one of my favorite (read: least favorite) things about how people treat cleopatra is she’s so often called a slut or is only ever portrayed as being this incredibly sexy, often scantily-clad seductress, when in actuality 1. while some ancient sources describe her as somewhat pretty, it generally seems that what was attractive about her was her intellect, charm, and voice, and the sources that refer to her as extremely sexy/slutty are specifically out to condem her, 2. she was a brilliant politician who chose her affairs as a way of securing power for her country and not just so she could have a bunch of sex (which shouldn’t be an issue anyway), and 3. one of the men she had an affair with was mark antony, ancient roman super slut supreme, a man known for his love of sex and tendency to wear extremely short tunics for the sake of showing off his sexy legs/probably also his dick

i’m not saying there’s anything wrong with portraying cleopatra as beautiful or even sexy, because she clearly had allure. all i’m saying is that, if your cleopatra is wearing less clothing than your mark antony, there’s probably a problem in your depiction of them

i’ve cracked the code,

okay as funny as this is (and it’s hilarious)

I was actually able to sit in on a lecture by a Kleopatra scholar (Dr. Tara Sewell-Lasater, check her out if you can, she’s really cool) where she talked about the way that Kleopatra VII has been depicted throughout history as this “sexy beguiling slut” and that it can be traced all the way back to Roman propaganda against her

The image of this sexy Egyptian queen that most modern day people immediately think of has it’s roots in the fact that Rome was trying to make her look as bad as possible both before and after her death so that people wouldn’t be on her side

I’m totally butchering this explanation so once again I am highly recommending that yall go check out Dr. Tara Sewell-Lasater and her various works about Kleopatra and the other Ptolemaic queens because its really really cool

[Image description by @quailfence : Art titled “New Rule: However sexy you make Cleopatra, You must make Mark Antony at least 25% sexier”. It then goes on to provide examples, with illustrations. Cleopatra: Regular clothes, Mark: Regular (slutty) clothes. Cleopatra: Open backed dress, Mark: Thigh-high gladiator sandals & body oil. Cleopatra: Ancient Egyptian bikini, Mark: Ancient Roman whipped cream. End description.]

i love john brosio paintings bc theyll be an absolute gut punch that forces you to consider your own morality like two earthlings and they will also be Big Crab

“two earthlings”, an absolutely devastating oil painting that i think about every single day

“fatigue 2”, Big Crab

I hadn’t seen the second one.  You can just tell that guy is standing where his car should be.  He’s too tired to worry about the crab directly, he’s just thinking about how this means he’s gotta call the insurance company and lord knows if giant crab attacks are covered.  He’s looking off to the left because that’s where the bus stop is, he’s watching a bus pull up right now and thinking that while there’s a chance he could sprint for it and make it on he absolutely cannot bring himself to run right now - not from the crab, not to the bus, not for anything.  Fuck the diet, though, he’s getting fast food tonight.  Not like he can drive to the store now anyway.

Man has gotten the bus home (car crushed by giant crab) to find more sea creatures on his property

Is this targeted? What will this do to his insurance premiums?

Mandala Commissions

Thank you so much for reading about my commissions! And thank you so much to anyone who has/is thinking of commissioning me. I'm working to pay down some medical debt (yay America /s) so this will help me out a lot!

Current commissions status: Open

Coasters Round: $12 each, or $10 each if you buy 2 or more Square: $15 each, or $12 each if you buy 2 or more

Wall Art 6" - 6.5" : $50 10": $75 12": $125 Rocks $15 each Please note the pictures in the posts may not be available as some have already been sold or are for commissions; these are examples of the kinds of thing I do. Thank you!! :)

Shipping will be $10 for coasters and wall art, and $15 for up to 3 rocks (more will vary by weight)

Anyway thank you again so much for your interest and support!! Please DM or message me if interested in a commission as I'm terrible at keeping up with post notifications.

