“Beyond happiness or unhappiness, though it is both things, love is intensity; it does not give us eternity but life, that second in which the doors of time and space open just a crack: here is there and now is always.”
Octavio Paz
escape from a bankrupt state
Collecting, sharing and pointing to material that makes me click.
Tag Archives: art
Thinking of beauty, thinking of Florentine Art
Lorenzo Ghilberti, Creation of Adam and Eve, ca. 1435, panel part of the ‘Gates of Paradise’, East Doors, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Florence
“The great Florentine art, from Giotto through the quattrocento, has the faculty of amazing with its unexpected and absolute truthfulness. This faculty was once called beauty.”
Mary McCarthy, the Stones of Florence
Leda and the Swan
The story of ‘Leda and the Swan’ is a Greek myth which is told in many variations.
According to one of them, Leda – a mortal queen, wife of the king of Sparta Tyndareus – was in the forest when Zeus spotted her and wanted to make love to her (or rape her). He transformed himself into a swan and landed next to her. They started playing and he seduced her. On the same night she also lay with her husband.
As a result, Leda ‘hatched’ two eggs, from one egg she bore the twins Castor and Pollux (Polydeuces), the fomer being the son of Tyndareus and mortal, and the other being the son of Zeus and therefore immortal. They are known as the Gemini (‘Twins’), the famous constellation, star sign. Through their love for each other, they both eventually became the immortal-mortals.
From the other egg she bore Clytemnestra, famous for becoming the wife of king Agamemnon, and Helen of Troy. No more is needed to say about the importance of these two women in the narrative of the dawn of the western civilization.
All these mythological- archetypical figures and life circumstances have fuelled the human imagination in the millenia and given such great material for the arts…. Here, I think, are two beautiful examples of this:
‘Leda with the Swan’ by Bartolomeo Ammaneti
Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence
Leda and the Swan
by William Butler YeatsA sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
“The poet’s mind toils between substance and the void.
Every detail in high and low relief he seeks to perfect, so
that the form, although it may transcend the dictates of
compasses and ruler, shall be the paragon of resemblance to all
shapes and features imitated.”Lu Chi’s Wen Fu
The Art of Writing
Quote from The Art of Writing
The Rock is out of its temple
In an earlier post back in April, titled ‘Talking about Art and Devotion’, I was talking about a photograph I was working on, the Rock. At the time of that post I wasn’t happy with my test print. It took me a couple more months of working on it, leaving it aside, looking back at it, making test prints, using different printing methods, etc, to get it to where I felt I liked it. So here it is:
This image was taken using my iphone 4S (!) on a early spring afternoon at the Paros Park in Paros. I processed it in CS5 and my final print was made on a Sommerset Velvet Fine Art A4 paper in Piezo, using a carbon selenium split toning.
I have to say that if you compare the two variations of the same image on a computer screen, I mean the one I have uploaded on the April post and this one here, you might not see much of a difference. The adjustments I made are subtle so the illuminated highly contrasty computer screen might not reveal them, but there is a huge difference in the tonal values between these two versions and, therefore, in the overall feeling of the image on the print(s). I wish I could show you that too.
Needed some beauty tonight… like Monet’s water lilies
Claude Monet‘s water lilies in his garden at Giverny.
Martha Graham Quote
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.
And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.
Martha Graham
Stephen Nachmanovitch Quote
And to do art only for the high feeling of completion and connectedness in the moment of inspiration would be like making love only for the moment of orgasm.
Stephen Nachmanovitch, “Free Play: Improvising in Life and Art”
Jorge Luis Borges, The mirror – documentary on Vimeo
A documentary on Borges. At the very beginning it sounds a bit too “proud” for the man about to portray, but very quickly it becomes interesting, informative and engaging.
Here is a Borges quote from an interview of him featured in this doc:
“Reality is a combination of perceptions, emotions, feelings, distractions, dreams and surprises. That is reality”
Let’s start blogging with some Dante Alighieri
The soul, which is created quick to love,
responds to everything that pleases, just
as soon as beauty wakens it to act.Your apprehension draws an image from
a real object and expands upon
that object until soul has turned toward it;and if, so turned, the soul tends steadfastly,
then that propensity is love—it’s nature
that joins the soul in you, anew, through beauty.
Dante, Divina Comedia, Purgatorio, Canto 18, verses 19 – 27
escape from a bankrupt state 