You are the greatest archeologist in the world and you have been looking for the City of Gold for decades, after all these years you have found the City. When you open the ancient gates you see glitters running towards you, the “gold” of the city has always been thousands of Golden Retrievers.
Today the Department of Extraordinary Embroidery is marveling at this awesomely exquisite cross-stitched recreation of John William Waterhouse’s 1908 Pre-Raphaelite painting, The Soul of the Rose. It was painstakingly created, one x-shaped stitch at a time, over a 4 year period by the mother of Twitter user @TamSepulveda.
I had a dream yesterday that I was in Whitby and I looked out of the window to see a wolf made of stars and bigger than the eye could hold. Unfortunately, in jpeging this painting I’ve lost a lot of the colour nuance, which is A Sad Thing.
Over two years have passed since the Department of Awesomely Good Deeds first discovered an awesome ongoing program called The Monster Project (previously featured here) which is all about helping children “recognize the power of their own imaginations and to encourage them to pursue their creative potential.” Based in Austin, TX, The Monster Project invites elementary school students to draw monsters and send them in. Then their team of over 100 professional artists recreates the monsters in their own artistic styles and later shares them with the kids in person.
“…when we deliver these new interpretations back to the students in person, we are able to demonstrate new art techniques within their original creative context. They are able to see what their idea sparked in others.”
I mean the whole damn point of the Nativity story is that the supposed son of God (interpret Jesus how you fucking want, of course) was born to a couple of poor, exhausted peasants in the stable for the inn, and his first bed was a feeding trough for animals. That would nowadays be like a poor couple where the mother gives birth in a parking garage behind the motel because they couldn’t find a better place and nobody else would take them in. It’s a pretty gritty setting, and the idea is that God was reborn in some of the rock-bottom lowest circumstances. The only thing majestic was all the angels and shit, and of course motherly love
I get that a lot of the art portraying Madonna and Child as fabulously wealthy europeans in splendid robes and golden light was meant to glorify God + whichever nobility was sponsoring the artist, and while of course it’s genuinely beautiful art, it just always struck me as horribly missing the point, which is that the supposed son of God started in incredibly humble circumstances, among the kind of people that everyone else looks down on
‘Massacre des Innocents’ by Leon Cogniét, 1824. Although the Feast of the Holy Innocents is in a couple of days time, this painting is still really relevant in that it portrays Mary as how She really was: a scared refugee mum, so fearful that Her son was going to be one of the Innocents killed by King Herod.
