#go back to looking at chinese paintings or wall art depictions even
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There is a person on IG that looks to be of East Asian descent who is a hobbyist model. They have recently taken to wearing hanfu in at least 3 photoshoots I have seen to date.
All of the hairstyles are Wrong. It may look kind of right or okay at first glance, but when you look a bit closer they just seem just a little bit off. I do not know how to explain this Exactly Precisely except for pointing out that in varying cases, it is a) too wide; b) not enough accessories in the appropriate places (you do not make a big hairstyle with a lot of empty spaces normally unless it is to put accessories in. In dynastic eras the more elaborate the hairstyle the more pins you have in it. This is because the pins hold the style and the various bits that go into that style in place. So a great big empty space is Unrealistic because it looks like Something Is Missing, unless it is a simple enough hairstyle that it can feasibly be held up with minimal pins.), for instance having pins in the front but no adornments in the back; c) in the latest post I just saw, the front sections of their hair are just Down while there are braids to the back of it. This Does Not Happen. At most you are allowed some strands of hair escaping at the front, you Cannot have whole front sections of your hair on each side down. Or else they are Too Tall and just Straight Up. Unrealistically so. It is just Wrong.
I have never seen such Wrong hairstyles in hanfu before. It Bothers me so much. Even just leaving their hair down would be better.
I realise after I have written this that it is just sad and kind of upsetting to see when people (diaspora) are trying to reconnect with their heritage and are either misinformed or miss the mark in terms of 'Actually, That's... Not It' somehow. It also annoys me because this can go on to misinform other people not from our culture as to what something is or looks like.
Like I understand that diasporic Chinese food for instance is its own thing, but like - I saw a post somewhere where a Chinese diaspora person had written in a novel all poetically about the way a particular Chinese character supposedly came to be written as it is (told, of course, to them by a 'Master Wang') - they said the word 黑 ('black', pronounced hēi) is made up of a mouth (口) bifurcated by and on top of earth/ground (土) being heated over fire (火), even going so far as to make metaphors about it.
This is completely incorrect. It's actually a field (田) on top of the earth (土) and fire below (火). It cannot be a mouth (口) because it does not account for the two dots/点 in the 'mouth' at the very top of the word 黑. Just Googling it on Wiktionary will show you this.
But it's... published in an English-language book now, this. And I came across it because some other Chinese diaspora person had shared this page, commenting that this author 'writes so evocatively of characters that it gives them such feeling' or something to that effect. When it is flat out Wrong.
It's just in the same vein of things as like - once a Chinese diasporic friend said they were looking at buying some hanfu and wanted my opinions on which, and proceeded to show me something on Etsy that, at a glance, was immediately clear to me that it wasn't hanfu; it was more Japanese (the belt/sash was wrong, it was too wide and fastened differently iirc, something like that). Or like when I and my dad wore hanfu for Chinese New Year back home in Sg, and my uncle and several other people commented like, 'Wah, wearing kimono ah/why wearing Japanese stuff?'
Like... I understand that reconnecting with heritage is a tricky thing, especially when you don't have a lot of background, which is kind of the whole thing, in many cases; and that it is a very personal thing and that in some cases as diaspora it is completely about transforming or making something new of it. But at the same time, some things really are 'right' or 'wrong', in the sense that some things do fall within a 'Yes this is how it looks like/is done' and 'Oh that's not quite how it is' circle. Like it just wouldn't be true to say that, oh, idk, Chinese people believe that the Jade Emperor is the One God. The Jade Emperor is one of the immortals we have in our lore/believe in! But it's not true that we think there's only The One God. Or something like - God forbid, wearing the collar crossed right over left (only done at funerals after the person is Dead).
You are free to break the rules - but only if you know them well enough first to know what the rules Are.
#sigh.#not to be Gatekeepy but like. genuinely. sometimes things really are just. Wrong.#like pls go and look stuff up u kno watch a chinese-made piece of media see how things are depicted that kinda thing familiarise yourself#there is so much info available in english#there are tutorials on YouTube for stuff like hanfu hairstyles even simple ones for under 5min#stylistic choices are one thing & like just Doing Something Because are two different things#personal#like i just mean - if you wanna do a hanfu hairstyle there are SO MANY refs#go back to looking at chinese paintings or wall art depictions even#but when you make something up on the spot with little to no understanding beyond some Impressions it shows
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So I read Elixir and I love how you write sex pollen and I was wondering if you could do one for our other federal agent, Marcus?
Jump Start
Warnings: smut. A lot of smut. Unbeta’d writing; soft Marcus.
Words: 3,500
Summary: What if Marcus only went to DC for a while? And what if he came back for you?
Marcus: Still game for tonight?
You: Are you kidding? Cho and Lisbon have bigged up that Aladdin’s Cave for months. I’ll be there.
Marcus: You sure this is what you want for your birthday?
You: Yes.
Marcus: Okay then… Bring a pillow because I’ll probably bore you to sleep with all the art stories.
When the elevator doors part to reveal Agent Marcus Pike, you’re standing by the door to the lock-up. A smile lights up his face when he sees you, and your heart bumps hard in your chest. He slides his hands in his pocket, a blush creeping up his neck.
“Happy birthday.”
“Thanks, Marcus.”
He ducks his head, a little shy. You know he isn’t always. You’d seen him in the interview room a few times last year, when your team and his had co-run a case. Watched his eyes go hard, his face stern. He’d slammed a file down on the desk inches from a suspect’s face and the surprisingly rough side to him had made you shiver.
Lisbon had sent you a knowing look and you’d ignored her.
She’d had her chance and she’d blown it, and frankly you didn’t want to know what she and Marcus had shared; how close they’d been.
Marcus had gone to DC after that. A year’s undercover work has helped him heal, you think. Get his head back in the game.
He came back for another co-op case, and thankfully, Lisbon and Jane had been away on honeymoon then.
