Just a kelpie in the marsh

Abalone

Fusion of Bismuth and Pearl

🤍 The Warlock : Part 2

A nervous glance. But what is that back there watching?

I will be honest guys, the Red portrait of king Charles is gorgeous asdfghjkl

it's a bad portrait. Like. Objectively. It does the opposite of what's intended. It looks like the painter is insulting him. If it was in a contemporary gallery with no context you would see it immediately as the ambivalent criticism of Charles's reign, how he fades into the overwhelming red background as a tiny little figure, small and insignificant, insufficient for the clothes he's wearing. It reminds my of Goya's portraits, how they were so 'realistic' that they ended up making these great figures look pathetic to the viewer. So these are our rulers?

the sheer novelty. the surprise and shock, the kinda cunt it's serving for no reason. I. I love it. It's an incredible portrait by Jonathan Yeo. By the sheer fact that Charles, the man, is impossible to portray as greater than man because he's just such a nothingburger of a dude. So a portrait made to make him look huge and interesting made him be swallowed in red brushstrokes. The butterfly, that reminded me immediately of " we will all laugh at guilded butterflies", draws more attention than him. It looks like an omen. It looks like a warning in all this red. Something is not right here.

This is the best royal portrait ever 10/10

This is a painting of a monarch whose individual personality and even bodily presence are a mere footnote within the legacy of bloodshed that built the throne he occupies. This is the only way it's possible to depict him. It's a photograph of his soul

And I think all of that is entirely deliberate!

I think Jonathan Yeo meant this portrait to be absolutely all of those things, he just can't be very vocal about the paintings true meaning. Yet.

I've done this on another post, but let's compare that portrait up there to some other portraits Yeo's done.

Here's actor and activist Idris Elba, whom colleagues have described as warm and friendly, open-hearted, with an emotional intelligence that makes him capable of being very honest and vulnerable with the character he's playing:

Here's Jony Ive - who founded Apple with Steve Jobs and was chief design officer responsible for some of the more popular artistic choices, who recently left the company because the culture had gotten so toxic and shitty. He now works more in private design, so he has more artistic freedom and he can be less in the public eye:

Yeo's even previously painted British heads of state. Here's the phenomenal Baroness Doreen Lawrence of the labour party, a Jamaican immigrant who turned the tragic murder of her son into a lifelong campaign of quietly and steadily dismantling systemic racism:

To me, all these portraits are deeply personal, conveying the sitter's character with empathy and quiet dignity.

Elba is leaning forward in an intimate friendly gesture. He makes eye contact with the viewer but his face is turned slightly to the side, inviting but not confrontational, his brows slightly drawn together thoughtfully. His hands are natural and relaxed. He's shirtless - not to be a beefcake thirst trap (okay maybe just a tiny little bit), but to convey how emotionally naked he's willing to be.

Ives is literally putting a lens between himself and the viewer - we have to look closer to see his face, but when we do we see his eyes crinkled with a hint of good humor. The perspectives are all distorted, but the main thing we see is the hands that have physically built so much of the technology we use. And even outside the phone screen he's still enased by a circular frame within a frame, indicating yet another layer of separation between the subject and the viewer.

Lawrence is radiant, proudly upright and implacable as a mountain, her head held high and her hands folded before her with a self-contained air of calm determination. And even though the background is a chaotic sea of looming shapes and quick brush strokes, her eyes keep us grounded, even pinned in place. We're the viewer, but she is studying us.

And then, on the other end of the personality spectrum, here's noted asshole Damien Hirst, who frequently makes the news for being racist and sexist and just generally a really slimy piece of shit. His most famous works are the animal carcasses suspended in resin-

-yeah, that. That guy. He's made all the money in the goddamn world three times over for pieces like that, and he still seems like he's on a personal mission to make everyone around him as miserable as possible.

Here's Yeo's portrait of him, seated on a leather throne, dick bulge at eye level, contained in one of his own tanks:

Here's the droopy and melancholic portrait of the famously pompous and insufferable John Cooper Clarke, self-described "original punk poet", who was recently booed off stage for making super transphobic remarks, and whose most famous quote is "I read Kerouac at 12 and decided I could do better":

And, most notably for the argument I'm making here, here's D-Day veteran Sgt Geoffrey Pattinson, and see if you can spot the extremely subtle use of color theory here:

My conclusion: Jonathan Yeo paints very good portraits, and sometimes his subjects are very bad people.

