Art

Just a pic from within my garden. I just like the way the light fell in this picture.

Water scarcity and floods in Pakistan within the same year every year.

Just a picture of a plant in my driveway.

Patterns in nature are beautiful.

My shameful confession is that I LOVE New Yorker covers.

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/56680255

Folks pls take a look at this. One of our comrades could use some help rn. My favourite person on Lemmy, sharing the link or boosting for engagement would be helpful too. ❤️

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siyah_Qalam

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/56680255

Folks pls take a look at this. One of our comrades could use some help rn. My favourite person on Lemmy, sharing the link or boosting for engagement would be helpful too. ❤️

Much as Degas was fascinated by the movements of dancers, he was also intrigued by the repetitive, specialized gestures made by laundresses as they worked. This painting, the first of three versions of the composition, is distinguished by its dramatic chiaroscuro, with the woman silhouetted against a luminous white backdrop. Purchased by the singer and collector Jean-Baptiste Faure, the canvas was returned so that Degas could rework it. The artist, however, kept the picture and lent it to the 1876 Impressionist exhibition, receiving praise for his "rapidly done silhouettes of laundresses."

The Met.

In this pastel and another of 1885–86 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) Degas explored the expressive potential of a bather doubled-up, snail-like, drying her foot. The blue, yellow, and green harmonies in the two works are typical of many of his bather pastels, but the hues here are more high-keyed.

The met.

My own eye for composition is very heavily influenced by degas. The fascination with figures facing away is one we share. Similarly find interesting the meaning in the mundane. Love Degas.

Hecate, the Greek goddess who presided over witchcraft and magical rites, was historically known as the “Night-Hag,” hence the title that the artist gave this work. It illustrates a passage from Paradise Lost by the English poet John Milton, in which hellhounds are compared to those who “follow the night-hag when, called, / In secret, riding through the air she comes, Lured with the smell of infant blood, to dance / With Lapland witches, while the laboring moon Eclipses at their charms.” Fuseli and Goya did not know each other, but they both captured the psychological impact of the turmoil and war experienced by many during the age of revolution and Napoleonic expansion.

The met.

As Alexander the Great is represented with a similar elephant skin on coins minted by Ptolemy I of Egypt, this statuette may represent Alexander as ruler of Egypt. This figure has also been identified as Demetrios I of Bactria, who is represented on coins wearing the scalp of an elephant in recognition of his conquests in India. Its monumental quality may signify that it reflects a famous large-scale equestrian statue.

The met.

This painting’s title refers to Dante Alighieri’s medieval epic of a journey through hell. Although Stuck employed traditional symbols of the underworld—a snake, a demon, and a flaming pit—the dissonant colors and stylized, exaggerated poses are strikingly modern. He designed the complementary frame. Stuck’s imagery was likely inspired by Auguste Rodin’s The Gates of Hell, particularly the figure of The Thinker. When Inferno debuted in an exhibition of contemporary German art at The Met in 1909, critics praised its "sovereign brutality." The picture bolstered Stuck’s reputation as a visionary artist unafraid to explore the dark side of the psyche.

The met.

This is a fragment of a full-length sculpture portraying the ferocious Hindu goddess Kali in the form of Chamunda, an epithet derived from her act of decapitating the demons Chanda and Munda. Chamunda embodies bareness and decay. Her hair is piled up into a chignon decorated with a tiara of skulls and a crescent moon. She scowls, baring her teeth, and enormous eyeballs protrude menacingly from sunken sockets in her skeletal face. As a necklace, she wears a snake whose coils echo the rings of decaying flesh that sag beneath her collarbone. Just above her navel on her emaciated torso is a scorpion, a symbol of sickness and death. She presumably once held lethal objects in the hands of her twelve missing arms.

Chamunda is naked except for a short diaphanous dhoti partially covering the two tiger skins complete with heads that hang from her waist to her knees. Although her extremities are missing, it is clear from comparison with related images that this Chamunda stood with legs straight, the right turned outward. The starkness and uncompromising horror of this sculpture are representative of one aspect of Indian theology.

Like images of Shiva in his dark form of Bhairava, such macabre images of the Goddess are common occupants of the exterior walls of temples. They appear both on shrines dedicated to Shiva and those to the Goddess herself.

The Met.