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She may be a saint, and I may be ugly and hairy, But she'll soon find out that that doesn't matter a bit. I'm collecting my strength; one day I shall manage without her, And she'll perish with emptiness then, and begin to miss me.

[shouldyoushouldi]

Hedy Lamarr

[saintjoan]

— margaret atwood, excerpt of circe/mud poems

[moody-poet-deactivated20180227]

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.

Sylvia Plath

I exist in two places, here and where you are.

Margaret Atwood

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies.

David Mitchell

I’m kissing you now—across the gap of a thousand years.

Marina Tsvetaeva

Come back! Even as a shadow, even as a dream.

Euripides (tr. Anne Carson)

[loumargi]

Jane Whiting Chrzanoska -solitare

[shouldyoushouldi]

John Rawlings

[stripedhosenrubyslippers]

Kehinde Wiley

[blackartiststudio]

∆ Kehinde Wiley | Portraiture, World Traveler & Mr. Custom Suit

[thunderstruck9]

Rinat Voligamsi (Russian, b. 1968), Dusk. Ursa Major, 2010. Oil on canvas, 100 x 100 cm.

[femme-de-lettres]

Large (Clark Art Museum)

Harry Wilson Watrous painted this, The Chatterers, in 1913.

The Metropolitan Museum writes of Watrous, “About 1905 the artist’s eyesight began to fail, and he shifted from exquisitely rendered, tiny genre scenes recalling seventeenth-century Dutch paintings to larger canvases containing idealized female figures.”

There certainly is something ideal in the work, with the well-dressed woman gazing at a crow, apparently sitting up from where she has been reclining on a bench.

There is also something slightly surreal, however, to the odd unity of the scene: birds of all sorts fly hither and thither across the wallpaper while a woman in black, iridescent black feathers in her hair and on her shoulder, gazes calmly at a crow that (one would expect) better belongs outdoors.

[femme-de-lettres]

Large (Wikimedia)

Rosa Bonheur was a French animal painter of the nineteenth century, having received a thorough training in both painting and animal anatomy.

She painted this, Ploughing in the Nivernais, in 1849, to fulfill a commission from the French government.

Although the scene is strikingly and deliberately organic, it is also orderly; the cattle are yoked to the plows in tidy rows, while the earth itself retains the even furrows they produce.

[femme-de-lettres]

Large (Wikimedia)

If you’ve ever seen a Pre-Raphaelite painting in your life, dear reader, it was probably this one, Sir John Everett Millais’ Ophelia, 1852, which was originally shown alongside a work I’ve written about previously.

Certainly it was the first I ever saw—and what a painting to start with.

I often write about “detail” or “accuracy” in relation to a painting.

It would be practically insulting, in this case, for me to apply such labels.

He painted Ophelia in two places, in the field (literally) to capture the lovely setting, and in the studio with an artist’s model lying in a lamp-warmed bathtub full of water (the lamps went out, and she caught a dreadful cold—as the Tate details—it was quite the story, actually).

His fairly extreme approach paid off.

As one of Millais’ sons records in The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, “[p]erhaps the greatest compliment ever paid to ‘Ophelia,’ as regards its truthfulness to Nature, is the fact that a certain Professor of Botany, being unable to take his class into the country and lecture from the objects before him, took them to the Guildhall, where this work was being exhibited, and and discoursed to them upon the flowers and plants before them, which were, he said, as instructive as Nature herself.”

It wasn’t just the detailed plants people appreciated about Ophelia, though, and rightly: a little further down on the same page, a Mr. Spielmann is quoted as saying “It is one of the proofs of the greatness of this picture that, despite all elaboration, less worthy though still superb of execution, the brilliancy of colour, diligence of microscopic research, and masterly handling, it is Ophelia’s face that holds the spectator, rivets his attention, and stirs his emotion.”

That’s what I find so peculiar about people, like John Ruskin, who objected to the relative mundanity of the backwoods-England-stream setting: in a great, exaggerated river, Ophelia wouldn’t make such a striking contrast—and the work wouldn’t come across quite so shockingly, breathtakingly sincere.

[femme-de-lettres]

Large (Wikimedia)

At the request of the wonderful laclefdescoeurs, today I’m writing about John William Waterhouse’s 1892 painting Circe Invidiosa.

One of Waterhouse’s defining features as a painter is what Christie’s calls his “particular brand of late, academic Pre-Raphaelitism.”

I might quibble, as the Tate does, that he only “revived the literary themes popularised by the Pre-Raphaelites, though he was not Pre-Raphaelite in technique,” and indeed “[h]is fondness for backgrounds conceived as blocks of colour and tone, as well as the broad, chunky brushwork of his draperies and accessories, ultimately derive from such European prototypes as Jules Bastien-Lepage.”

Certainly the setting has none of the careful precision of, say, Millais’ Ophelia, while the composition has greater depth and three-dimensionality than the somewhat more (superficially) comparable work of Rosetti’s.

And indeed, he was very much a painter of his own time, not merely a mimic of the past: as the Royal Academy puts it, “Waterhouse’s paintings reflect his engagement with contemporary issues ranging from antiquarianism and the classical heritage to occultism and the ‘New Woman.’”

That said, he nonetheless picks up very Pre-Raphaelite themes, as Circe indicates.

Here clearly from a Roman text—Ovid’s Metamorphoses—rather than a Greek, this second of Waterhouse’s three versions of Circe pours a viscous and vividly green concoction into the glass-like water below her. Meanwhile a creature roils the water from beneath her feet, foreshadowing the monstrous transformation Circe’s rival in love will undergo as a result of Circe’s sorcery.

The near-abstraction of the background, though not especially Pre-Raphaelite, serves a useful end: Circe seems to float over the surface of the painting as she does over the water—interacting with it but sharply distinct from it—making her the clear and vivid focal point of the image.

[shouldyoushouldi]

Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Banjo Lesson 1893

[shouldyoushouldi]

Hit Man Gurung, Yellow helmet and gray house (from ‘I Have to Feed Myself, My Family and My Country’ series)

[shouldyoushouldi]

Hayv Kahraman

Shield

Concealed Weapon

“[This character] is someone who was taught to believe that European art history was the ultimate ideal. She became an expression of who I had become as an assimilated woman. I’m working to give her agency and a voice as I obsessively repaint her again and again.”

[shouldyoushouldi]

Grace Weaver

Sunday Brunch

[shouldyoushouldi]

Amy Sherald

Girl in Purple Dress

Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance)