'This anecdote may prompt your own extended consideration of whether the female mermaids' penises are, in fact, erect.' (Jen Graves, "The Most Unusual Art Gift Ever" - NSFW)

Hey, kalimac, have you seen this: "Russian Lord of the Rings Illustrations Make Middle-Earth Look More Medieval"?

Ten illustrations, including this:


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I took my Big Book of Caspar David Friedrich to La Push with me again on the latest trip. Friedrich, who lived from 1774 to 1840, continues to amaze me. He was capable of what look like fairly normal landscapes to my eyes (albeit with perhaps more of the canvas than usual dedicated to the sky), but many of his paintings are deeply weird. They have ( Read more... )

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So I saw Tim Burton's Big Eyes a week ago, and it piqued my interest in Margaret Keane's artwork. I've seemingly been aware of Keane's big eyed waifs my whole life, and I've always had her in the kitsch category. It's interesting to discover that she has painted in a more modernistic style as well (the movie hints at this), and the first four ( Read more... )

The portrait of Medea by Evelyn de Morgan that I posted not too long ago got me looking at more representations of Medea. When I was looking at the Evelyn de Morgan painting, I found this comment by Whitney Chadwick from Women, Art, and Society: "Evelyn Pickering de Morgan’s Medea of 1889 replaces conventional male representations of Medea as a ( Read more... )

Like Marianne Stokes, Evelyn De Morgan was associated with the Pre-Raphaelites, but unlike Stokes she was directly related to the group. Her uncle, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, was a "second wave" Pre-Raphaelite painter. The Art Magick article about Morgan says of her paintings, "Many do reflect the usual conventions and literary subjects of late ( Read more... )

When I was poking around looking at Symbolist painters recently, I came across Marianne Stokes' meditative portrait of Melisande (from the Maeterlinck play Pelleas and Melisande, which Debussy adapted into an opera). Stokes was not herself a Symbolist, and the Wikipedia article says she started out painting in a rustic naturalist vein but ( Read more... )

It's harder to find dates for contemporary paintings, at least with the amount of time I'm willing to put in, so for a couple of these I've substituted birth years of the artists. I'm not even completely sure I've got the right titles for e.g. the Gasparian, which was probably something Armenian to begin with. I'm also not completely surprised that ( Read more... )

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