You and Marcus had worked this one together, sometimes late into the night, sharing take-out and anecdotes from other old cases, and then, you’d started hanging out, a little.
He’s interesting. Funny. Friendly. Panty-melting gorgeous.
Heart-stoppingly gorgeous.
Cho dropped that it was your birthday at last week’s after-work drinks, and then Marcus had texted offering you a tour of the art lock up. You’d been rota’d off the day Cho and Lisbon got to see it, last year.
Patrick Jane hadn’t been allowed in. Marcus had muttered something about sticky fingers when you’d asked him about it.
“You ready?” He ducks his head to buss your cheek and you meet him halfway, breathing him in, minty gum, sandalwood, and the gourmet coffee he hides in his office. He shared it with you once and it’s like him, memorable, decadent, addictive.
“Ready.” You pull away, reluctantly, wanting him, but he’s never given you any overt hints that he sees you as anything more than a colleague.
He and Lisbon are cordial to each other when they meet, but for all you know, he’s still pining over her.
You daren’t ask; you don’t want to know the answer.
Marcus punches in a code to the first gate, then plucks the rings of keys from his pocket and opens the dinner door of the lock-up, a smile playing on his scruffy face. He grew the patchy beard during his time in DC and it really suits him, highlights his beautiful jaw and makes his soulful eyes a deeper brown.
This time on a Saturday, no one else is around.
“A private museum,” you breathe as you see all the paintings, sculptures and other art set carefully in frames or on desks or custom made plinths.
“Yeah, I always feel like Aladdin.” He scoffs at himself. “I say that every time. What a dork.”
You turn and grin at him. “I like it. You’re an art geek. It’s sexy.” The words are out of your mouth before you can stop them.
Marcus’ brow wings up. “That so?”
“Um, sure.” You duck your head, embarrassed. “So. Tell me some art stories, Special Agent Pike. What’s new here?”
He brightens, soulful chocolate eyes going wide for just a moment. “Well. There’s this equine sculpture. Maker’s mark is Italian but we seized it during a raid for paintings. Wasn’t expecting it.” He snaps on white gloves and offers you a pair, then gently turns over the statue to show you the swirling signature on the bottom. “We’re still not sure where the other two are.”
You trace a gloved finger over the horse’s detailed mane, wrought perfectly in cherrywood. “Other two?
“Sure. This is part of a set. You can tell here-” he points out a divot in the base that you wouldn’t even have noticed, and another on the opposite end. “And here. The two connecting statues are missing - other horses, I’d guess.”
“Wow.”
Marcus sets the horse down and meets your gaze. “You bored yet?”
“Nope! More!”
He chuckles indulgently. “Okay. Why don’t you choose.”
You wander around the various lock-up cages for a while, examining instruments, more statues, even a huge quilt that looks woven with gold.
After a few moments, a painting about your height catches your eye. It’s an orgy, but tastefully done, painted in shades of amber and gold, the bodies fluid, enchanting.
“I’ve never seen such a… soft depiction of a group bang,” you smile.
Marcus’s eyes crinkle at the corners. “That came in last week. Rumour has it, the artist was quite the lothario back in the 1800s. A steady stream of, ah, callers to his penthouse in Florence. The accounts of his sexual prowess are something else.”
“I bet.” You eye the curves of the women in the painting; she looks soft, welcoming, her eyes closed in ethereal bliss. “So, how’d you get this?”
“Allegedly, found in an attic. We went to the house to pick it up. The man who gave it to me - said they just moved in - seemed kinda high.” Marcus’ brow furrows. “Very mellow. Pretty sure he’d been smoking something. He was half-dressed.”
You crouch, examine the painting more closely. “And you didn’t… arrest him?”
Marcus shrugs. “Art’s our deal. I did note the address with a colleague in the DEA, so if it gets flagged again, they’ll investigate.”
Something about the painting keeps you enraptured. You spy a little notch in the frame. “Do you think something’s hidden in here?”
Marcus bends next to you to examine the area you point to. He’s been working today, so he still wears his suit, the red tie the little bit of flash he allows himself on the job. His scent weaves around you, the lick of coffee, the gasp of mint, and something uniquely Marcus.
“It looks like something…. Comes undone?”
You both lean in together, and you edge your gloved finger along the groove in the ornate gold-effect frame.
Marcus does the same from the other end. “Wow,” he breathes. “A hidden compartment?” Then his eyebrows shoot up as part of the frame depresses under his finger, clicking. He grins hugely. “Well, now I really do feel like Aladdin.”
“Don’t suppose you’ve got a little monkey wearing a fez around here, do you?” You tease.
“Maybe a magic carpet. I-”
He’s cut off when a hissing noise pops from the painting. You and Marcus both lean in to try and hear it more closely, and just when you get close, powder sprays from the frame, light gold in colour and smelling faintly musty.
You cough, reeling back, your hands over your face. “Gross.”
Marcus steps back too, wiping a gloved hand over his face and examining the golden-hued powder on the cotton fabric. “What the hell-”
You slowly sit down on the floor. “I feel… sort of dizzy. Hot.”
Marcus crosses to you, crouching in front of you, and if you didn’t feel so discombobulated, you would appreciate the closeness of him, the amber shot through his irises, the slight curl of his cowlick. “I’ll go get help. Maybe some water?”
You’re burning up. A slow dance starts in the pit of your belly, something that you think was always there, maybe, but intensified now Marcus is so close. “Please don’t go.”
His brow furrows in concern. “Of course.” He smoothes a gloved hand over your hair, and then you see it; the change in his eyes, the way they go dark and hot. “I… what the fuck is this stuff? I feel…”
You clutch at his forearms, feeling the play of lean muscle under his suit. “What if…. What if this was the reason that painter was such a, um, lothario?”
Marcus’ gaze has dropped to your mouth and at your words, he blinks. “What? Oh. Oh.”
