Art and Words

Photograph 🌹 Tiempo de Rosas 🌹 Juan Luis Seco

On Reading

By Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Great thoughts in crude, unshapely verse set forth, Lose half their preciousness, and ever must. Unless the diamond with its own rich dust Be cut and polished, it seems little worth.

Illustration • Simple Moments • Daria Danilova

Yellow Roses in a Vase

Gustave Caillebotte: Influenced by Manet and Monet

This overblown bouquet of roses by Gustave Caillebotte features a cascade of petals, each one deftly built with just a few brushstrokes of thickly applied paint, scattered across a marble surface. Caillebotte’s choice of a marble tabletop, set against a scumbled, or thinly painted, black ground, may be an homage to Édouard Manet’s final series of floral still lifes.

However, the intensity of color at the center of the bouquet points to Caillebotte’s familiarity with the complex, densely worked surfaces of Claude Monet’s flower paintings. The reason that Caillebotte was so familiar with Monet’s style was because the two artists shared a Paris studio during 1882. In fact, Caillebotte purchased one of Monet’s floral still lifes.

Caillebotte kept his work Yellow Roses in a Vase throughout his life. At his postmortem sale, the painting was purchased by Edgar Degas, who also held onto the cherished painting until his death.

"Coffee is the common man's gold, and like gold, it brings to every person the feeling of luxury and nobility." ~ Sheik-Abd-al-Kadir

🍵Photography • Calm Beginnings • Fangping Zhou

“Some say fall is the season when the leaves change. I say it’s the season when my sweat pants never change.” ~ Katie Nicole Felton🍂

🍁❤️‍🔥🥮Illustration by Jess Mason

“When I used to read fairy-tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one!”

~ Alice, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Illustration • Wonderland • Naoko Stoop

The Alchemist

Insomnia • Jayne Ruiz

She Sent

By Donna Ashworth

She sent me a book with a page turned down I barely had strength to read it but I knew with my knowing that she also knew there was something in there my heart needed.

And as I began to take the words in tears found their way to my cheeks the lump in my throat let forth a soft howl I’d been keeping inside for some weeks.

Like floodgates thrown open a storm was released a bottled-up genie set free all of the magic I’d kept trapped inside and all of those versions of me.

She sent me a book with a corner turned down she sent me the key to my cage all of her love and all of my pain let loose with the turn of a page.

Illustration by Jungho Lee

A Searching Spirit...

The searching spirit... at wisdom's shrine, Will draw pure draughts from her unfathomed well, And nurse the never-dying lamp, that burns Brighter and brighter on, as ages roll... For there is in the company of books, The living souls of the departed sage, And bard, and hero; there is in the roll Of eloquence and history, which speak The deeds of early and of better days...

~ James G. Percival, "Love of Study," c.1822

Print By Valentin Ivantsov