And I think he brings absolutely all of his artistic talent to the Charles portrait.

@chromegnomes is absolutely right; it is the only possible way to depict him. It is a photograph of his soul.

And that's precisely why it's so ugly and uncomfortable to look at.

People have said that Charles has a "complicated legacy", which is what people say when someone has an objectively horrible legacy that they are still personally benefiting from. But the people who still tolerate his extravagant gilded existence to "honor historical tradition" will find absolutely nothing to like in this portrait. All the gold and brass and pomp of his uniform, all the military accolades for his colonial warmongering, all the fabulous ostentatious wealth he was born into and has spent every second of his life surrounded by - which would have been rendered with glittering precision and care in a traditional royal portrait - they're all dingy and washed out and already fading. The medals aren't even clearly marked enough to really know what they are; it's all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The butterfly that was included as a nod to his honestly extensive conservation work (because let's give the little bit of credit where credit is actually due) stands out as the one bright point of beauty and authenticity - but it's dwarfed by the only other visible object, the sword, and it's being swallowed up by that lurid, putrid background that seems to seep out of Charles' uniform. The dark tips of its wings are the most high-contrast part of the painting except for Charles' black hollow eyes that stare into nothing. And, most significantly in my opinion, the butterfly isn't actually touching him, or connected to him in any way. It just exists alongside him, but it doesn't need him.

His face is painted in such a way to detail absolutely every wrinkle without ever being able to completely cover up the blood red background, and below the sunken shark-like eyes, the artist has included that vapidly pleasant plastered-on smile with nothing behind it that is practically the royal uniform by now. I think the angle is also deliberately chosen to be unsettling: many portraits are traditionally done either head-on, 3/4 profile, or full profile. Charles is none of these - his head is tilted juuust a few degrees off kilter. It's not quite right. And he's looking off to the side very slightly; his thousand-yard-stare is kind of drifting over the viewers shoulder. He can't look us in the eye.

And there is no way, there is absolutely no possible way that an artist who is smart enough and skilled enough to imbue all his other portraits with so much meaning and symbolism and indicators of the subject's character - there's no way that's not intentional.

But... Yeo lives in London. He's still working on other royal and aristocratic portraits. He still has to live in that society, and he still has to get paid.

So of course he has to toe the line, at least until Charles dies, and say that the vivid blood-soaked red is to symbolize the """vibrancy""" of this terminally ill octogenarian, to bring a """modern contemporary feel""" to this 19th century colonizer.

Yeo knows exactly what he's doing.

Here's an excerpt about it from Smithsonian magazine:

Listen, I work in memory care and end-of-life care, and we only say someone "seems to be smiling approvingly" to comfort the family when someone is so far gone they clearly don't know where they are anymore. His ex-wife Camilla, who probably has more good reasons to hate him than any other single human being alive, looked at this haunting vision of hell and was like YES PERFECT.

This is all completely intentional. We are all picking up on exactly the message the artist was trying to convey. Yeo is trying to tell us, loud and clear, that something is not right here. It is absolutely an omen.

Op is right; it is insulting him. And it is supposed to make us look at this pathetic villain, who is currently toddling through the final days of his unfairly long and lavishly useless life, and think "these are our rulers?"

drawing a fat bottomed bunny boy for @wolfertinger666 :3 🩷🩷🩷

WOAWEEE

Behold, the most boopable of snoots!

goated with the paws

(she/they) 🍃

also adding more lore to them(sorry): she is Salem's younger sibling and they fight and bicker over stuff alot

"how does that work they're two completely different species"

idk I love found family (⁠ᵔ⁠ᴥ⁠ᵔ⁠)

stop asking about her balls😭 (please)

Today on clownery from my fraternity: I started “pavlov training” this guy from my frat as a joke but now it’s actually working

Context: This guy from my frat (I’m in a coed academic frat) is really into geography, and he’s been trying to learn all the state capitals of Brazil. I happen to be Brazilian, so I’ve been helping him learn them along with pronunciations. One day I was eating a pack of m&ms and decided to quiz him. If he got the question right he got an m&m, and if he got it wrong I’d eat it. Thus a tradition between us was born. If I’m eating a snack I’ll quiz him a bit and give him a tiny treat if he’s right.

