stay awake

hi, my name is noni

[holly-warbs]

a moment! 

Evening sketch 26/09/18.

[knowknee]

The peace of a hot day at the beach, arriving early enough to observe the tide roll in, between intervals of reading interesting articles and dispatches from other worlds. A dream: and then home to construct a lunch of fresh ingredients, something to keep the temperature down in the heat. Suntea steeping off the back stoop or the window sill. The feeling of a private life full and enjoyed, and additionally connected to the world at large, the web spinning and twirling and reinventing itself beyond the horizon line where the barges sit, docile for the time being. Is this a hint of what Vancouver during the war could have been like? Worry across the ocean, distant but omnipresent. Picnic lunches complemented with indulgent ice cream and berries from down in the valley. Three girls and their young mother settling into a safe landscape, where they’d ride bike and continue to attend school and break their arms racing down the street, all while the world spinned on. I imagine each person in my family sitting in the bay watching the island call sleepily through the mist. 

[ortut]

Nándor Baránay - Balance, 1936

[stankyleg-deactivated2918973]

She’s looking out for you today

[oxydes]

Louise Bourgeois in her 90s

[edenliaothewomb]

Saoirse Ronan, photographed by Jamie Hawkesworth for Vogue, Aug 2018.

[twixnmix]

Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe photographed by Norman Seeff, 1969.   

“We wanted, it seemed, what we already had, a lover and a friend to create with, side by side. To be loyal, yet be free.”- Patti Smith

In her memoir Just Kids, Patti Smith details her intense relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe in which they struggle to become artists in New York City. They lived together at the Hotel Chelsea – home to numerous writers, musicians, actors and artists. Patti supported Robert by working in bookstores, he soon flourished as a photographer and encouraged her to pursue visual art. As a writer, Patti eventually turned her poems into songwriting. For the cover of her debut album, Horses (1975), Patti used a portrait Robert took. Once Robert came out as a gay man their intimate relationship ended but they remained friends until his death from HIV/AIDS in 1989.

[eerin-deactivated-deactivated20]

“Bouquet of Flowers” drawn by Andy Warhol in 1956.

[commonmusings]

Her daily routine here was marked by her reverence for simple rituals and an inner clarity that allowed her to be fully present in each moment. She would rise early and take a long walk before breakfast, accompanied by her dogs. After breakfast, she would venture back into the desert for a day of painting, often using her Model A Ford as a portable studio. Upon returning home, she would take an evening walk before dinner. The lasting impression of O'Keeffe’s legendary life and art, and the Ghost Ranch home that stood at its center, is that of a woman completely at ease with the natural world and with herself. 

[knowknee]

11 months 

[gatheringbones]

“About noon, an arrow entered Joan’s body, just above her left breast, at exactly the place she had prophesied to her confessor on her way from Chinon to Orléans. She fell back, in shock and in great pain. She wept, despite her foreknowledge of the nature of her wound. It is as though she were surprised, not that she had been struck by an arrow, but that it would hurt.”

— Mary Gordon, Joan of Arc (via wheredoesthehoneyflow)

[tat-art]

“However bad life is, what’s important is to make something interesting out of it. And that has a lot to do with the physical world, with looking at stuff, snow and light and the smell of your screen door and whatever constitutes your phenomenal existence from moment to moment. How consoling—that this stuff goes on and that you can keep thinking about it and making that into something on the page.”

— Anne Carson explains an idea that she and Alice Munro have in common (attachment to the physical world and the details in life), from The Art of Poetry No. 88, Paris Review 

[mademoiselleclipon]

Nicole Atieno  /  Greg Lin Jiajie

[softchubbypuppy]

[elisabeth-reidy]

“Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection, there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sigh that you will recognize it.”

— Simone Weil, “Gravity and Grace” (via misswallflower)

[sulphuriclike]

William Eggleston Untitled, Memphis, Tennessee, 1974 (Karen Chatham and Lesa Aldridge)

[clusterstruck-deactivated202405]

Planet Earth II