Friday, October 30, 2009

Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin... book cover & poems...




Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin (1872–1936) was a symbolist poet, prose writer, and playwright. Openly gay, he wrote the first celebrations of
gay themes in Russian literature, and the first Russian coming-out novel, Wings (1907), in which a young man learns to accept his sexuality, which makes him feel as if he has grown wings. Kuzmin too was a poet who mined his own biography,incorporating its associations
and events in his poem-cycles.
Photobucket
Wings.Story in Three Parts(Krylya) cover by Nikolai Petrovich Feofilaktov




~Poems~


Sun, Sun

Sun, sun,
divine Ra-Helios,you delight
the hearts of kings and heroes,
sacred horses neigh to you,
in Heliopolis they sing hymns to you;
when you shine,
lizards crawl out onto rocks
and boys go laughing
to swim in the Nile.
Sun, sun,
I am a pale scribbler,
a library recluse,
but I love you, sun, no less
than a tanned sailor
smelling of fish and salt water,
and no less
than his accustomed heart
rejoices
at your royal rising
from the ocean,
my heart trembles,
when your dusty, but flaming ray
slips
through the narrow window by the ceiling
onto my filled page
and my thin, yellowish hand,
writing out in vermilion
the first letter of a hymn to you,
O Ra-Helios sun!




The Sense Of Your Bidding

The sense of your bidding is unclear:
to pray, to curse, is it, to fight
you bid me, inscrutable genius?
The spring slackens, niggard, meager,
and Benozzo Gozzoli's courier
dozes in the drowsy thickets.

Hills are dark with honeyed cloud.
Look: I do not touch lithe strings.
Your gaze, prophetically flying,
is clenched, gushes no winged streams,
and beckons by no May road, trying
to outstrip Hermes in his flight.

Hobbled horses do not neigh,
Aging warriors sprawl in disarray...
Hold your palms open wide!
Risen spring is bright,
but groves of darkness are not given
to leap for joy having leapt from dreams.

The groom names not the hour,
be not guiled to tarry,
hark through ice the clarion voice,
your flax is drenched with chrism,
and, bidding goodbye to numb laze,
free, in love, you will rise.

Cizhou ware ceramic pillow...1368-1644...



Photobucket


Photobucket



The term 'Cizhou ware' refers to a type of sturdy stoneware produced at many kilns throughout the northern Chinese provinces of Hebei, Henan and Shaanxi. These wares
were produced during the Northern Song(960-1127),Jin(1127-1279)and Yuan(1279-1368) dynasties.Cizhou wares are heavily potted and boldly decorated with freely drawn designs.They are called 'popular' ceramics (as opposed to the types produced for the imperial court).
Ceramic pillows were used by the living, but were also buried in tombs for the next
life, along with other items for daily use
.

Ex libris...





Thursday, October 29, 2009

Fritz Eichenberg... beastium fabulosium...prints



Photobucket


Photobucket



Jorge Luis BORGES... drawing... Self Portrait




Photobucket


Poignantly relating to self-portraits, Borges wrote in his The Art of Poetry:


To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water …

Sometimes at evening there's a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.



Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Hans Bellmer ... drawing




One of my favourite artists draws one of my favourite writers...


Photobucket

Hans Bellmer  ~ Gaston Bachelard 1957


In 1957 Bellmer executed portraits not only of Gaston Bachelard but also of other
leading artists and writers of the day, including Arp, Wilfredo Lam, Henri Michaux, Victor Brauner, Albert Camus and Jehan Mayoux. The art historian Peter Webb has written of these works that together they ‘form a marvellous pantheon of the creative people of his time’ and it seems likely that Bellmer himself saw these portraits, generally pencil or charcoal
drawings, as a coherent body of works.


Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.
Gaston Bachelard



~"the pure imagination designates its projected forms as the essence of its proper fulfillment. It delights naturally in imagining, thus in changing forms. Metamorphosis thus becomes the specific function of imagination. The imagination cannot comprehend a form except by transforming it, by dynamizing its becoming, by seizing on it like a sectioning of the flux of formal causality, precisely as a physicist cannot understand a phenomenon except by grasping it in a sectioning of the flux of efficient causality."~ 

G Bachelard  LAUTREMONT



Amos Nattini...




Photobucket

Dante's Divina Comedia 1923


Francois Perrier...print 1638






Photobucket




Sunday, October 18, 2009

Austin Osman Spare...drawing



Photobucket
Crucifixion


Photobucket





Ramón María del Valle-Inclán...The Lamp Of Marvels...



A unique account by a great mystical poet of his search to realize Beauty, Truth, and Goodness in his life and in his art.


Photobucket

Ramón del Valle Inclán (1866–1936) was Spanish writer and a member of the Generation of ‘98. Valle Inclán was deeply influenced by foreign literary trends, especially by modernismo. An eccentric who cultivated bizarre legends about himself, he published a collection of sensational, erotic tales, Femeninas (1895). He used himself as the model for the old libertine hero of his Sonatas (1902–1905), translated as The Pleasant Memoirs of the Marquis de Bradomín (1924). His symbolist aesthetic is expressed in his poetic works such as Aromas de leyenda (1907). Among his plays are Águila de blasón ("Eagle of Honor," 1907), in prose, and La Marquesa Rosalinda (1913) in verse. In his later works he satirized Spanish life in grotesque caricatures he called esperpentos, including Luces de Bohemia (1920).

