Today is my birthday and if you wanted to get me a gift, feel free to share my work 😊 🦊 🐟

Can't, I'm being sucked in again

Special agent Fox Mulder investigates sightings of katana-wielding mutant turtles in the sewers of New York.

Saw this skeet this morning and thought, what if I based my next drawings on anagrams of "beautiful painting"? So here is "Flute in a pig in a tub" The next one, "Tuba, lute, fig panini" will be less topical.

I hate this shit so much man

"he lost the concepts of real and imaginary, and jumped from reason into that which we call madness, and which may merely be a state where the soul, being more intensely stimulated, perceives invisible connections, unnoticed coincidences, and enjoys spectacles which elude the material eye" 📷 Nadar

Me: I've taken up drawing. Friend: What do you draw? Me: You know, the usual stuff: seahorses, Danton, that time in '63 when Vladimir Ashkenazy's baby upstaged his father during a photo op in Amsterdam...

"Those lovely eyes, in which was revealed the most profound boredom, and, what was worse still, a despair of finding any pleasure, came to rest upon Julien. At any rate, he was not exactly like all the rest." Stendhal, "The Red and the Black", Scott-Moncrieff's translation 🖼️ Corregio, Jupiter & Io

These two letters were written on the 30th (left) and 31st (right) of December 1830 by a nine-year-old Flaubert. The first one is for his grandmother: "I hasten to fulfil my duty by wishing you a happy New Year..." The second one is for his friend: "You are right to say that New Year is dumb."

"The first was: "The Instruction of Children Through the Eyes". He wanted free theatres to be established in the poor parts of Paris for small children. Taken there by their parents at the earliest age, they would receive, by means of a magic lantern, all the elementary pieces of human knowledge."

Ever heard of Watto in a Watteau ? I thought not.

Gaston depuys les troys iusques à cinq ans feut nourry et institué en toute discipline convenente par le commandement de son père, et celluy son temps passa comme les petitz enfans du pais, c’est assavoir à boyre, manger, & dormir, à manger, dormir, & boyre, & dormir, boyre, & manger.

At last I come to you, expecting nothing but To find inside your eyes a death that eludes me. My despair wants only for their indifference, They need only forbid a remainder of hope. For my race towards death to end sooner they need Only to tell me once what they've told me always. Racine 🖼️Cocteau

"The horse was struggling; his pupils, Like a sword or a yatagan, Shone bright; he was flapping his wings, Each of his breath a hurricane. He wanted back in the abyss; He pulled back, wondrous to look at, Having sulfur in his nostrils, The soul of the world in his eyes." V. Hugo 🖼️ E. Delacroix

League of Animal Assassins character submission #455 Artist: Eugène Delacroix Character description: cat with a jambiya for a leg. Reasons for rejection: blade would impair stealth/agility; could easily get stuck in wooden floorboards, shelves, tables etc... #caturday

For #Thingthursday, a 2000+ year old Parthian tetradrachm. The king on it is Phraates IV, who died in 2BC of natural causes (poisoned by his power-hungry Roman wife) If the Magi stopped for wheat and snacks at a camel feed station outside Seleucia, they may have come into possession of this coin.

Many painters of this era tried to represent the sense of smell, but imo the only one who nailed it was Adriaen Brouwer, with "Smell", aka Unpleasant Fatherly Duties" (1631)

"The eye to which all things are commensurable, Unknowing of itself, knows the whole universe, And envisions within the bounds of its roundness The circle and the square, the straight and the crooked" Pierre de Marbeuf, "L'Anathomie de l'œil" (published in 1628) 🖼️ Charles Le Brun

For #caturday, here's a page of sketches by Charles Le Brun, circa 1670. It is believed (by me) that Le Brun was working on a series of children's books that he intended to get published under the title of "Les Animorphes"

"Beautiful eyes, sacred channels of a precious deluge, Innocent tempters of your loving Judge, Will you ever be without tears nor sting? At least for a moment, rein in your charm: The earth is still smouldering from your fiery looks: And already you're burning the Heavens with your tears."

