accidentalformalist:

Francis Alÿs

The Nightwatch

Surveillance cameras observe a fox exploring the Tudor and Georgian rooms of the National Portrait Gallery at night.

John Fekner

It’s an illness like any other, Van Gogh wrote,
as the flashes behind his eyes kept popping
while in his hands the brush’s marked determination
to continue exploded beyond the canvas, hands
and eyes, together, wrestling the mind
into some kind of submission. The glory of it
assaulted him every time. I have been working
on a size 20 canvas in the open air in an orchard,
lilac plowland, a reed fence, two pink peach trees
against a sky of glorious blue and white.
On a size 20 canvas where illness equals work,
there is nothing more or less than hands,
brushes, and eyes, scraping pink, lavender,
blue, and white zinc here and there
until the mind in her illness settles
at the edge of an orchard
shedding blossoms in brilliant light.

^* The passage in italics quoted from Vincent Van Gogh’s letter to his brother Theo dated March 30, 1888.

(via ahuntersheart)

claytoncubitt:

David Hockney, ‘Domestic Scene, Los Angeles’ 1963

poetsorg:

Remedios Varo

“The Creation of Birds”

I think this is the most truthful painting I’ve ever seen. 

theartofanimation:

Michelle Kondrich

visual-poetry:

grasiele sousa using stamp of poem by lucio agra as a performance piece

”(…) it is composed by the letters O, U, Y combined to represent a female body in a mirror. from that, a performer named grasiele sousa, made a stamp of it and stamped her own body with the poem, constructing a photo-performance with it (…)” (lucio agra)

(source)

And may you walk on air by Vanessa Huang
            In memory of Shaima Alawadi


What of the way of this world
unconscious
wild and wavering?
 
I imagine Fatima’s
horror finding
you, the silent scream/ of an illegitimate voice
 
and the terror words knotted
in such rigorous execution.
When you’re returned to Najaf and we’re left
 
with neighbors in close-knit ceremony
eyes gaping, mouths staring
the sounds of El Cajon’s ghostcattle carry
 
and we are
still at war.
I rest in knowing
 
All wars are useless to the dead
as breath grasps
prayer, pulsing
 
alarm of this ordinary
wanton world,
the iron’s tired grip:
 
What of this frozen hand,
child lost in shatter
beneath the troped silence?
 
 
After Adrienne Rich’s “Implosions” and Costanza Knight’s “And They Would Walk on the Air, Like Climbin’ on a Gate” (image above, from Costanza Knight’s website), with language borrowed from Rich’s “Cartographies of Silence.”

Adrienne Rich (by Alison Bechdel)

visual-poetry:

“civilisations come and go like autumn leaves and rain” by robert montgomery

artqueer:

Agostino Arrivabene
The vision of Irene
oil on linen

theartofanimation:

安非他明

invisiblestories:

The endless dance of energy, from Tantra Song, Franck André Jamme’s collection of paintings by tantra devotees. (via insectaphasia).

poetbabble:

Women of Antiquity / Anselm Kiefer

“Another of his recurring interests has been the unfair treatment many mythologies have handed out to women, particularly strong women whose intellectual questioning has been seen as unruly and cause for demonization: for example Pandora and Lilith. In ‘Women of antiquity’, Kiefer uses attributes to identify individual characters from history: a lead book identifies Myrtis, a Greek poet blamed for competing with Pindar; a glass ‘melancholia cube’ represents Hypatia, an Alexandrian philosopher who was brutally murdered in sectarian unrest in 415 CE; and a rusting mass of razor wire signifies Candida, a Roman witch who wove vipers through her disheveled hair.”