Black & White - Shadows

To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light

C.G. Jung



Lee Friedlander, New York City, 1966

Sunday Favorites - The Pulse of Nature

In short I am convinced it is a most
ridiculous thing to go round the world,
when by staying quietly, the world
will go round with you

Charles Darwin



Yunfun Tan

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.

Circles - Mandalas - Radial Symmetry X

The ideas need not be complex. Most ideas that are successful
are ludicrously simple. Successful ideas generally have the
appearance of simplicity because they seem inevitable.

Sol LeWitt

John Latham, Full Stop, 1961, Acrylic on canvas

Animals in Art - Jane Edden - Ornithomorph

Jupiter announced that he intended to appoint a king over the birds and named a day on which they were to appear before his throne, when he would select the most beautiful of them all to be their ruler...

Jane Edden - Bird feathers and resin in perspex case
32 Glenny & Henderson HSF.2 Gadfly 2012

R.I.P. Chris Marker

I write to you from a far-off country ...

Chris Marker died on his 91st birthday (29 July 1921 – 29 July 2012)

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Movie Moments - Ten Minutes Older, 1978

Explanation separates us from astonishment,
which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible

Eugene Ionesco

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Black & White - Transportation

Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --
because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Pablo Neruda



Louis Stettner, 1958

Black & White - Doppelganger

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do
is to suppose that they are like himself

John Steinbeck



Diane Arbus, Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J. 1967

Heavenly Bodies - Robert Longo

When I draw, I take it into me. I look at it,
it goes into every part of my body; it comes out of me.

Robert Longo



Robert Longo, Untitled (Saturn), 2007

Animals in Art - Adam Fuss

The aesthetic of me not being there

Adam Fuss,  Untitled, From the series 'My Ghost', 2000

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




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Movie Moments - Solaris, 1972

Mankind does not move forward synchronously, 
it stops and starts and goes off in different directions.
And only when scientific discoveries occur in the
course of technological development is there a
corresponding leap in man's moral development. 

Andrei Tarkovsky





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Black & White - Dogs

When the Man waked up he said,
'What is Wild Dog doing here?'
And the Woman said,
'His name is not Wild Dog any more,
but the First Friend,
because he will be our friend
for always and always and always.'

Rudyard Kipling



Elliott Erwitt,  New York City, 2000

Circles - Mandalas - Radial Symmetry IX

With color one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft

Henry Matisse


Robert Mangold, Ring Image K, 2010

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.

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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!

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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