le chant des muses

Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind

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"Let us look for secret things somewhere in the world on the blue shores of silence."

Pablo Neruda, from On the Blue Shores of Silence: Poems of the Sea

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Jacek Yerka - The winter wave

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Thomas Cole - The Course of Empire

“There is the moral of all human tales;

'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past. First freedom and then Glory – when that fails, Wealth, vice, corruption – barbarism at last. And History, with all her volumes vast, Hath but one page...”

Byron- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–18).

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George W. Joy - The Bayswater Omnibus (1895)

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“What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.”  ― Vincent Van Gogh

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The house at Rueil - Edouard Manet 

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Harbor Scene - William Torgerson

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Morning on the Seine, near Vetheuil - Claude Monet

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"I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I’m beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn’t pleasant, it’s not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves."

—Hermann Hesse, Demian

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From Such Foulness of Root Does Sweetness Grow - Ray Caesar

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Cleopatra on the Terraces of Philae - Frederick Arthur Bridgman

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Charles Courtney Curran - Among the Wild Azaleas (1908)

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"At present I absolutely want to paint a starry sky. It often seems to me that night is still more richly coloured than the day; having hues of the most intense violets, blues and greens. If only you pay attention to it you will see that certain stars are lemon-yellow, others pink or a green, blue and forget-me-not brilliance. And without my expatiating on this theme it is obvious that putting little white dots on the blue-black is not enough to paint a starry sky.” 

― Vincent Van Gogh

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“At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow.” 

― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

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The course of Empire consummation - Thomas Cole

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"The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful."

—Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being