Anyways, today I was in our frat lounge eating some m&ms by myself, kinda minding my own business. I eventually got really bored and wondered what would happen if I gave everyone in a lounge an m&m except for him, so I did that. He noticed and then started dropping every Brazilian state capital he could think of, getting increasingly desperate until he just started naming random Brazilian cities. A few of them he repeated multiple times to get the perfect pronunciation. It was like watching a dog do every trick it knows in rapid succession, just hoping something would get a treat. I eventually gave him a few m&ms and started wondering what the hell I’ve done

Thank you @clearancecreedwatersurvival :O (genuine, I love learning new things)

At the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, I think that college should be free and also not a requirement for employment outside of highly specialized career fields

At the risk of sounding like an effete intellectual, I do actually think you should be allowed to just take college courses indefinitely

lmao

this is crazy

Yeah that’s her.

ahbeeolah

Posting this vid cuz I've noticed the behavior mentioned is rampant on Tumblr which prides itself as being full of progressives, allies, and being diverse. And Tumblr, especially white tumblr has a massive problem with tokenizing and censoring Black women and especially politically vocal Black women who refuse to be tone policed or quiet.

i am not immune to heart shaped objects

They’re on their way home from the shops!

SKITTLEZ!!! 🌈💫🌟✨🐉🥣

(she/it) 🏳️‍⚧️🐉

My neighbour had had one of those roll-away dumpsters on his lawn for awhile. In case you're unfamiliar, people often have a lot of trash generated from home renovation projects. They do not want to drive to the dump constantly to throw this stuff out. Instead, you can call someone who comes and drops a dumpster on your driveway, and then when it's full, you can call them again to get it picked up and taken to the dump. The very icon itself of suburban make-it-someone-else's-problemism.

People get really mad when you throw garbage into a dumpster that you didn't pay for. For instance, the local Tim Hortons has put up threatening signs falsely claiming that they have security cameras pointing at the bins at all times. This might be because I once disposed of an entire Subaru EJ25 engine and slightly dented 4-speed automatic transmission, along with most of its fluid, into their dumpster. If you ask me, this is just whining, because that stuff was all made out of aluminum and shouldn't have counted too far on their weight limit anyway.

And yet, I don't want to drive to the dump. Partially, this is because of the exorbitant dump fees: in an attempt at "greening," or more likely to not have so many dumbasses coming to throw out a single tire, they charge a minimum of thirty bucks to throw out anything under a hundred kilos of crap.

Thirty bucks! I can buy a lot of cool junk for that. And they don't even let you take old bicycles out of the garbage pile for that money to try and recoup your cost. Once, I saw a dirt bike, and they wouldn't let me take it. It became a whole thing, which is the main reason I can't go to the dump anymore: they have my picture posted everywhere. So borrowing my neighbour's dumpster is the next best thing.

Here's the tactic you want to use: watch the bin for a few weeks. Check what days there's a lot of stuff being thrown out. These things naturally ebb and flow. There will be an initial burst of enthusiasm as they rip their kitchen to bits, being replaced with a crushing realization that they have ripped their kitchen to bits. It's during that lull that you throw your shit into the dumpster, and cover it up with construction debris from the previous effort. Demoralized, the homeowner won't look in their bin for at least another week, until they are forced to finish the job or hire someone competent to do so, who will start refilling the bin again.

Or, you can do what I did, which is wait for the truck that picks up the dumpster to show up. While the operator is busy loading it up, you throw your stuff into the bin and drive away as fast as you can. The neighbour can't get mad, because the pickup's already been paid for: you're just extracting some extra value from it. The driver can't chase you, because he has a dumpster full of your old shocks and axles halfway loaded onto his truck. And the cops can't get you for illegal dumping, because it sounds like a whole bunch of paperwork and to be honest they're probably too busy arresting folks who start a fistfight at the dump over a pretty sweet dirt bike.

Family Feud