“Clare Designs Hypothetical Movie Posters” or “Clare falls in love with a single frame and dedicates her time to building a graphic around it”
[also you just know Lily took one look at the mock ups for the promo stuff and any guilt she felt about her Official Decision to be Irked by Her Co Star evaporated]
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1dw6QHj.
But there, my friends, songs like trees bear fruit only in their own time and their own way; and sometimes they are withered untimely.
—J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers, Book 3, Chapter 4
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1gFZfGT.
“The war on drugs creates perverse incentives. When the police find assets that they suspect are the proceeds of crime, they can seize them. Under civil asset-forfeiture rules, they do not have to prove that a crime was committed—they can grab first and let the owners sue to get their stuff back. The police can meanwhile use the money to beef up their own budgets, buying faster patrol cars or computers. All this gives them a powerful incentive to focus on drug crimes, which generate lots of cash, rather than, say, rape, which does not. This is outrageous. Citizens should not forfeit their property unless convicted of a crime; and the proceeds should fund the state as a whole, not the arm that does the grabbing.”
– The Economist (via prettayprettaygood)
There’s no compelling reason why laws that turn out to have harmful consequences to society should be allowed to persist. If laws don’t advance the common good they should be repealed. If a system of government does not allow that to happen, it is a system of government that is overdue for reform.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1gEpGN7.
They do, however, get to vote on whether or not to stick around to actually see how it ends.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1p8Znjo.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1hbPI9e.
This teen girl’s response to the DFTBA sexual abuse scandal is out of this world and needs to be watched and thought about and discussed.
This is a 16-year-old girl. Her video gave me CHILLS.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1fkpDAH.
John Singer Sargent
Portrait of Lady Michaelis
1925
Some googling turned up the following:
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1rAkltm.
Looks like my essay wasn’t the only one with a repetitive, lyric style in the recent issue of Brevity.
Check out A. Papatya Bucak’s excellent “An Address to My Fellow Faculty Who Have Asked Me to Speak About My Work.”
I’ve been seeing Bucak’s work around a lot lately. I just taught her essay “Eight Questions You Would Ask Me If I Told You My Name”; this beautiful short piece came across my Tumblr dash a little while ago; and one day this winter I was in Common Good Books and found, in short order, pieces of hers in both the new Pushcart Prize anthology and the current issue of Normal School. So far she’s knocked it out of the park with every piece I’ve read.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/P19Jof.
Kissing in the Rain (Episode 2)
What if I just keep making KitR fanart for EVERY EPISODE?Anyway, this is a little scene constructed from a book based on a webseries based on a book. Woah. I’ve never done book sculpting before, but this Anne of Green Gables scene was GORGEOUS, so I HAD to try. (PS- This took six hours, and I am COVERED in Mod Podge. Sigh.) (PPS- What am I even supposed to do with this now?)
*rubs hands together*
Okay.
At the premier for Anne of Green Gables, they have really cool artwork at the afterparty. And all of it is inspired by Aogg and Canada and stuff like that. There’s poetry and doilies and quilts and some of the costumes. But everyone’s favorite piece is this book sculpture. The little-known artist from the Midwest gets wider recognition after her artwork is featured at this party.
The artist’s further work in miniatures picks up interest from the art team behind the upcoming Warner Bros. production, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1drcXwz.
Maybe you’ve seen this photo a hundred times. I find it fascinating and I was thinking about it for no reason this morning. There are the photographer’s children and she’s particularly interested in capturing the way children are just people. They are often fairly savvy and not as childlike as sometimes depicted. Especially as the veer toward teenaged years.
The cigarette is a candy cigarette, but it’s the pose that is striking and her daughter’s expression.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1drcZ7N.
I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: to see the kitr tag constantly filling up with new fics and creations is bringing me so much joy. I have read each fic and I love a lot of them, and most of all I love that I’m a…
The KiTR fanception experience: loving each layer until it all turns to gibberish. Then loving the gibberish.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1jJ4iE9.
Best beloved episode. With bonus Jane Bennet.