Boosting this because I'm currently done with all commissions (but just put down $4000 on my Care Credit for some dental work that I need to work to pay off...woohoo lol). Signal boosts greatly appreciated! <3

Can we PLEASE normalize non-sexual nudity in art, I'm aroace, but I find the human body so fascinating and beautiful, and like seeing how different people represent it

but whenever I see nude artwork there's always some rat in the comments saying "sus" or criticizing the artist for daring to draw someone with no clothes on, in a non suggestive manner, it's a shame so many people only see it as an object of attraction, please make more cool art

Recently found out about Francine Van Hove, who has some amazing paintings depicting female nudity in a non-sexualized way

Some examples:

Amazing, to say the least!

The first simulated image of a black hole was calculated with an IBM 7040 computer using 1960 punch cards and hand-plotted by French astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet in 1978.

the romance of hand-plotting. this guy looked at the numbers and drew each of those dots manually, and the image emerged. we can only imagine how he felt

Neal Caffrey: ✨ arts & crafts ✨

105 “The Portrait”

211 “Forging Bonds”

301 “On Guard”

310 “Countdown”

415 “The Original”

501 “At What Price”

BONUS:

EXTRA BONUS:

just stumbled across Francisco Soria Aedo’s work and first off: really good painter, super talented. He mainly did portraits and neoclassical but I really like are his expressions, which do show up in his neoclassical work. lots of people smiling and having fun and it’s just very cute

this is one of my favorites

heres a couple more examples!

…i dont thing I’ve ever seen this style with people smiling…

The reason it feels so post-modernist and odd to see wide smiles in this style is because showing teeth in classical art was considered lurid and too openly sexual (kinda like nipples in 2020 cough). Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun caused waves as a neoclassical painter in 1787 because her self-portrait featured her smiling with lips parted and showing a peek of her teeth. Since Francisco Soria Aedo was active around the 1930′s it was no longer an issue to show teeth in general yet it still serves as a subversion of the classical ‘look’.

“Inseminary”

or “Lockpick to the Priesthood” or “Come Unto Me” or “Pearl Necklace of Great Price” or “Faith is Like a Little Seed”

Authentic stolen holy text, Near Clear silicone, gold pigment.

I went to the mormon church’s website, looked up their views on homosexuality, noted the scriptures they referenced, ripped them by hand out of the bible and book of mormon I stole from their chapel, and then mixed them into a silicone dildo of my own design like confetti. A dildo which will of course be used for homosexual purposes (with non-lubricated condoms and water based lube, for safety).

I’ve wanted to try dildo making for literally over a decade. I don’t have any fancy equipment like a 3D printer or a vacuum chamber, I made the sculpt by hand, and I fucked up a lot along the way, but all that being said I’m proud of what I was able to accomplish and I learned a lot. I put in more gold than I meant to, but honestly, it was meant to represent scripture’s gilded edges, and as it turned out, it looks really beautiful or quite filthy depending on the lighting, which feels entirely appropriate for scripture.

It was hard to read all of those verses. But as I tore them up I bathed them in the intention to take words that were meant to inflict queer pain wherever they go, and say “Actually, I pull those words out when I want some queer pleasure.” Build joy where they want you to have it the least.

Read about/donate to the Timpanogos tribe, for whom brigham young sent out an “extermination order”

LandBack

If you don’t get this you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what art really is

One of the best things that ever happened to me was during my trip to Venice 5 years ago. I had bought an all-inclusive ticket for all museums and exhibitions in the Piazza, and I was going through an exhibition of statuettes when I entered the next wing with paintings. The styles seemed somewhat familiar, but I couldn’t work out what was happening. Thankfully this incredible lady working at the exhibition saw that I was a bit confused and approached me to ask if I knew what this exhibition was. I said no, just that it had seemed interesting.

She explained that the reason why I might be confused is that I had entered the exhibition of Wolfgang Beltracchi from the end rather than the beginning. She then took me to the start and started explaining about him and his history. He has art forgeries in every style from medieval paintings to modern art and his forgery is not copying existing paintings but creating “lost paintings” that the artist might have painted or talked about painting but never did. He perfectly matched the artist style, composition, ideas, colours and medium. His materials were historically accurate and experts couldn’t determine that they were fakes.