“Yeah,” you say slowly. “Marcus, I…”
He stands up, backing away. “I can’t be near you. Not when I want… I can’t.”
You reach out to him. “What if you stayed?”
He gazes down at you, longing in those bottomless eyes, and now you can clearly see the outline of the powder’s effect on him. “I can’t. Can’t do that to you.”
A flash of hope pierces the haze descending on you. “You want to? Because of the.. Stuff,” you finish lamely.
An expression of half desire, half pain, sketches itself over Marcus’ features. “I’ve wanted to for a while. That night we worked late.” He’s half-panting now, the fingers of one hand curled around the wall of his side of the lock-up. “Wanted to take you over the desk. I - fuck- can’t do it.”
You make to move. “Marcus-”
“Not like this,” he groans, that voice of sin and sex dropping half an octave, California with a lick of the drawl of Texas. “Not… like this.”
“Don’t go!” You beg. Your insides are burning up for him. If he’d just touch you. Just for a moment.
Marcus is shaking his head, fumbling with the door on this section of the lock-up. You lunge for him but he pulls the door closed, locking you in and him out.
He turns the key, then tosses the ring across the room.
“I’m sorry. I can’t. Not like this. Goes against everything.”
“But I want you,” you say. You crawl over to the fencing separating you. “At least… touch my hand.”
You pull your gloves off, slide your fingers through the holes in the mesh.
Marcus takes his gloves off too, tangles his fingers with your the best he can. He sighs deeply. “I had this whole date thing planned. Dinner at an Italian that reminds me of a place I ate at in my gap year.”
“Marcus,” you whisper. “So you do really like me.”
He groans. “Sweetheart, I haven’t been able to think about anything but you since I got back from DC, and there you were, pretty as a picture, working late with me, sharing Chinese food. Making me laugh.”
You swallow, wanting him so badly it hurts. Every inch of you burns for him.
“I wanted to go slow,” he rasps out. “I know I jump in. Get overexcited. But with you.. I wanted to do it right. Fuck.” With his free hand he, almost unconsciously, palms himself through his suit pants, his eyes rolling back. “What the hell is this drug?”
You hungrily follow the path of his hand with your gaze. “Lothario, remember?”
“I remember.” Marcus groans, pressing the heel of his hand against his erection. He’s sitting awkwardly. “Bastard.”
“Marcus.” You squeeze his hand. “I want this. I want you. It’s lonely up on that white horse.”
He shakes his head, vehement. “It’s….not… not right.”
You press against the caging and just the pressure of the mesh on your breasts makes you moan. “So I can’t touch you, and you won’t touch me, but you also won’t leave me.” You watch him squeeze his eyes shut, look at the tent in his suit pants. “Touch yourself.”
His eyes pop open. “What?”
“If you won’t leave and you won’t… give in to whatever this is, although I want you more than I’ve wanted any man, ever…. Let me see you.”
A bead of sweat rolls down his forehead as he looks at you, big brown eyes considering. He’s weighing every option. Marcus is thoughtful, considered. Considerate. He always thinks two steps ahead, encompasses everyone in plans and strategies.
But he’s blindsided by this, and you can’t say it isn’t sexy as hell to see him unravel this way.
“Please,” you add, holding his gaze.
He squeezes your fingers and the air changes between you, and then he leans heavily against the mesh and you take the opportunity to stroke his hair, a little, and it’s so soft. Feels like silk, and you have to touch more of him, but maybe you’ll get to at least see more, so you will your breathing to calm, just a bit, as he fumbles one-handedly with his belt buckle and then slides the zipper of his suit pants down to reveal plain grey boxers, darkened in the centre by a damp patch, and your throat is so dry.
“Have you…” your heart bumps hard, the rush of seeing new parts of Marcus making you even dizzier. “Ever gotten off in this evidence locker before?”
“Can’t say I have.” Marcus’ gaze stays on your face, earnest. “I can go. I can just go.”
“Please. Please don’t go. Come in.”
“Can’t do that.” He closes his eyes; looks like he is silently praying for the power to resist you. His fingers curl into the parted edge of his suit pants.
“Let me see you?”
He sucks in a deep breath, then exhales shakily. “This is not how I planned to seduce you. Just so you know.”
Your pulse rabbits. “You seduce me every moment, Marcus. With every sweet text. Every time you smile at me. All your art stories. When you say my name. Your voice, oh God.”
Marcus’ hand trembles as he holds your gaze through the wire mesh of the lock-up, and he finally, finally parts the opening of the plain grey boxers and draws himself out, and you just drink him in with your eyes, the shape of him, the swollen tip, his length and girth, the curling hair at his base. It looks as silky as the hair on his head and you hear yourself groan needily.
“Marcus.”
He fists himself, his gaze hot on yours. “Not how I planned this date,” he repeats. “I feel like I’m on fire for you.” He rasps out your name and you watch his hand move, and suddenly it’s too much, the heat between your legs cannot be ignored, and you shove your skirt up and mirror Marcus on the floor.
His head jerks around. “Fuck,” he hisses.
“Never knew you had such a potty mouth,” you half-gasp, half-tease.
“For you, I’ll do whatever you want with my mouth.”
You groan at that as you circle your clit with a finger.
Marcus almost growls “Underwear off, I want to see.” His voice, that voice, is gentle-rough, and you think of the day you watched him in the interview room.
“Whatever you say, Agent Pike.”
“Christ.” He’s jacking off in earnest now, his gaze riveted to you as you pull off your underwear with one hand, letting it fall wherever. Your skirt is rucked up around your hips and the fact it’s Marcus watching you is a huge turn on, but honestly you’re not sure if you could have stopped, for anything.
Your combined pants fill the space. You’ve never been so wet. When you slide two fingers inside yourself the sound is obscene.
“It’s.. a wonder.. He ever got… any painting done,” Marcus grits out.
You laugh. “Now? You wanna talk about art now?”
