Posts tagged Beauty and Mystery

Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

libraryland

I’ve had a love affair with Europa ever since Arthur C. Clarke suggested life beneath the icy surface in the book 2061.  Nothing is more romantic or mysterious than those silent rocks floating through the sky.  Beautiful. ~ü

I’ve had a love affair with Europa ever since Arthur C. Clarke suggested life beneath the icy surface in the book 2061.  Nothing is more romantic or mysterious than those silent rocks floating through the sky.  Beautiful.

~ü

eruptedrainbow

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman down beside you at the counter who says,’ Last night, the channel was full of starfish,’ And you wonder, is this a message, finally, or just another day?
Eleanor Lerman, from Starfish

airwalker

Lamentations have lost their place in today’s prosaic world.  Escapism trumps contemplation.  Memories are offlined, commoditized online and then referenced wistfully as people click through virtual photo albums.  Rarely are these the moments that have changed our lives.  Those moments are locked deep inside each one of us,  referenced only in the deepest hours of the night. ~ü [Image: Alfred Guillou Farewell 1892]

Lamentations have lost their place in today’s prosaic world.  Escapism trumps contemplation.  Memories are offlined, commoditized online and then referenced wistfully as people click through virtual photo albums.  Rarely are these the moments that have changed our lives.  Those moments are locked deep inside each one of us,  referenced only in the deepest hours of the night.

~ü

[Image: Alfred Guillou Farewell 1892]

worldpaintings

I do not insist upon knowing.
André Breton, Nadja

mythologyofblue

I take the liberty of maintaining that without the art of ambiguity there is no real eroticism, and the stronger the ambiguity, the more powerful the excitement.  ~Milan Kundera [Image: Photographer Unknown]

I take the liberty of maintaining that without the art of ambiguity there is no real eroticism, and the stronger the ambiguity, the more powerful the excitement. 

~Milan Kundera

[Image: Photographer Unknown]

crackityjones77

What if the distant light were clearer than before?  What if we could clearly see the obstacles along the way?  It would be a life full of banalities.  It would be beautiful, but it would be a life without fear.  This alludes to the fact that fear and beauty share some common ground. ~ü

What if the distant light were clearer than before?  What if we could clearly see the obstacles along the way?  It would be a life full of banalities.  It would be beautiful, but it would be a life without fear.  This alludes to the fact that fear and beauty share some common ground.

~ü

hardcore

The real world is much more colorful than we think it is. ~ü [Image: Grains of sand under a microscope.]

The real world is much more colorful than we think it is.

~ü


[Image: Grains of sand under a microscope.]

discovermagazine.com

When light is only shadow, mystery ensues. ~ü [Image: Henri Le Sidaner, By the Light of the Moon in Bruges (1898-99)]

When light is only shadow, mystery ensues.

~ü

[Image: Henri Le Sidaner, By the Light of the Moon in Bruges (1898-99)]

amare-habeo

Destruction is not negative. ~ü From A Genteel Iconoclasm: The genesis of the project is well-documented: Rauschenberg went over to the master’s studio and said he’d like to erase one of his drawings as an act of art. De Kooning, apparently intrigued, had three groups of drawings. The first comprised those with which he was not satisfied - that wouldn’t work. The next was of drawings he liked, but which were all in pencil - too easy to erase. If de Kooning was going to participate in this neo-Dada performance, he would play his part. He looked in his third group and found a multi-media work on paper that would be quite difficult to eradicate (the media of Erased de Kooning Drawing are “traces of ink and crayon on paper”). It apparently took Rauschenberg one month to get the sheet relatively clear of marks. No photograph exists of the work he erased. Erased de Kooning Drawing is iconic because it stands for an era when something seemingly negative could, in fact, turn out to have positive repercussions. It is revolutionary in a philosophical, though not in an aesthetic, sense.  [Image: Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953)]

Destruction is not negative.

~ü

From A Genteel Iconoclasm:

The genesis of the project is well-documented: Rauschenberg went over to the master’s studio and said he’d like to erase one of his drawings as an act of art. De Kooning, apparently intrigued, had three groups of drawings. The first comprised those with which he was not satisfied - that wouldn’t work. The next was of drawings he liked, but which were all in pencil - too easy to erase. If de Kooning was going to participate in this neo-Dada performance, he would play his part. He looked in his third group and found a multi-media work on paper that would be quite difficult to eradicate (the media of Erased de Kooning Drawing are “traces of ink and crayon on paper”). It apparently took Rauschenberg one month to get the sheet relatively clear of marks. No photograph exists of the work he erased.

Erased de Kooning Drawing is iconic because it stands for an era when something seemingly negative could, in fact, turn out to have positive repercussions. It is revolutionary in a philosophical, though not in an aesthetic, sense. 

[Image: Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953)]

tate.org.uk