesis. There are also times when those that are standing beside us moments before suddenly slump to the ...

Henri Fantin-Latour, White Lilies (c. 1883)

The beautiful and the terrible mingle. The horrible and the delightful- the flower that blossoms in all its loneliness into a beauty incarnate. Setting against the ugly and the homely, like a harmonious melody that courses through a hubbub of ceaseless clanks and clangs, one need not strain his ears and the music will flow into them like honey. Modesty the flower knows not. The flame of its beauty coruscates even in the depth of night, when the whole town is plagued by endless sleeps and ravaged on the point of crumbling away. Those who are inexorably licked by the flame allege that the flower is the vessel of the Devil. Still-lives often take on the appearance of an artificial nature. What is depicted is no longer something that bustles with life, as life is frozen for the sake of art. Therefore we see, on closer inspection, how every leaf of the lily seems to tremble as its last breath is on the brink of slipping away, or some might fancy that they hear the flow...