La Grande Odalisque - Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres 1814

...For Solar Bear

en.wikipedia.org

With her five additional vertebrae, the "odalisque" (concubine) depicted in this painting is meant to convey sensuality, and departs from anatomical realism which was asserted at the time.

I especially like the quote on wikipedia that suggests that the distance between her (difficult to decipher) gaze and pelvic region are a "physical representation of the depth of thought and complex emotions of a woman's thoughts and feelings"; taken from a 1997 edition of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.

Maybe some men do get it after all.

So Much Happiness

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness,
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hand like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats,
It doesn't need you to hold it down.
It doesn't need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in  a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy
Everything has a life of it's own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even to the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linenes and scratched records...

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, raise your hands and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

Naomi Shihab-Nye

The Great Wave off Kanagawa - Katsushika Hokusai 1830s

fineartamerica.com

ukiyo-e art

Contrary to popular belief, this picture does not depict an actual tsunami but instead, large open sea waves surrounding Mt Fuji from Thiry-six views of Mt Fuji

Today I wondered seriously if the many prophecies conspiracy theorist nod knowingly to about the world coming to an end soon do in fact have some grounding in reality. Certainly, I'm not the only one either. 

A number of days ago whenthis was first put up, a tsunami struck Sendai in central Japan killing hundreds and devastating urban landscapes. Those were sights few thought they would ever see, of cars being swept away like colonies of little insects from major highways, of large buildings crumbling like paper cards in a gush of water from a gardening hose. 

Now, a nuclear meltdown in Fukushima is feared as cooling attempts at remaining reactors after one blew up appear to be failing. Radiation is already seeping into Tokyo and the death toll at present is looking to be in the thousands. No one is putting a number on that yet. 

It's funny that it seemed to take a spate of natural disaster and human loss on a scale so unimaginable before to get me believing in a higher power again. If you haven't done so yet, do say a prayer for the people of Japan and everyone else who has lost their possessions, loved ones and lives this year.

Jokes aside on what I would do if the world was coming to an end (go nuts with my new credit card and take the first flight out of Mackay?), a friend made a good point. What would be the point in doing anything but living the life I would otherwise have lived? A decent, honest living (that's funny to my ears too) with the little ups and downs that make the days pass as they will.

The ache is physical and I just want it to stop now. I know what the causes of it are, but really, I don't know the answers. And I have too much pride to ask for help, or to expect anyone to know any better than I do.

Is this an Art Blog?

It wasn't meant to be. I simply seem to have found art pieces which have interested me enough to consequently spur some original thought, little of which has managed to make it to the blog as well. In due time though, I'm sure some will. I'm writing more for myself than for an audience right now although I'm one of those people who believe that speaking or writing about a thought breathes life into it, and lets it possibly grow into something else. Still catching a whiff of other proliferating thoughts slinking my way.

In the mean time, I'm somewhat bracing myself for anyone who chances upon this with a broader knowledge of contemporary art than I do (not hard to imagine) and therefore very possibly higher expectations and more pronounced opinions about why I've chosen to say the things I have about these images.

Bateau Bleu ("The Grotto") - Dorothea Tanning 1942

Dorothea Tanning was born in 1910 and at 101 years of age, is still producing art in the form of poetry, writing, sets and having her work showed off in single-artist exhibitions. She is considered a surrealist artist and her later works are characterized by blurring of form and identity of her subjects. This earlier lithograph seems to have little of that - the crisply formulated female subject appears to sail towards indeterminable forces which are both inevitable and sought after. 

The artist herself had to say of it, "Still at [the lithograph studio of Mr. Edmond] Desjobert, working now on three stones for three colors and making the kind of technical discoveries that every artist lives for. These are held in check by the lithographic crayon which draws them all tightly together to produce an event or an enigma, take your choice. The boat, the waves and the timepiece can take you anywhere you want to go, I thought."

Image from http://www.dorotheatanning.org