He huffs. “Art is the reason we’re here. Like this.” Then he sucks in a breath and you look down at him, his balls drawn up tight, his cock wet with his own pre-come.
“Marcus Matthew Pike, I swear to God, if you don’t get in here right now, I will never ever speak to you again.”
He hesitates.
“I swear on Van Gogh’s ear,” you add, your internal muscles fluttering.
Marcus half-yanks up his pants, scrabbles for the key. The seconds feel like hours until he appears again, boxers and pants around his knees, shirt tails hanging, and he opens the mesh door and you yank him in and kiss him and you tumble to the floor together, and Marcus grabs both your wrists and pins them above you with one hand, his face dark and determined, and it makes your heart pound.
“Please,” you grate out. “Marcus. I need you.” You spread your legs and try to hook your feet over his calves, but he shakes his head.
“Not yet. Sweetheart, not yet.” He curls your fingers into the wire of the mesh. “Hold on. Don’t… don’t touch me. I wanna make it good for you, first.”
You hear yourself keen his name as he shucks off his clothes from the waist down, then slides down your body and puts that gorgeous mouth to work. Your favourite thing he did with his mouth until now was talking, but this-
Maybe he’s writing his name, maybe he’s writing a sonnet, but whatever it is, the way he curls his tongue is obscene, and you don’t know if it’s partly the drug, but when he puts two fingers inside you, you come so hard you almost black out. And then lust rears its head again and you grab for him, carding one hand through his hair and cupping him with the other, and he’s slick in your palm and the ridges and heat of his cock feel so good.
“Marcus.” You fist a hand in his hair, pull a little, and he groans and pants, and you take the opportunity to pump him in your fist until he swears under his breath.
"Condom. Oh fuck. Condom."
He hesitates, then drops a soft kiss on your lips - your first, you think, a bit giddy - and you taste yourself, and he licks into your mouth and whispers your name and it's pure, unadulterated bliss.
Then he extricates himself, rummages in his suit pants, and as soon as he has the foil square in his hand you grab for him, pulling him down on top of you.
"After this," you murmur, "you're gonna bend me over the desk." And you roll the condom down his dick and he lets out a long, slow breath and pushes inside you and it's everything.
Everything inside you quiets for a moment that stretches as he starts to move, caging you in with his braced forearms, and you look into his dark chocolate eyes and his heart is on his face, with Marcus it always is. It's your favourite thing about him.
He nibbles at your lips as you make love to eachother, and you hook your legs around his hips to stop him pulling out too much. You want him close, want to feel his skin under your hands. The buttons of his shirt rasp against your dress, and if you were more aware you might think it's ridiculous, him bringing you to orgasm with you both half dressed in the floor of the art squad lock-up, but you can't care. Not when his cock hits you right there, and then you're keening his name and he tumbles over the cliff edge with you, pressing hard in those final thrusts as your muscles milk him.
You curl around him. "Marcus."
He sighs, presses his forehead to yours. "Was that… are you okay?"
You chuckle lazily. "I've never been more okay."
He cuddles you close, nosing at your cheek, murmuring sweet nothings. "Christ, what is this stuff? I could go again."
At his words desire rears its head. "There must be a desk in here somewhere, right?"
And his eyes go hot.
And that's how you find yourself bent over a desk recovered from an abandoned shipping off, the edges intricately gilded. You cling to them as Marcus fucks you hard and fast, just the way he'd fantasised about, and it's so good that you sob his name over and over.
Afterwards he cuddles you so gently, stroking your hair as he whispers praises about how good you felt around him, how next time he's gonna give you a bed covered in rose petals.
You shake your head, kissing him deeply, helping him into his jacket. "You're all I want, Marcus. Any way I can have you."
A flush colours his cheeks as he cups your cheeks. "Dinner? Let me take you out to dinner."
"I'd rather have it in bed. Have you in bed."
His eyes go wide for a second. "The drug.."
"This isn't the drug and you know it." You loop your arms around his neck. "It just jump-started us. Never been so grateful to a horny nineteenth century painter."
Marcus laughs out loud, hugs you, then releases you to hold your hand, tug you towards the elevator. "You're the best thing that ever happened to me. You know that, right?"
Happiness unfurls slowly inside you. "I could stand to hear it again."
Tagging the Pedro pals! @soldade @beccaplaying @heatherbel @mourningbirds1 @alldatalost @songsformonkeys @agirllovespasta @nelba @chews-erotically @mrschiltoncat @gamingaquarius @alienprincesspoop @dornish-queen @lackofhonor @agentpike @jaime1110 @thegreenkid @pedropascallion @mrsparknuts @buckstaposition @winters-buck @oloreaa @mstgsmy @synystersilenceinblacknwhite @holographic-carmen @cryptkeepersoul @alwaysbethewest @poenariuniverse @starlight-starwrites @keeper0fthestars @alwaysbethewest @kindablackenedsuperhero @abuttoncalledsmalls @f0rever15elf
And @arch-venus25 did you wanna be tagged in Pedro stuff?
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Art Deep Dives #1 - The Value of Art ~
Hi everyone!
This is the start to another project I want to start on this account, a companion to my Art Advice tag, and each week or so I’ll be ‘deep diving’ into art history, arts & culture, society’s relationship to art, etc etc... (I basically want to make use of my history of art degree, and also because I genuinely love talking about this stuff... especially without the pressure of deadlines lol)
Side note: don’t worry about these being really ‘academic’ or ‘formal’, since neither of those things are in my vocabulary lol... this is a very casual, informal kind of ‘essay’ writing that I want to be accessible to everyone, regardless of how much you know about art!
This first one is a kind of follow up of my Art Advice post talking about references, and I’ll be talking about the ideas of how we ‘value’ art.
(this is about 1600 words long by the way...)
