skin - hair - fur - feathers II

Natural objects, for example, must be experienced
before any theorizing about them can occur

Edmund Husserl



Vija Celmins, House #1

Joseph Cornell - Rorschach Drawings

The world is a harmless enigma made terrible by our own mad attempt
to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth

Umberto Eco



"They Say the Owl is a Baker's Daughter" Ophelia, 1971

Animals in Art - Levi Fisher Ames

Nothing is more beautiful than to know all.

Athanasius Kircher

 

Wood carver Levi Fisher Ames (1840-1923) was originally a carpenter when he began working on his menagerie of small wooden animal figures, some of which were based on real animals, some were purely imaginary. Ames created a very personal cabinet of curiosities: several hundred fabulous creatures housed in glassfronted shadowboxes, completed with hand written labels.

Favorite Monsters - The Cat with Hands

This is why poetic images are imaginings in a distinctive sense:
not mere fancies and illusions but imaginings that are visible
inclusions of the alien in the sight of the familiar.

Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought




watch the video 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.

Robosnails

458mn is a stunning computer generated version of the romanticized sequence of mating snails from the documentary "Microcosmos", that bids goddbye to any possible cuteness of that image.
You'll never look at love making snails the same way again!

watch the video below

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

Skin - Hair - Fur - Feathers

Meret Oppenheim, Fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon, 1936

Moon People

Pictures from the times when all the unknown places of the earth and the heavens still were crowded with fabulous creatures and imaginary landscapes

Scoperte fatte nella luna Sigr. Herschell, [1836]

While browsing some archives with historic scientific images I  found the picture above and below are some examples from this wonderful "portfolio of hand-tinted lithographs purports to illustrate the "discovery of life on the moon." In 1836, Richard E. Locke, writing for the New York Sun, claimed that the noted British astronomer Sir William Herschel had discovered life on the moon. Flora and fauna included bat-men, moon maidens (with luna-moth wings), moon bison, and other extravagant life forms. Locke proposed an expedition to the moon using a ship supported by hydrogen balloons."

Things with wings II

I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.

Gustave Flaubert



Emmanuel Polanco

Things with Wings

Polaroid by Andrej Tarkovski