Detail of St Jerome and St Catherine of Alexandria, ca. 1480-90, by anonymous, Bruges

“Высохшее русло / Dry River Bed” Andrey Simakov 2010

Demon from The Fall of the Rebel Angels by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1562.

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When a bullet is fired at an acute angle (less than 90 degrees) to the water, it jumps upward and does not enter the water because the water resistance under the bullet is greater than the air resistance above it.

Echoes ,  Nauset Beach in Orleans   -   Jeanne Rosier Smith, 2021.

American , b. 1966  -

Soft Pastel,  24 x 36 in.

Hitchcock Presents

From Vertigo to Psycho, how Hitchcock changed the role of architecture in film.

As a director Alfred Hitchcock was responsible for some of the most seminal moments in cinematic history. His career in film began as a production manager and set-designer, formative experiences that would later help to develop his unique visual style when in charge of the camera. For each of his films he would sketch pages of storyboards and layouts, often based on real locations, that his design teams would then build. For Hitchcock, a film set was never simply a background for the actors, each acts as a supporting character within the plot and is used to channel the psychological mood of the scene. 

The influence and legacy of Hitchcock is visible throughout cinema history. His masterful use of architectural space can be seen in the empty yet haunting corridors of the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and the rainy, future-noir Los Angeles portrayed in Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner, a city of cavernous monolithic structures rising above crumbling street level apartments. More recently the enfolding architectural mazes created for the multiple dream levels of Christopher Nolan’s Inception and Wes Anderson’s obsessive interior styling in The Grand Budapest Hotel both owe a debt to Hitchcock’s ability to make architecture speak as loudly as the actors.

Anne Hathaway, Audra McDonald and Raul Esparza in “Twelfth Night”

#rbing this feels like rbing like. the mona lisa. like its just too iconic

Boom💥

Gustave Courbet, Le Sommeil,1866.

Le Sommeil [The Sleepers], which depicts two women entwined in a post-coital embrace, caused a stir when it was first shown in the 1870s. The police were called in, and the painting was not shown again until the 1980s. But its brief showing had an influence on a number of contemporary artists, and helped challenge the taboos associated with lesbian relationships. For modern audiences it’s a good reminder that people in the 19th century were not ignorant of lesbian relationships, as we tend to believe. And it’s pretty damn sexy, don’t you think?

They called the police on this lesbian painting.

The best part is, the lesbian embrace isn’t even the biggest thing that made the painting so controversial, it was the art style. People in the artistic community at the time were wholly familiar with sapphic relationships being portrayed in art, but were used to these scenes being portrayed in the ‘academic art’ style, which consisted of smooth, simplistic, idealised versions of the nude female form. This often went hand in hand with the depiction of Roman & Greek allegories to illustrate certain ideals (think Cabanel’s Birth of Venus). Courbet’s journey into realism was met by heavy critique from the academic movement, as the women he painted were, well, more realistic. Leaving in details such as the rolls of fat around the ribs acted as a blunt reminder to the audience that these were not euphoric goddesses caressing in ecstasy, but ordinary women having a nap together after making love. Other realist paintings suffered the same controversy, Manet’s Olympia is a perfect example, where the problem was not that the painting depicted a nude woman in an erotic pose, but the fact that she was just an ordinary courtesan, given an identity & portrayed in a place of power & control. Realism humanized the female form in art, & removed it from its previous role as a representation of the ideal.

So what disgusted people about the painting wasn’t so much that Le Sommeil depicted two women, but rather that it depicted two ‘real’ women.

Artist: So I painted a couple of lesbians in bed. 

Men: Niiiiiiiiiice

Artist: They have cellulite

Men: I AM CALLING THE POLICE

Seeing people rocking out to Hamtaro is the best thing I’ve seen all year

Irresistible

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when AHS cums on

Jenna making everyone feel like they have a low IQ

Just a reminder that even though she makes silly videos on YouTube, this girl also has a masters degree from a top rate university.