A Natural History of Yearning

[piastark]

by Rob Gonsalves

[distantobserver0]

Star Dust, by Canadian surrealist painter Rob Gonsalves, 2016.

[paintedout]

Cy Twombly

[sunjongpyo]

Cy Twombly

[the--framed--maelstrom]

Properly written texts are like spiders’ webs: tight, concentric, transparent, well-spun and firm. They draw into themselves all the creatures of the air. Metaphors flitting hastily through them become their nourishing prey. Subject matter comes winging towards them. The soundness of a conception can be judged by whether it causes one quotation to summon another. Where thought has opened up one cell of reality, it should, without violence by the subject, penetrate the next. It proves its relation to the object as soon as other objects crystallize around it. In the light that it casts on its chosen substance, others begin to glow.

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

[derangedrhythms]

Because when I read, I don’t really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.

Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude, tr. Michael Henry Heim

[havingapoemwithyou]

In a Dream by Anna Akhmatova

[pommegf]

overlooking Gurnard's Head Mine at Treen Cove

[its-anemone-girl]

[bluesandbarebones]

A poem may be the residue of an inner urgency, one through which the self wishes to register itself, write itself into being, and, finally, to charm another self, the reader, into belief. It may also be something equally elusive---the ghost within every experience that wishes it could be seen or felt, acknowledged as a kind of meaning.

Mark Strand, On Becoming A Poet

[likeafieldmouse-deactivated2015]

Gustave Caillebotte - The Floor Scrapers (1875-6)

Original on top, later version below

“Despite the effort Caillebotte put into the painting, it was rejected by France’s most prestigious art exhibition, The Salon, in 1875. The depiction of working-class people in their trade, not fully clothed, shocked the jurors and was deemed a ‘vulgar subject matter.’ 

The images of the floor scrapers came to be associated with Degas’s paintings of washerwomen, also presented at the same exhibition and similarly scorned as ‘vulgar’”.

[neoyorzapoteca]

“You learn by doing. You have to read a lot to be a writer. But I don’t think it necessarily makes you better. Only writing a lot does that. It would be ridiculous to say that going to museums makes you a better painter. It just doesn’t. Of course, it makes you better in the sense that you learn from observing, but if you don’t get your hands dirty every day with the paint, you will not become a better painter.”

— BOMB Magazine | Laia Jufresa by Valeria Luiselli

[kvothes]

marie howe, in an interview with krista tippett of on being

[ymutate]

Hiroo Isono

[urgetocreate]

Hirō Isono (Japanese 1945-2013), Acrylic on canvas

[calellon]

Pomegranates, Majorca, John Singer Sargent, 1908 (detail)

[shadowslament]

The sun smashes hydrogen atoms together to form helium, creating unimaginable numbers of photons, which hurtle through the solar system at 300,000 kilometers per second. They reach our planet in just over eight minutes, where they clatter through the atmosphere, bounce off clouds, get lost in forests, and plunge into oceans. These violent interactions between energy and matter are the crucible of color.

James Fox, The World According to Color

[apocryphics]