Animals in Art - Chris Marker's Petite Bestiaire

Chris Marker lives in Paris and very rarely grants interviews. 

When asked for a picture of himself, he usually offers
a photograph of a cat instead.

watch the video below

19th Century Stereographs

Form is henceforth divorced from matter. In fact,
matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, ...

... except as the mould on which form is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it. Pull it down or burn it up, if you please. We must, perhaps, sacrifice some luxury in the loss of color; but form and light and shade are the great things, and even color can be added, and perhaps by and by may be got direct from Nature.
source

Movie Moments - Landscape in the Mist, 1988

Don't worry. I will tell you our story.
In the beginning there was chaos ...

Landscape in the Mist a journey towards a mythical origin as two siblings, Voula and Alexander, attempt to find their unknown and essentially nonexistent biological father who, their mother evasively (and conveniently) explains, lives in Germany. Guided by daydreamed, unanswered missives to their eternally silent father, the children’s odyssey is an existential quest for ancestral identity and community. (source)

Theo Angelopoulos, one of the great European film-makers, died this week, aged 76, after a road accident. He'll be terribly missed!

watch the video below

Alchemical manuscripts - Cabala

When you have water, that is Mercury of the Air,
that is of the Stone and Air of Fire, that is Spirit
of Mercury and fire that is Mercury of the Earth,
that is of Luna, then you shall have the Art fully.

Aristotle

Early 20th Century Illustrations from Japanese Children's Books

I imagine that yes is the only living thing

E. E. Cummings

Movie Moments - Jean Painlevé

Roll on, deep and dark blue ocean, roll.
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain.
Man marks the earth with ruin,
but his control stops with the shore.

Lord Byron


watch the videos below

Marvels of Creatures and Strange Things Existing

Kitab Aja'ib al-makhluqat wa Gharaib al-Mawjudat

literally "The Wonders of Creation and the Curiosities of Existence", or

Marvels of Creatures and Strange Things Existing

Merchant from Isfahan Flying


Kitab Aja'ib al-makhluqat wa Gharaib al-Mawjudat, literally "The Wonders of Creation," compiled in the middle 1200s in what is now Iran or Iraq. The vibrantly illustrated work is considered one of the most important natural history texts of the medieval Islamic world.

Sunday Favorites

Childhood is the sleep of reason

Jean-Jacques Rousseau


William Eggleston, Memphis, Tennessee, 1971

Lights in the Night

… the Stars
That nature hung in Heav’n, and fill’d their Lamps
With everlasting oil, to give due light
To the misled and lonely Travailer.

Arthur Rackham

I am starting this year with a new collection - similar to the series Things with Wings - called
Lights in the Night.  Art from different times and cultures about the pleasures of exploring the
sky with its heavenly bodies as well as the urge to illuminate the dark hours between dusk
and dawn with fire and light.