Francisco de Goya, Time and the Old Women, c. 1810–1820. Public domain. Francisco de Goya painted this nightmare somewhere between 1810 and 1820, during those black years when he’d gone deaf, half-mad, and wholly honest. The result is Time and the Old Women - a canvas in which social comedy collapses into a danse macabre. … Continue reading Time and the Old Women: Vanity with a Skeleton’s Smile
Tag: art
Down Below: Leonora Carrington’s Descent into the Furnace of the Mind
Leonora Carrington didn’t so much write a memoir as vomit out an apocalypse. Down Below isn’t autobiography in the polite sense, with polite sentences arranged like cutlery for an afternoon tea. It is, rather, the table turned over, the crockery smashed, and the cutlery embedded in the wallpaper. This slim, feverish account of her psychotic … Continue reading Down Below: Leonora Carrington’s Descent into the Furnace of the Mind
The Party on the Stairs: Ghosts in Petticoats and the Stumble of Innocence
Adelaide Sophia Claxton, The Party on the Stairs (c. 1875). Watercolour with bodycolour, 50 × 45 cm. Public domain. Image via Wikimedia Commons. The staircase is one of those odd places in a house where something uncanny always threatens to happen. One’s neither in the drawing room nor the bedroom, but somewhere in the thin … Continue reading The Party on the Stairs: Ghosts in Petticoats and the Stumble of Innocence
The Writing Girl: A Love Letter in Marble
Giovanni Spertini, The Writing Girl, c. 19th century. Marble sculpture. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons. Marble has no business being this soft. Giovanni Spertini, born in Milan in 1821, clearly never got the memo. With a chisel and an unholy amount of patience, he coaxed flesh, lace, and even stationery out of Carrara stone … Continue reading The Writing Girl: A Love Letter in Marble
The Kiss of Judee Sill: A Hymn to Love and Death
Some songs drift like smoke and some songs weigh like stone. Judee Sill’s The Kiss is the latter: not a melody you whistle while waiting for a bus, but a requiem whispered in the confessional, heavy with sorrow, radiant with a kind of bruised grace. Judee Sill herself was a paradox incarnate. Born in 1944, … Continue reading The Kiss of Judee Sill: A Hymn to Love and Death
Wording 