A really cool thing about (mostly) working from home is that I can pretty easily work from other places, too. My current trip to Mammoth, for example, was planned as a working vacation. I’d bring my laptop, and while Linda and Rory were hiking I could be working back at the condo.
Except that my MacBook’s GPU chose this morning to malfunction, leaving me with a black screen of death and no way to work until the replacement arrives tomorrow. Sigh.
So I went back down to Mammoth Creek this afternoon and spent more time with my new lichen friends. This time I brought the clip-on macro attachment for my phone, so I have some lichen close-ups coming your way.
We’ve started editing Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party and we’re so over the moon with how the footage looks that we just had to share some shots with you. We’re not sure yet when Poe Party will be coming your way, but we can assure you, it’ll be worth the wait.
Make sure you’re following us everywhere so you don’t miss a thing!
This is a painting of Jacek Malczewski called simply ‘Death’ and it’s my favourite personification of death in any medium.
She’s not creepy or scary, or sexy, or abstract. She is this thick woman with worn hands, dressed as normal, with a non-stylised scythe and pins in her hair: like a farmer’s wife that just came form the field and rests against the wall, catching some sun. She is not creeping about the dying one holding her scythe over their head, she is just there, calmly waiting her turn.
This painting always fills me with peace and optimism when I think about death. She is just there, outside the window, in no hurry at all, sensible and down to earth. I can live with that.
““I believe that when people do period films they are reliant on paintings from the period, because there is no photography. But in a painting, everything is formally composed; it’s not real life. Then they do wide shots to show off the period detail of the sets. I think that the detail is in the small things, like crumbs on a table, or flowers in a vase. I wanted to shoot the details, the visual details of living.”
The story of how Sargent rescued his reputation (and career) with this painting after the debacle of Madame X is a fascinating story about the relationship between commercial and artistic success.