Photobucket

Photobucket

Photobucket

Photobucket

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful....



edward estlin cummings
(October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962)



"I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more."




Photobucket
self-portrait ee cummings



i am so glad and very

i am so glad and very
merely my fourth will cure
the laziest self of weary
the hugest sea of shore

so far your nearness reaches
a lucky fifth of you
turns people into eachs
and cowards into grow

our can'ts were born to happen
our mosts have died in more
our twentieth will open
wide a wide open door

we are so both and oneful
night cannot be so sky
sky cannot be so sunful
i am through you so i





i have found what you are like



i have found what you are like
the rain,

(Who feathers frightened fields
with the superior dust-of-sleep. wields

easily the pale club of the wind
and swirled justly souls of flower strike

the air in utterable coolness

deeds of green thrilling light
with thinned

newfragile yellows

lurch and.press

-in the woods
which
stutter
and

sing

And the coolness of your smile is
stirringofbirds between my arms;but
i should rather than anything
have(almost when hugeness will shut
quietly)almost,
your kiss






2 little whos

2 little whos
(he and she)
under are this
wonderful tree

smiling stand
(all realms of where
and when beyond)
now and here

(far from a grown
-up i&you-
ful world of known)
who and who

(2 little ams
and over them this
aflame with dreams
incredible is)




Monday, October 12, 2009

Magick Without Tears...


Aleister Crowley


October 12th 1875 - December 1st 1947





Photobucket


Photobucket
Photobucket



 "Lift yourselves up, my brothers and sisters of the earth! Put
beneath your feet all fears, all qualms, all hesitancies! Lift
yourselves up! Come forth, free and joyous, by night and day, to
do your will; for "There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt."
Lift yourlseves up! Walk forth with us in Light and Life and
Love and Liberty, taking our pleasure as Kings and Queens in
Heaven and on Earth."





Sunday, October 11, 2009

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

I Invoke, I Invoke! ...





Pan to Artemis


From The Equinox, vol I



Photobucket



Uncharmable charmer

Of Bacchus and Mars

In the sounding, rebounding

Abyss of the stars!

O virgin in armour,

Thine arrows unsling

In the brilliant, resilient

First rays of the spring!


By
the force of the fashion
Of love, when I broke
Through the shroud, through the cloud,
Through the storm, through the smoke,
To the mountain of passion
Volcanic that woke —
By the rage of the mage
I invoke, I invoke!


By
the midnight of madness: —
The lone-lying sea,
The swoon of the moon,
Your swoon into me,
The sentinel sadness
Of cliff-clinging pine,
That night of delight
You were mine, you were mine!


You
were mine, O my saint,
My maiden, my mate,
By the might of the right
Of the night of our fate.
Though I fall, though I faint,
Though I char, though I choke,
By the hour of our power
I invoke, I invoke!


By
the mystical union
Of fairy and faun,
Unspoken, unbroken —
The dust to the dawn! —
A secret communion
Unmeasured, unsung,
The listless, resistless,
Tumultuous tongue! —


O
virgin in armour,
Thine arrows unsling,
In the brilliant resilient
First rays of the spring!
No Godhead could charm her,
But manhood awoke —
O fiery Valkyrie,
I invoke, I invoke!

Aleister Crowley 1909





Sunday, October 4, 2009

DOROTHY IANNONE...




Born 1932, Boston, Massachusetts; lives in Berlin, Germany

Since the 1960s, Dorothy Iannone has been making vibrant paintings, drawings, prints, and objects depicting male and female figures in states of physical union and ecstasy. These works narrate the artist’s life in intimate detail and, departing somewhat from the dominant feminist discourse of the 1960s, emphasize personal freedom and spiritual transcendence through complete devotion to, and union with, a lover.



Photobucket


Photobucket


Photobucket


Photobucket










Josep Maria Subirachs ... prints...



Photobucket


Photobucket


Photobucket



Saturday, October 3, 2009

Thursday, October 1, 2009

*Guest Blog...



Maggie O'Sullivan

Maggie O'Sullivan was born in Lincolnshire to Irish parents. Poet, artist, editor, publisher, she has performed and published her work since the late 1970s.


Photobucket
Arshile Gorky, "Study for "Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia"

"Elegy" (after Arshile Gorky)

You measured things by weight.
You loved the feel & shape of apricots
the wave & sway of fields of grain
the strength & pressure of waterfalls
the flow & shimmer of rivers
the luxuriance of orange, amber & terracotta
on naked paper
the drift & wing, flutter & rustle
of birds & leaves.
You loved the surreal
the song
the edible
and, above all,
bread.

Your palette unfurls a flirtation
of glow & shadow,
a tenderness of breasts,
a poignant sweet incense of lemons
figs olives honey &
cherry trees in blossom.
The sanctuary holds all.
The bitter-red roses,
the scarlet-red crest of the cock,
the shivering silver sickness of poplar leaves
and the pallid hands, distorted, flat
as icons. [...]


Malevich

Photobucket
Malevich, "White on White" (1918)


white on white

white square on white ground
white ground on white square
groundlight on white
white on light

white nothing
nothing within nothing
within nothing nakendess
white nothing
naked

nothing revealing
nothing reveals nothing
yielding nothing
nothing yields nothing

* with many thanks to R O'B