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Month: October 2023

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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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