And his wife Helene Beltracchi was incredible. She helped “backdate” paintings and provide evidence of their age. One of the things that stuck with me the most is this black and white photo, created with an old-time camera  and medium and the photo itself was aged so carbon-dating couldn’t discover that it was a modern photo. It was of Helene, with her features slightly altered, dressed in an old-time, era appropriate dress with the painting in the background. can you imagine the level of dedication and the immense attention to detail required to so convincingly fake a photo to provide a reliable history of this painting existing for centuries? She helped him create fake history for a lot of his paintings.

I’ll never forget that exhibition. There were so many paintings, all of them in the styles of different artists, most of them verified by experts as genuine until his mistake with the white paint which prompted a much, much deeper examination by experts. I think the lady mentioned that they could still not forensically confirm that some paintings were fakes, but it’s been a while, I might be misremembering. I was just struck with awe at the sheer knowledge they must have of multitude of painters, not just their styles, but their lives and the way their minds worked. He painted scenes “they might have painted” and when you look at them, you could definitely see it. It hits especially hard when you have more than passing familiarity with the artist, their lives and struggles, their choices of mediums and themes. You can look at this painting and think, this is definitely created by []. It makes so much sense, it has that distinct flair and works incredibly well as a parallel to [], their earlier painting. It was indescribable. Can you imagine the skill required to back that knowledge up? To be able to perfectly mimic the styles of so many artists and be able to so accurately forge paints, brushes and canvas that experts verified them as genuine?

And he had his own original paintings as well. One of them struck a chord with me especially. It was a painting of storage rooms, storing thousands and thousands of paintings that the public doesn’t know of, because they’re the unpopular paintings, the paintings that never get exhibited, the forgotten paintings. I thought it was very poignant.

I love these people. They really did do it because they loved art, they loved playing around with art forensics, and they just had a blast. Seeing his gallery brought be such incredible joy and so many interesting things to think about. 10/10, would definitely recommend

Handbinding Project: My Immortal by Tara Gilesbie

This really started over a year ago, with a project started in the Renegade Bindery server: people would format different chapters of My Immortal, without knowing what anyone else was doing, and we would put them together into one file. It was agreed upon that everybody would disregard both good design and good taste. 

(If you click on each image, the caption lists who designed the page in question. I couldn’t include them all here, but every page is basically a work of art. Horrible, typographically hellish art.)

After raiding a Joann’s of materials I thought belonged in Hot Topic circa 2005 (before it just became Think Geek II: We Don’t Light Our Store,) I almost immediately tested positive for covid. So I made most of this over the last four days, and with varying levels of coherent thought and common sense. The process is documented in a thread here

Phoenician glass necklace, found in Olbia, Sardinia (4th century BC). Museo Archeologico di Cagliari, Italy.

life imitates art

My favourite artist has been cancelled! What do I do??

I think this is the wrong way to address the issue. Rather than cancellation, we need individually to decide how the scandal, statement, or other controversy colours the work we love, and in what shades. For some people, the metatextual knowledge of the artist will be overwhelming, and they won't be able to continue to consume the work. For others, it will just be another thread, however distasteful, on top of the themes and interpretations that were already present in the artist's art. For others still, it will have no effect at all, as they don't inject that commentary into the text at all. All three are equally valid.

There's a fourth group, of course, which is particularly social media prone, who enjoy feeling morally righteous by ceasing to consume the work of people who've been cancelled. I know because I spent a lot of time thinking that way. If you're one of those, I'm sure you'll be tempted to reply, but I'm not talking to you. So we'll leave door number 4 for now.

What I would suggest is that you go back and consume the art that you love and see how much you read the current scandal into it. That will tell you how much you're still able to enjoy the work for what it was to you a month ago. It might be that falling into those old, comforting flows of language or colour of music allows you to put the real world aside as you fall into it. It might well be that it's time to find some other artist who speaks to you in a similar way. Even if you return to that artist's work some day in the future.

Whatever you choose to do, I'd say take a break from the discourse here and on other social media and make your mind up for yourself. Ultimately art is a conversation between the artist and the consumer. Everything else is just noise.

I've put in the tags the artist I was thinking of when I wrote this, but I really do think it applies to any artist; including ones that I personally find loathsome, such as J. K. Rowling or Morrissey. Your relationship with art is your own, and don't let anyone else shout you down.

they say “treat yourself like you would treat your friend” so be kind to yourself, little artists