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


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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.

Movie Moments - Lotte Reiniger

Happy Holidays!

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Tsuki Hyakushi - 100 Aspects of the Moon

Whore and monk, we sleep
under one roof together,
moon in a field of clover

Bashu






A huge thank you to all my followers and subscribers.
You are amazing and I couldn't do this without you!

Heinrich von Kleist, On the Puppet Theater

Paradise is locked and bolted and the Cherub is behind us. We must make a journey around the world, to see if a back door has perhaps been left open

Heinrich von Kleist (18 October 1777 – 21 November 1811)

Black & White - Hands III

Please leave your fingerprints

Maya Deren and Marcel Duchamp, The Witch’s Cradle, 1943

3 short documentaries about vanishing, loss and preservation.

A Factory - A Museum - A Collection

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Sunday Favorites

Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe,
which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out
a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for
instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves



Peter Lindbergh, Malgosia Bela, 2008

Photographing the Photographer

Who photographs the photographer?

André Kertész, Self-portrait, 1927

Animation Short - When The Day Breaks

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Moon

you'll be beautiful in my manner

John Adams Whipple, View of the Moon, Feb 26, 1852 (Daguerreotype )

__________________________


The Moon’s Favors

Meanwhile, in the expansiveness of her joy,
the Moon filled all of the room like a phosphoric atmosphere,
like a luminous poison; and all of that living light thought and said:
“You will be eternally subject to the influence of my kiss.
You will be beautiful in my manner.

You will love what I love and who loves me:
water, the clouds, silence, and the night; the immense, green sea;
formless and multiform water; the place where you will not be;
the lover you will not know; monstrous flowers;
perfumes that make you delirious; cats who swoon on pianos,
and who moan like women, with a hoarse, gentle voice!

Charles Baudelaire

__________________________

Japanese animal masks

Children in the industrialized world are surrounded by animal
imagery: toys, cartoons, pictures, ...

... decorations of every sort. No other source of imagery can begin to compete with that of animals. The apparently spontaneous interest that children have in animals might lead one to suppose that this has always been the case…. Yet it was not until the nineteenth century that reproductions of animals became a regular part of the décor of middle class childhoods
John Berger, Why Look at Animals, 1980

Jean Painlevé - Liquid Crystals

Jean Painlevé, Liquid Crystals, 1978

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Black & White - Masks, Rites and Transformations II (The artists)

I like contradictions. We have never attained the infinite variety and contradictions that exist in nature. Tomorrow I shall contradict myself.
That is the one way I have of asserting my liberty, the real liberty
one does not find as a member of society.

Man Ray



Kati Horna, Remedios Varo, wearing a mask made by Leonora Carrington, 1957

Black & White - Sunday Favorites

I realized that searching was my symbol, the emblem of those who go out at night with nothing in mind, the motives of a destroyer of compasses

Julio Cortázar


Larry Fink

Circles - Mandalas - Radial Symmetry VIII

Now, however long a time may pass, according to the eternal laws governing
the combinations of this eternal play of repetition, all configurations
which have previously existed on this earth must yet meet, attract,
repulse, kiss, and corrupt each other again

Heinrich Heine



Jasper Johns, White Target, 1957



Jannis Kounellis, no title, 1999 (Etching on paper)

Arthur Ganson - The notion of breath and time

A modern-day creator of "twittering machines," Arthur Ganson uses simple, plain materials to build witty mechanical art. But the wit is not simply about Rube Goldberg-ian chain-reaction gags (though you'll find a few of those). His work examines the quiet drama of physical motion, whether driven by a motor or by the actions of the viewer. Notions of balance, of rising and falling, of action and reaction and consequence, play themselves out in wire and steel and plastic. (source)

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Mary Delany - Paper Mosaiks

Mary Delany, Ornithogalum Pyramidale, Star of Bethlehem, 1779