OMG, I never noticed that! Imminent rewatch alert!
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1p5XBPQ.
Sargent and the Burckhardts
Valerie Burckhardt, 1878
Edward Burckhardt, 1880
Lady with a Rose (Charlotte Louise Burckhardt), 1882
Pointy (Portrait of Louise Burckhardt’s dog), 1885
Mrs. Edward Burckhardt and Her Daughter Louise, 1885
Edward Burckhardt was a well-to-do Swiss merchant; his wife, Mary Elizabeth Burckhardt (née Comes) was American. John Singer Sargent’s parents, expatriate Americans who travelled the European circuit, apparently socialized with the Burckhardts, such that their children knew each other growing up. Sargent was friends with Valerie, the older of the two Burckhardt daughters, and painted her portrait in 1878 while he was still a student in Paris. Valerie would have been about 21 at the time, a year younger than Sargent.
According to some accounts they may have been romantically involved, but if so it didn’t come to anything; two years later, in 1881, Valerie married a Swiss silk merchant named Harold Farquhar Hadden. Sargent presented her with a portrait of her father as a wedding gift.
During 1881 and 1882, Mrs. Burckhardt tried to create a match between Sargent and her younger daughter, Charlotte Louise (who went by her middle name). Louise was 19, Sargent 25. According to Deborah Davis’ book Strapless:
People who knew Louise described her as a pleasant but unremarkable young woman. Some acquaintances even suggested she was a little stupid. Above all, she was a docile and obedient daughter, dedicated to fulfilling her mother’s ambitions for her.
According to Davis, Mrs. Burckhardt actively plotted to bring the two together.
She invited Sargent and his friend James Beckwith to Fontainebleau and other nearby destinations that would remove them from the distractions of Paris. Normally, Sargent seemed to have no time for romance… But this summer was different… He appeared to warm to Louise and actually welcomed opportunities to be alone with her. Beckwith caught them unaccompanied several times — something that would never have happened during those days of constant chaperones if Mrs. Burckhardt had not counted on a wedding in Louise’s immediate future.
Inexplicably, however, Sargent’s interest waned and evaporated completely by the end of the summer. At the very moment when Mrs. Burckhardt felt closest to attaining the prize of a marriage proposal for Louise, the artist baffled her by reverting to his friendly, yet decidedly platonic, relationship with her daughter. Louise confronted him at his studio, hoping for an explanation. Sargent had the difficult task of convincing her that their flirtation, if it could be called that, was over. Their unpleasant conversation was interrupted by Beckwith, who walked in on them and saw that there was “evidence of trouble.” Sargent confessed to him that although he valued her friendship, he didn’t care for Louise in a romantic way.
I wonder what the “evidence of trouble” was. In my imagination, Louise had been visibly crying.
It’s not clear when exactly Sargent began his large, full-length portrait of her, though his work on the painting spanned the time when their on-again, off-again romance was playing out.
The painting came to be called Lady with a Rose.
The amazing thing for me about Sargent’s portraits is the way they communicate their subjects’ humanity. It’s not just a likeness. It’s a person, captured in a particular moment that tells a story. Photography may have replaced painted portraits, but I doubt even a skilled photographer could do what Sargent did, sitting with a subject for hours, even days; conversing, taking breaks at the piano, trying different approaches, and finally choosing one particular moment to commit to canvas.
And Sargent was honest, sometimes brutally so. His realism has gone in and out of fashion, his technique sometimes lauded, sometimes criticized, but his honesty endures.
When I look at Lady with a Rose, I see Louise posing dutifully with one hand on her hip and the other holding up the rose, but her expression has a hint of exasperation. Really, John? I have to hold it like this for how long? Her head tilts a bit, but her gaze is steady, if a bit resigned. And I wonder: Is Sargent depicting the moment in which she finally reconciled herself to the fact that the relationship between them wasn’t going to happen? That this painting of her, with the heavy black dress and the slightly silly pose, chosen by Sargent to echo the Spanish master Velasquez, was all she would be left with for the summer spent with the handsome artist, the friend of her older sister whom she may have spent years quietly admiring?