The Value of Art
It’s no secret that art is highly subjective. Particularly when it comes to the question of ‘what is the most important type of art?’. It changes from person to person, country to country, and era to era. How we define ‘great art’ now is vastly different to how we defined it several hundred years ago. I mean, just look at the kinds of art in galleries in the modern era (Tracey Emin’s bed comes to mind) versus that of the 18th century (with the likes of Joshua Reynolds, JMW Turner and Thomas Gainsborough). Really, it’s clear to see that what we see as ‘the most important type of art’ is forever changing...
Or... is it?
In order to really answer whether the kinds of art we value now versus that of the past has changed, we need to first establish what ‘valued art’ even means.
I think in today’s day and age, ‘value’ is often synonymous with ‘price’. So, a Banksy original chipped away from it’s original wall setting and having been sold at a Christies auction for £3.2million is, by this definition, what we as a society ‘value’ as art... Right? Or maybe ‘value’ is more to do with what kinds of works that are displayed in big galleries or public spaces? The Tate has an entire wing dedicated to the works of landscape/seascape painter JMW Turner, so surely that means that we today place a high ‘value’ on his work still? What about public sculpture? Architecture? Sculpture and architecture are often a lot more available for the general public, and even if most people wouldn’t be able to tell you who made the Statue of Liberty, they at least know about her and perhaps even enjoy to look at her? And surely the fame of buildings like the Eiffel Tower or the Taj Mahal mean that they, too, are ‘valued’ as pieces of art? And what of artworks from other countries and cultures? A Chinese man may find no ‘value’ in a painting by a so-called ‘Great Master’ of the Italian Renaissance, but instead will ‘value’ a piece of Imperial Ming Dynasty porcelain instead, does that mean his opinion is the ‘right’ one? Colonialism has played heavily into what arts are now called ‘valuable’ and what are not, so how do we quantify whether a work has ‘value’ without placing our own individual cultural bias on it?
Basically what I’m getting at is, what we value as art in this day and age is very complicated, in a big way because our society is complicated. But for the sake of arguments, and for my next few points, I will be defining an art’s ‘value’ predominantly by whether it has been featured in a big gallery... Which also means I’ll be focusing on painting and sculpture... And also focusing on the Western world of art, specifically Europe, which I want to clarify doesn’t mean I personally ‘value’ that art more, it’s just where I’m from and predominantly what I studied in my course...
Art historians often declare the Renaissance (around the 14th to 16th centuries) the ‘beginning’ of what we know as art today. But for this essay, I want to instead start a little before this, in the Early Medieval period. People often know of this era as ‘the dark ages’, in Europe at least, because it was after Rome had fallen and taken all their so-called ‘genius’ with them. A particular note for why for years we’ve seen this period as ‘regressive’ is through their art. A quick Google search of ‘Medieval baby’ will come up with a plethora of results for a wide range of paintings depicting babies (usually the baby Christ) as scaled down versions of adults, complete with receding hairlines and strangely buff arms and chests.
Now, is this because medieval babies actually looked like this? I think this is... highly unlikely... I know most things happened earlier in that era than nowadays (girls getting married and pregnant at age 14, for example), but I think it’s a bit of a stretch to think their babies had six packs... No, instead it’s more likely that rather than being direct representations of babies, these were purely symbolic. And particularly given how they often were of Christ, art historians often say that the weird adult-baby hybrids are to represent Christ’s divinity.
Now... What’s all this got to do with art and value? Well, the thing about early medieval art is that the value was almost entirely placed upon the symbology and meaning of a piece. Later in the medieval period, paintings began to become more ‘realistic’ to some extent, but it still for the most part stayed true to this idea of symbolism over representation.
That is, until we get to the Renaissance and all of that gets thrown out of the window because artists want to be able to paint babies that actually look like babies, thank you very much! And with the likes of Leonardo da Vinci championing for art to become a science, surely this means that the kinds of art that was valued in this era were highly accurate portraits or landscapes... Right?
Short answer? No.
Long answer? Well, portraits and landscapes had their place in the hierarchies of art. Portraits were often commissioned by wealthy patrons, and were basically ways of the artist showing off how good their portrait skills are. And landscapes were less important, more seen as ‘nice backgrounds’ than anything else. But the art that was highly valued by most wealthy patrons and art connoisseurs of the time was... (imagine a drum roll here please)
History painting! These are basically big biblical or mythological scenes, often with a lot of figures doing a variety of things (think Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel), often with some pretty landscape as the backdrop, and often featuring a couple of portraits in the mix (including one of the patron who commissioned it, probably being blessed by the Virgin Mary, and a cheeky one of the artist peeking out from behind a bush or something...). From the Renaissance era up until basically the mid 19th century, History paintings were seen as the most important works of art to be featured in galleries.
And really, things only really began to change when we reached the end of the 19th century, with the development of photography.
Photography, and film, both lead to a massive shift in not only the kinds of art that are produced in the 20th century, but also the kinds of art that are valued. For so long art had been the main form of representation of society, and the advent of photographs meant that art had almost lost that ‘purpose’. Not to mention the leading towards a more secular society which no longer had a need for symbolic or spiritual artworks.
So, the only place art could really go was to become a form of expression instead. The likes of artists like Picasso and Braque pioneering cubism, being about new ways of representing the world. The Surrealists delving into ideas of the subconscious. Pop-Artists like Warhol looking into media and consumerist society, and the list goes on...
Which brings us onto my most hated period in the history of art: Conceptual art.
I’m not going to go big into this period, which is still around today (unfortunately), but all you need to know is this twat Marcel Duchamp flipped a urinal (which he didn’t even make himself) upside down and called it a ‘fountain’ and shoved it into a gallery and thus art that has no value beyond it being ‘concept based’ was born. And yes, yes I hate it a lot (I’m not even trying to be objective about this, I hate conceptual art with a burning passion... some guy put some sh*t in a box and put it in a gallery & called it art and I am SO mad about it lol...). And as much as I hate this period, what it does signify is how art began to be valued not through the craftsmanship of the work itself, but instead the ideas.
