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“First Dates” by Arseny Tarkovsky

Each moment of our dates, not many,
We celebrated as an Epiphany.
Alone in the whole world.
More daring and lighter
than a bird
Down the stairs, like a dizzy
apparition,
You came to take me on your road,
Through rain-soaked lilacs,
To your own possession,
To the looking glass world.

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Witches’ Flowers: The Art of Rosalie Lettau

The daintily dotted pencil, graphite, and digital illustrations of Rosalie Lettau are full of goats, witches, flowers, and sharp-nailed, enveloping hands. There is a grainy texture to the blacks as of careful static, as well as a poetic luminance to the whites. The themes hint at a folkloric world where witches sign compacts with the devil, where they choose armfuls of lovely flowers which obscure their faces, where youths lie down in fields dreaming of a life beyond their known boundaries, and where the witches are hunted down and hanged from trees along with their familiars. It seems as if both the witches and the witch hunters come from the same seemingly peaceful place, a place where maidens either slowly dream their lives away, or turn to the occult arts. Each subject is a rustic figure in a mythical village, a sleeping village that presents both its light, wistful face, and its dark, mysterious, and demonic face. The darkness resides in the persecution and death of witches, even more so than in the maiden-witches’ tokens to Satan.

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The Night Forests of Tuesday Riddell

Cocoons, snails, snakes, birds, and insects populate the still yet intensely alive nightscapes of Tuesday Riddell. There is a glow in her works depicting the nocturnal life, death, and decay of forest creatures. She uses the long-lost technique of japanning in her delicate works, also often incorporating gold leaf and silver powder. This imparts the ghostly, ethereal feel to the illuminated plants and animals against their velvety black backgrounds. Riddell is inspired by Sottobosco painting, a 17th-century subgenre of still lifes which explored the forest floor and creatures of the undergrowth. The lovely little foxgloves, the sinuous ferns and stems and branches, all exude a subdued, almost phosphorescent light – the lustrous quality of her scenes conveys a sense of the mystery of nature in all its renewals and depredations. All this serves to create a unique effect which makes her lacquered and gold-pigmented paintings immediately recognizable, an impression of stillness teeming with slightly sinister life, as well as a certain flatness which is intriguing and evocative of historical art.

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Laura Makabresku

The nostalgic, saturated, slightly grainy photography of Laura Makabresku calls to mind the highly tactile quality of vintage snapshots and the beautifully composed splendor of Andrei Tarkovsky vignettes. Ordinary yet marvelous household objects, teapots, vases of wildflowers, religious items, candleholders, a bowl of strawberries – a room, steeped in honeyed, sweetly melancholy and golden light, from which the warmth of a remembered family member has just been withdrawn: all these well-worn fragments of a life add up to the ineluctable magic of the beloved everyday. They are visions of a lost yet imperishable past seen through the magnifying haze of memory.

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Bloodmilk: Katabasis

My perennial favorite jeweler, Bloodmilk, has come out with a new collection, Katabasis (from the Ancient Greek for “descent,” meaning a journey to the Underworld). The pieces are inspired by various elements of Hadean mythology, including Lethe, the river of forgetting, Hekate, the witch goddess who holds the keys to the Underworld, Orpheus who descended in order to bring back his doomed bride Eurydice, the terrible Morai who spin and cut the thread of fate for all mortals. Iridescent moonstones and onyx nest within intricate oxidized settings which seem to blend the ancient with the modern, the elegant sparrow claws and bat bones of Bloodmilk’s iconography forming cradles for the jewels.

Jessica’s statement for the Psychopomp ring is touching and lovely:

…the first iteration was meant to serve as a devotional ring to yourself, a declaration of accepting all of the sharp, inky, messy parts of yourself…your inability to mask at all times…your inability to say the right thing when you “need to”…that you can’t quite seem to feel good any day of the week… This first ring meant accepting these things, wearing a ring that meant belonging to all of the parts of yourself, saying “yes” to every little part, no matter how much society says “no.”

Many years later, this newer version of this ring means all of these things, and it also means you have permission to change too, you have permission to face these things and to chip away at any of them and any of them I missed, and you have support too…something to touch and turn on your finger to know you’re not alone, that I believe magic is real and you’re allowed to believe that too, in whatever way that word resonates for you.

It’s my wish that you’re not alone. That you feel safe and protected, whether it’s with this ring or not, whether it’s with the pages of a book, with the kinship of others…with knowing someone else feels the same way and is working on it too, is also just accepting the same things about themselves too.

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Nikolay Tolmachev

The delicate watercolors of Nikolay Tolmachev are playful, irreverent, and surreal. Taking themes from mythology such as Leda and the swan, as well as classical painting, Tolmachev creates juxtapositions that partake of the humorously absurd as well as the fragilely beautiful. He depicts limpid-eyed boys and girls with milk-white flesh, birds, angels, and flowers. With a largely pink, white, and red palette of flesh-and-blood tones, the exquisite mottling of colors which gives such a realism and also often lends a rosy flush to the subjects, has a tenderness that contrasts with the sometimes crude concepts of the images. These paintings are a bit eerie and unnerving, as well as wonderfully lovely and light. The ironic eroticism in his work seems to comment upon the lost (or perhaps never-existent) innocence of youth, the entanglements of romantic relationships, ties that bind, metamorphoses.

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The Writhing Anatomy of Melancholy: Artwork by Christina Mrozik

Christina Mrozik’s intricate drawings and paintings imaginatively fuse animal and plant life in order to explore inner worlds. Organic decay, exposed anatomy, unnatural amalgamations of natural entities are common features, with her signature delicate ribbony skeletons resembling grass. Sometimes the animals are wrapped around, shrouded, or embraced by a cage of the grass-like ribbons/bones. Birds emerge gruesomely from the exposed and lacerated throats of larger birds. The precisely drawn depictions of strangely hybridized, combined, distorted, multiplied, fractional creatures are wildly expressive, summoning specters of pain, beauty, and transformation. Snakes, rabbits, doves, seabirds with their merciless gaze…all are pitifully dissected and tenderly displayed, complexly mingled and interwoven, to illustrate phases of the human condition.

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