Vision Crystal by the American artist Alex Grey (born November 29, 1953)
Fractal-Ize!
Category Archives: Aesthetics
Fractal-Ize!
Gorge the Gaze on God’s Gift
“The fact is, that, of all God’s gifts to the sight of man, color is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.” — John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, Vol. 2 (1853)
The Chimera Eye
Chimerical colors (from Wikipedia)
(click for larger)
Rock & Rule
(Image by David Kelso-Mitchell 2023)
(click for larger)
Tête avec Texte
Above you can see the Peacock on a Platter, or Robert de Montesquiou posing as the severed head of John the Baptist and flanked by relevant lines of his own poetry. But there’s a better version of the poetry, as you can see by comparing the photo with this:
J’aime le jade,
Couleur des yeux
D’HérodiadeEt l’améthyste,
Couleur du sang
De Jean-Baptiste. — from “Robert de Montesquiou: The Magnificent Dandy” (1962) by Cornelia Otis Skinner
I love jade,
Color of the eyes
Of HerodiasAnd amethyst,
Color of the blood
Of John the Baptist.
Elsewhere Other-Accessible…
• Portrait of a Peacock — Cornelia Otis Skinner’s excellent essay on Montesquiou
• Le Paon dans les Pyrénées — review of Julian Barnes’ not-so-good book partly about Montesquiou
Straight to Shell
Ernst Haeckel’s “Prosobranchia” from Kunstformen der Natur (1904), or Artforms in Nature
I Say, I Sigh, I Sow #14
“In a very real sense, the Holocaust, as the ultimate moral and aesthetic obscenity, was also the ultimate drum-solo.” — Simon Whitechapel, 31i18
Pavonique
Twin-peacock lamp at the V&A by René Lalique (1860-1945)
Twin-peacock lamp by Lalique (alternative view)
Elsewhere other-accessible…
• Nou’s Who — a review of Art Nouveau by Camilla de la Bedoyere
Bash the Trash
From George Orwell’s “As I Please” for 11th February 1944, Tribune:
THE FOLLOWING lines are quoted in Anthony Trollope’s Autobiography:
When Payne-Knight’s Taste was issued on the town
A few Greek verses in the text set down
Were torn to pieces, mangled into hash,
Hurled to the flames as execrable trash;
In short, were butchered rather than dissected
And several false quantities detected;
Till, when the smoke had risen from the cinders
It was discovered that — the lines were Pindar’s!
Trollope does not make clear who is the author of these lines, and I should be very glad if any reader could let me know. But I also quote them for their own sake — that is, for the terrible warning to literary critics that they contain — and for the sake of drawing attention to Trollope’s Autobiography, which is a most fascinating book, although or because it is largely concerned with money.
Elsewhere Other-Accessible…
• Pindar (c. 518-438 BC) at Wikipedia
• An Analytical Inquiry Into the Principles of Taste (1806) by Richard Payne-Knight at Archive.org
• An Autobiography and Other Writings (1869) by Anthony Trollope at Gutenberg
Monetomania
« La couleur est mon obsession quotidienne, ma joie et mon torment. » — Claude Monet (1840-1926)
“Color is my day-long obsession, my joy and my torment.” — Claude Monet
Overlord In Terms of Core Issues Around Maximal Engagement with Key Notions of the Über-Feral 