The Hours of Catherine of Cleves

An artist whose name has been lost to time painted the gold-studded illuminations around 1440 in a book of prayers for Catherine of Cleves, a Dutch countess. Her court commissioned the volume of hours, or illustrated daily devotions, around the time she separated from her spendthrift husband, Arnold of Egmond, and began a futile 30-year effort to unseat him. Catherine’s illustrator is most famous for weirdly fanciful borders; he surrounded Latin text blocks with bee swarms, devils, birdcages, pearls, pea pods, burst-open mussels and fish eating one another’s tails. (source)

Detail

Leonora Carrington dissolved into her dreams

Leonora Carrington, El recital de los sueños

“You may not believe in magic but something very strange is happening at this very moment. Your head has dissolved into thin air and I can see the rhododendrons through your stomach. It’s not that you are dead or anything dramatic like that, it is simply that you are fading away and I can’t even remember your name. I remember your white flannels better than I can remember you. I remember all the things I felt about the white flannels but whoever made them walk about has totally disappeared. So you remember me as a pink linen dress with no sleeves and my face is confused with dozens of other faces, I have no name either.”

Leonora Carrington (06 April 1917 — 25 May 2011)

Leonora Carrington photographed by Kati Horna in 1960

Animals in Art - Roni Horn - Bird

bird presents the culmination of Roni Horn’s long-running photographic series of taxidermied Icelandic wildfowl. Photographed at close range against white backgrounds (as though obeying the conventional format of studio portraiture) the birds are viewed from behind, their unique physiognomies and markings resulting in inscrutable shapes and patterns on the photographs’ surfaces. Despite the singular form of the title, the birds in this series are presented in pairs, images that are hung side by side one another highlighting the differences and similarities between the two. The gesture of doubling — as an aesthetic and conceptual strategy — has been a recurrent motif for Horn since 1980, a tool that invites careful scrutiny from the viewer, altering the dynamic of the work.

source

Artist - Hilma af Klint (1862-1944)

I found this artist while looking for new pictures for the Circles - Mandalas - Radial Symmetry series. Hilma af Klint was a swedish artist who was born in 1862 and died in 1944. She is concidered one of the first abstract painters together with Mondrian, Malevich and Kandinsky. I immediately liked the strong colors and her use of forms. They remind me a lot of alchemistic illustrations.

If you want to read more about Hilma af Klint, I recommend this article , from Sally O’Reilly in frieze.

frieze has a whole issue from the end of last year about the connection between art and spirituality, which you can find here. It contains another very interesting article that mentions her work, titled Soul Searching - The complex relationship between science and the spirit – and how to represent it written by Mark Pilkington

Animals in Art - Tim Flach

There is no exquisite beauty, without some strangeness in the proportion...

Edgar Allan Poe