And this idea remains today. Damien Hirst has forged his entire art identity on creating works that are based entirely on some ‘meaning’ that could be forced onto it, rather than the aesthetic or material value. And as mentioned before, Tracey Emin’s infamous bed isn’t about the work and effort gone into the piece itself, but instead about what the artists intends for the piece to ‘mean’. So, the ‘value’ of the work is what it says, and not what it is, essentially.
(This is not to say that there are no artists who work today that get featured in galleries and are highly skilled at their craft. The one that springs to mind is Grayson Perry, who’s well known for his pottery and tapestries with some kind of social commentary bled into them.)
This ideology around art also bleeds into online spaces of art (which I see as distinctly separate from the world of art galleries and the Turner prize). I still see artists, and non-artists, talking about how much they enjoy work that is ‘original’, and oftentimes ridiculing and demoting ‘fanart’ as purely ‘derivative’ or ‘unoriginal’.
And all this brings us back to history paintings. Because their ‘value’ wasn’t just in the immense amount of skill that went into them. A large part of their ‘value’ was that artists and non-artists alike saw them as feats of the artist’s ‘genius’ or ‘imagination’ at play. And in the same way that Early Medieval art was valued for the symbology of the piece rather than the representation, history paintings had the benefit of including both elements. In essence, they were both meaningful AND beautiful.
In conclusion (just to remind you that this is technically an essay lol), a lot about art HAS definitely changed in the last few hundred years, particularly in what kinds of art is getting made now (and why we make art in the first place). However, what we as a collective society ‘value’ as art has remained surprisingly the same, often with a heavy preference for a work’s meaning and symbology, which can sometimes overshadow the craftsmanship of the work itself.
I still hate that godforsaken Duchamp toilet though...
(images used:
unknown medieval painting (I just liked that he had his hand down mary’s dress lool)
mona lisa by da vinky
detail of the creation of adam on the sistine chapel by michelangelo
a photograph by louis daguerre, often known as the father of photography
*clenches fist* ‘fountain’ by marcel duchamp
‘my bed’ by tracey emin )
I hope you enjoyed this informal essay about art, I will definitely be doing more of these in the future! If you have any thoughts on this, feel free to reply to this or message me, etc! I love having open and frank conversations about art!
#art history#art discussion#essay#history of art#art#long post#renaissance art#early medieval art#conceptual art#i over simplified a lot of this i know but i hope this is still interesting to read lol!#art deep dives#value of art#no sources or bibliography because we die like MEN#(also u want me to site things that i can't remember why or how i know them??? look just... trust me plz...)#(honestly this is more about sparking a discussion than anything lol)
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Victims With Numbers
Fandom: Nanbaka/Corpse Party (crossover)
Genre: Horror
Characters: Hajime Sugoroku, Samon Gokuu, Kiji Mitsuba, Kenshirou Yozakura, Jyugo, Uno, Nico, Rock, Tsukumo, Liang, Upa, Qi, Honey, Trois, Musashi, Sachiko Shinozaki, Ryou Yoshizawa, Yuki Kanno, Tokiko Tsuji, Yoshikazu Yanagihori, Yoshie Shinozaki, Takamine Yanagihori, some OCs to take the role of Kizami later on instead of actual Kizami
Includes major character death.
Chapter 14 of ?
Liang and Keiko had found their way back to the bathroom. The one taped shut with the charms that seared flesh. There had been no further sign of the ghost child, nor of the spirit that had saved Liang before. It truly seemed as if it were just the two of them in that building, though he was sure he could hear footsteps now and then. They'd found little to do, beyond circling the building a few times, trying to find something that might be of use. A way to open the main doors, a clue to where the others may have gone, just anything. At first, the only new thing Liang could note was that someone had scrawled over a flyer stuck to the wall. Before, the flyer had been uninteresting. A bake sale advertisement from before Heavenly Host closed its gates. When they passed the flyer for maybe the third time, it had blood on it. Not in splatters or drops either, no spray or lean. It hadn't just gotten there by mistake. No no, something was written there, scrawled in sloppy and shaky Chinese. Smeared in unsteady blood letters with several jittery mistakes, parts of the lettering reversed, trails where the writer's hand weakened and fell from the paper, and points where the letters went over the edge of the paper and onto the wall instead.
ART ROOM
FR
IE
ND
2 1 7 1 4
111111111KNIIIIIII
DO T R S H OL E R TH
H E L P
It was most likely from the spirit from before. A message to someone, to tell them to meet in the art classroom, just as the spirit had told him verbally, as well as something indeterminable.
Perhaps this message was written for the lost little girl to find.
Perhaps there was someone else here he was supposed to meet with.
Perhaps it was something the man wrote before he died, and the message was never even meant for Liang.
But that begged the question of how many people would actually be here expecting to communicate with their friends in Chinese. From what he could tell, the majority of people trapped here were from Japan, which made sense. The building itself had been Japanese, and the story, the legend of the school and of the deaths was one circulated in Japan. So it must have been meant at the very least for a Chinese speaker. The next question was what did the numbers mean? If the writer was from Nanba, it made sense for him to signal to specific people with numbers, but the numbers used didn't specify any of the inmates, except for maybe Qi and himself. More than anything, that was unnerving. The jumble of 1's and unfinished hanzi only complicated the message further. Something the spirit, possibly, tried to write with the last of his strength, making it an important message, but one that he could not fully tell.