"Clara became ill. Arriving with the tea tray, the dinner tray, Pattie was silently reproached by eyes which became ever more large and luminously sad." Iris Murdoch, "The Time of the Angels" 🖼️ Ferdinand Hodler, "La Malade" (1914)

"Every now and then the rats cleaned their paws in their whiskers. When they came to the eyes, they scratched them out slowly and licked the eyelids. They bit into the eye as though it was a little egg and chewed it gently, slanting their mouths to suck up the juice." Jean Giono 🖼️ Otto Dix

"J’ai des yeux, de vrais yeux, des yeux vivants, des yeux de flamme, des yeux merveilleux qui vont jusques au fond de l’âme et qui même en bien des cas en peuvent prêter une à ceux qui n’en ont pas" Jules Barbier, after Hoffmann, for Offenbach ⬇️ Robert Wilson's "The Sandman"

Nothing to see here? Well, this is a slow moving 🧵 for #skystorians and others about #eyeglasses of the past, about how to read in the past, where to buy eyeglasses, and how to do with them in general. The hashtag is #HowToDoWithGlassesInThePast Let's roll.

"In vain are our graces, In vain are your eyes. In vain are our graces If love you despise." John Dryden, King Arthur Botticelli, Portrait of a Young Woman

and they are all screaming, and not only are there cataracts in their bulging eyes, but they are all blind, they stand leaning to one side in pieces and corroded from the acids around the collapsed graves, and blindly they scream in the darkness,they scream that this was awaiting them Krasznahorkai

I tried to translate Yourcenar's "Cantilène pour un Flûtiste Aveugle", with no success, except maybe (???) with the last stanza: "And, since your steady cadences Guide the heartbeat of summer nights, Make us believe the sky dances Because a blind man sang just right" 🖼️ Titian? (disputed)

"My eyes are like telescopes I see it all backwards, but who wants hope? If I ever catch that ventriloquist I'll squeeze his head right into my fist" Tom Verlaine, "Friction" 🖼️ Paul Klee, "Ventriloquist and Crier in the Moor"

I'm in the town where the author of Das Passagen-Werk, fearing the Spanish authorities would not grant him passage into Spain, requested passage from Charon instead. The Walter Benjamin memorial monument, aptly titled "Passages" is an underground stairway leading to the sea.

Every transmission tower along the road I'm driving on has a stork nest on top of it. Every single one.

Good morning! Upper-left pic is the view I had for breakfast. The others were taken yesterday in the same place (Albarracín, Spain)

"you fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye" Margaret Atwood (from "Power Politics") 📷 Arthur Hertz, "untitled photo that became the cover art for Mr Bungle's second album Disco Volante

"Now I feel plenty It's only my way of touching What you cannot see Only this is mine Come closer, closer to me I come from far away Where you are not Where are my eyes? There are rings on my fingers But where, where Where are my hands?" Red Crayola, "Former Reflections, Enduring Doubt" 🖼️ M. Ernst

Eyes of Granada.

"The eye: a hand" Attributed to Edouard Manet by Stéphane Mallarmé 🖼️ Victor Brauner, "Composition with a Portrait"

Drop some eyes

Out of William Carlos Williams’s “Prologue to Kora in Hell” (1920): “A poem is tough by no quality it borrows from a logical recital of events nor from the events themselves but solely from that attenuated power which draws perhaps many broken things into a dance giving them thus a full being.”

Since I have managed to take an (underwhelming) cricket shot, I feel authorized to do a hike recap. And no, the cricket pic is not in black and white.

A Tragedy (silk and butterfly wing, 2025)

"[...] a smile which, unlike those seen on the majority of human faces, had no trace in it of irony, save for herself, while for all of us kisses seemed to spring from her eyes, which could not look upon those she loved without yearning to bestow upon them passionate caresses." Proust 🖼️ S. Valadon

Good morning!

Well that was a nice enough day, I think I'll have the same tomorrow.

Your morning image

Eyes of Seville.

Eyes of Barcelona.

"Why are you shooting yourself?" - Archangel Michael, the original bully Note that Gargan was aiming at a bull and, according to this particular depiction or the events, shot himself in the eye, so as far as I'm concerned, this story is where both "bully" and "bull's eye" come from.

One of the first thing I saw while visiting the MNAC in Barcelona this morning was this medieval depiction or St Stephen's stoning, where it appears that one of the stoners dared use something much harder than stone: a three day old baguette.

Did you think eye'd crumble? Did you think eye'd lay down and die? Oh no, not eye! Eye will survive! Mesopotamian, Early Dynastic Period III

"Beginning to wish that you never met The girl with the far-away look in her eyes But to your surprise, she pours you some tea How many lumps, is it two, one or five?" Family, "Never Like This" Lilla Cabot Perry, "A Cup of Tea"

"I shall be cried up to be a beauty; and what then? Then I shall have all eyes stare upon me; and what am I the better, unless their eyes could infuse in my brain, wit and understanding? Their eyes cannot enrich me with knowledge, nor give me the light of truth" Margaret Cavendish, "The Contract"