Sargent entered the painting in the 1882 Paris Salon, and it immediately created a buzz. The young artist’s virtuosic technique, along with the intriguing expression of his subject, captivated viewers. Lady with a Rose made Sargent’s reputation. Along with the other painting he exhibited that year, a dramatic depiction of a Spanish dancer called El Jaleo, it put him in the first rank. Commissions began coming in. Novelist Henry James wrote of the young Sargent that he offered “the slightly ‘uncanny’ spectacle of a talent which on the very threshold of its career has nothing more to learn.”
Three years later Sargent’s fortunes had turned. The scandal that followed the exhibition of Madame X at the 1885 Salon caused his commissions to evaporate. Sargent was in financial difficulty, and reportedly was considering giving up painting altogether. It may have been as a favor to him that his old family friends, the Burckhardts, commissioned a new painting.
First, though, Sargent painted and gave to Louise a painting of her dog, Pointy. I wonder if the white around the muzzle is an indication of Pointy’s age. The name seems like the kind of name a young child would give; Louise was 23 in 1985, but maybe Pointy’s name dated back to a time when she would have given such a name to a pet. And I wonder, too, if the gift was in a small way meant to make amends for what she had been through in 1881-82.
The painting the Burckhardts commissioned was a dual potrait of Louise and her mother. Mrs. Edward Burckhardt and Her Daughter Louise fascinates me. Louise is relegated to the background. At least she gets a more-comfortable pose this time, with her arms resting on the back of her mother’s chair. She still gazes directly at Sargent, but there’s a distance there that wasn’t there in Lady with a Rose. She looks almost startled, or at least somewhat taken aback. In my mind, posing for Sargent has brought her back to an emotional place she would have preferred not to revisit.
Maybe the distance isn’t all on Louise’s side. Maybe Sargent doesn’t want to revisit her face, doesn’t want to repeat himself, to risk falling short of the standard he set in recording the enigmatic expression that so captivated the critics previously. Or maybe he was rushing the depiction of Louise in order to concentrate on the picture’s real focus: her mother.
Mrs. Burckhardt sits for the portrait, but can’t bring herself to look at the artist. She gazes off to the side, outwardly composed, but with the tension visible in the left hand clutching the arm of the chair. And taking the two sitters together, mother and daughter, the story gets stronger: The thwarted matriarch, forced to endure the young man who was the author of her failure, looking away from him and even more, from her daughter, the one who actually suffered most in all this.
I keep coming back to Mrs. Burckhardt’s face, her look of memory and regret.
Four years later Charlotte did marry: an Englishman, Alfred Roger Ackerley. She fell ill with tuberculosis just two years later, though, and died at the age of 30.
Her older sister Valerie outlived them all. She had moved with her husband to New York, and sometime around 1922 she wrote to Sargent, including a photograph of the dual portrait of her mother and Charlotte, but with Charlotte blotted out. Apparently she wanted to know if Sargent would paint over her sister, making the painting a solo portrait of her mother.
Sargent’s reply:
I will return the photographs to you – as I found the composition as a whole is destroyed by taking out such an important part of it and leaving a gap instead. I cannot consent to do that any more than I would wear my hat in a drawing room or eat peas with a knife at dinner.
I wish you would send me a photograph of the picture as it is without the figure of Louise having been taken out. I would know better if anything can be done about it, and also what is wrong.
I know it’s unfair to try to draw a curve through two points, but looking at Louise’s portrait, and then thinking about her desire to have Sargent paint over the image of her dead sister, she doesn’t come across as a very nice person.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1hp1dqa.
Snowcap, Microchera albocoronata (Trochilidae), perched on a branch at Brawlio Carrillo National Park, Costa Rica.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1hoSnIX.
“Frank and I have been renting the same squirrel at Universal Prop House pretty much since we started working together. We try to hide it somewhere whenever we can.”
Reposted from http://ift.tt/NQZq5m.
You are currently browsing the lies.com weblog archives for March, 2014.