Shortly after this, Keiko's sharp eye had spotted something in one of the cabinets in the art classroom that Liang had overlooked. Beneath a needle-like implement sat a white board, a thin rectangle with writing on it. A charm. If he remembered correctly, there had been similar charms around the temple where he'd grown up. It was Keiko's opinion that the charm might counteract the ones on the bathroom door, and Liang, knowing that if done correctly such things indeed had the potential for great power, had agreed to retrieve it from the cabinet. The door was locked, but unlike the front door, this one could be broken or forced. They just needed something to help them cause a little extra damage. Some of the works of art around the room would have been enough to do the trick - the room still held works from when the room was in use. Children's paintings on the easels, clay and papier-mâché models and chalk doodles stacked in the corner. Some of these items were perfectly innocent creations made by children of the past, including the odd picture or piece that looked very phallic but was undoubtedly just a clumsy drawing of a fruit bowl or animal. Other pieces matched the dark atmosphere of the school. A painting of a person hanging by their neck. A piece of paper with a red scribble and the caption 'man went splat'. A model of a child's hand with what was undeniably blood staining the fingers. Depictions of pain and fear, some in far too much detail to be the work of a child. In the end, Liang had picked up one of the clay models, judging by the scoring a cactus, and used it to break the glass of the cabinet. Taking care not to cut himself, he lifted the charm from its place. There was a genuine power within it, he could feel it.
Which was why they'd chosen to return to the bathroom, charm in hand. No discussion, but no certainty. Liang carefully laid the charm before the doors before stepping back, one arm held out to the side to keep Keiko away from any potential danger ahead of them. At first, it seemed as if nothing was happening, and then he felt the heat. It came off the charm in waves, banishing the icy cold of the abandoned school. It quickly got warm enough that the two of them began to sweat. When the first of the warding spells on the door caught fire, Liang pulled Keiko back a few more steps and held a hand up for some degree of protection. By the time all the spells were alight, the fire burned too bright to look at.
"The school's gonna burn down!" Keiko squeaked in terror. "We can't get out! We're gonna die, we're gonna-!" She cut off and went into wordless screaming as Liang pulled her back even further, stepping in front of her to block her from the flames. He felt the heat against his back threaten to burn any skin it could find. He dared a glance back, to see how the fire was spreading, and was surprised to see that the fire seemed to not so much as skim the wood of the door. It burned away the paper spells, turning them to ash, and then sputtered out, taking all the heat with it at once.
Slowly, he turned to the door and took Keiko's hand, leading her forward as she, realising the heat was gone, opened her eyes and tried to calm herself down. He didn't look at her, but he could tell she was in tears and very, very afraid. When he reached out to the door, he found the handle was cool, as if it hadn't been exposed to the fire at all. The door slid open now without hesitation, and Liang stepped into the boys' bathroom.
The bathroom was in a better state than those he had seen before, at least. There were about five stalls, as in the girls' bathroom in the main building, but all of them were locked. From the top of the stalls, he could see ropes coming up and leading to some point along the high ceiling. He wasn't sure the ceiling was meant to be that high. A few urinals stood at a low height, blocked and flooded, but not broken. Usable. Between the urinals and the stalls, a young man with purple hair was curled up in foetal position, entire body tense and very, very still. From where he stood, Liang wasn't entirely sure if the young man was still alive or not. He was either petrified in fear in the truest sense of the phrase, or he was freshly deceased and entering a state of rigor mortis.
"Motomu?"
Liang looked to Keiko as she shuffled into the room. Her eyes were fixed on the purple-haired boy on the floor, who looked up in response to his name, his movements stiff and almost unnatural.
"K-...Kei-chan..." The boy, Motomu, got to his feet, and Keiko ran to him, sobbing. The two embraced, and Liang watched them, a smile on his face. At the very least, he could be happy they'd been reunited. He decided to hang back, let them have their moment for now, and tried not to listen to their conversation. They were fairly loud, though, and it was rather awkward.
"I was so scared, big brother!"
"I know. I'm sorry. But it's okay, Kei-chan. I won't leave you again for as long as you live. I won't let the ghosts here hurt you."
"Yui...Yui was-"
"I know. Makishi too. I saw them both. I bet it was that ghost girl holding the scissors. But I saw someone hurt someone else from their own school..." The elder brother took something from his back pocket and held it out behind Keiko's back, shifting his grip to angle the object slightly. "But don't worry. Big brother will take care of everything."
In a moment, Keiko was thrown to the floor, and Motomu pinned, his arm held high over his back. Liang's knee was digging into the boy's spine, keeping him down, and he had a vice-like grip on Motomu's wrist. In the boy's hand was a knife. By the looks of it, it was new, and a professional hunting knife, but had been used and hastily wiped clean. A faint smear of red still stained the surface. From where Liang had been standing, he'd seen, from the corner of his eye, Motomu preparing to plunge the knife into his sister's neck. A quick twist of the wrist, and the boy released the knife, allowing the inmate to kick it across the room.
"B...big brother?" Keiko managed from her place on the floor, staring at the boys in shock, tears forming in her eyes already. Liang's focus, of course, was on her attacker.
"You were going to attack your own sister?!"
Motomu, to his credit, completely ignored him. "Keiko! What's wrong with you? You just went off with a stranger? I get you were scared, but you don't know this guy! He could have hurt you! Look at him, look at this place! Look at what happened to Yui. For all you know, he could have done that."
"Care to explain why you're armed, and why you're turning your weapons on us?"
"Have you seen the corpses, genius?"
Fair point, at least for the first question. "Where did you get the knife from? Why did you attack your sister?"
Motomu twisted in his grip, trying to look him in the eye. "Why did you go to prison?"
The atmosphere seemed to drop even further. The suffocating darkness wrapped around the three of them, and Liang could sense the murderous intent beneath him increase.
"Motomu. We need to work together to find a way out of this place. We can't turn on each other. Every second we're here, we're in extreme danger. We need to know you don't add to that danger. Why did you point the knife at Keiko?"
"You didn't answer my question."
"You've barely answered any of mine."
"We can't get out of here."
"You've given up?"
"Not exactly."
"But you've turned to hurting others."
"You're no saint."
"What is wrong with you?"
Motomu twisted a little, trying to look Liang in the eye. There was something about the look in his eye that seemed very wrong. Something in there was cold, and dark, and tinged with insanity. He dropped his voice low, likely so his sister would not hear his next words. "Let me tell you this much, all you need to know. The spirits here are killing people, and those people are desperate to survive. But they can't. The ghosts will kill them, or they'll suffer some accident, or starve or dehydrate or sicken, or someone else will kill them. Someone like me, or maybe someone like you, right, Mr Criminal? Because I can see it in your face, you're no stranger to the stench of blood and rot, are you? You're not as disturbed as all the poor, innocent kids who come in here and die in some horrible, tragic way. And this place? It can twist your mind, poison your thoughts and make you want to kill. Not me, though, so don't worry.
"I've just always hated those people. Fake smiles. Platitudes. Pretence. Doesn't it all just make you so angry? But there's so many rules out there, rules that fall apart once you're in here. You can do whatever you want. Go crazy. Let loose all those nasty little thoughts and feelings. You don't have to serve your time or repent for anything you did wrong in the past. No prison, no punishment, just the freedom to suffer and cause suffering until your last breath."
Liang inhaled sharply, a thought coming to him during Motomu's words. "Those people you mentioned, the ones who had been killed...Yui and Makishi...did you do something to them?"
"It doesn't matter if you're killed by the ghosts or killed by me. Either way, you die."
#Damn Kizami substitutes#I have so much more planned that this is gonna go to over 20 chapters and I hate it#after they all get together again? God knows#that's all up in the air#shorter chapter because I'm full of rage#and this is hard to write still#I had to delete and rewrite so much my dudes#I'm very tired
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Continuing yesterday’s blog post about communication, I would like to focus on a crucial point that I see might well be one of the greatest misunderstandings of communication in art — syntax does not equal semantics.
But before we dive into the wonderful world of semantics and talk about a brilliant philosopher named John Searle, if you haven’t read the first part of this blog series, I do highly recommend you check it out.
To make matters simple (I myself am no professional philosopher but like to dabble in it a lot), there are three stories I would like to tell, all describing one of the more important facts of communication described in the first paragraph and to kick things off, let’s start with bats.
Thomas Nagel, the author of the story titled What It Is Like To Be A Bat posed an interesting proposition:
While humans can understand and imagine the behaviours of creatures, in this case a bat; merely being able to imagine how it would feel to be able to fly, navigate by sonar, hang upside down and eat insects, would never really be the same as a bat’s perspective.
Nagel claims that even if we were able to gradually turn into bats (think Kafka, but more uplifting), our brains would not have been wired as a bat’s from birth; therefore, we would only be able to experience the life and behaviours of a bat, rather than their mindset.
To behave as something isn’t equal to being something, regardless of how much it looks, swims and quacks like a duck, the shocker is, it might just be a rubber ducky.
And this goes for our language and communication problem too; I could paint a picture of an apple being picked by a woman somewhere in a forest. Some would see a nice lady picking apples, others would see the highly complex concept of Ancestral Sin. Same painting, same communication, immensely different results.
The next story, written by Frank Jackson is also about a woman who’s life is changed because of an apple — not because of eating it but merely by looking at it! Titled What Mary Didn’t Know, it describes a very curious lady who loved natural sciences — the field of colour theory especially.
She knew everything there was to know about colours; their wavelengths, the numerous psychological effects colours have on us, the various types of receptors that are utilised in our bodies to see them … just about everything. But she had one issue. She had been educated about all of this in a black-and-white room.
Black-and-white books, TV screens, and furniture — for some weird reason even Mary herself is black-and-white, but it is a story and if it was OK for Little Red Riding Hood to be red, I guess Mary can be colourless too.
So Jackson argued: Even though Mary had all the same information about colours that we do, she had never really experienced them and was therefore missing one crucial piece of information; one important bit of quaila, as philosophers like to call these magical bits of subjective experience, namely actually seeing red.
Jackson proposed that when Mary stepped out of her room and saw a red, juicy apple, she not only saw colour for the first time, she in fact learned something new. Something that she couldn’t have learned through any text book or YouTube video. She gained a new emotional and preceptorial experience — seeing red. (Remember all those people who told us that we can’t learn everything from books, well they were right in a way!)
And the last, and my personal favourite story curiously also evolves around red (philosophers love it for some reason). One of the greatest minds of the 21st century, John Searle wrote a wonderful tale about a talking room.
Titled The Chinese Room, this wonderful tale of speaking Asian walls stirred the lines of cognitive scientists when first presented in 1980. It describes a room, where one would input a piece of written-down information — be it a question, a statement or just a remark about the weather — and the room, after a period of time, would answer back. All in Chinese for some weird reason, probably because Searle himself said he’s awful at speaking Mandarin (the man speaks more than 6 languages fluently).
Well, the room wasn’t some magical artefact from a forgotten time, it was operated by one person. And the interesting fact was, that parson had no idea how to speak or write Mandarin. What he did have though was an assortment of instructions and guidelines on what to do and a giant library of cards with Chinese signs, decorating the walls of the room.
Whenever text was slid through the opening in the main wall, he would open the instruction books at the appropriate page depicting the combination of symbols (he was obviously really efficient at what he did and compensated generously for his job, probably owned a villa and a few Ferraris too).
After locating the right page in the manual, he would then find the appropriate cards on the shelves of the room, align them in the order depicted in the instructions and return the answer back though the slit in the wall. And the person on the outside would be absolutely amazed of how wonderful a computer this contraption was!
But the point of Searle’s work wasn’t to explain away computers by using miniature librarians living in our processors and memory units, he wanted to point out a simple yet profound truth about communication, computation and the mind. One that we have heard twice before, albeit in different iterations and with slightly different points.
Syntax (that is the assortment of signals; be it voice signals, written words or electric currents going to the processors of our computers) does not equal semantics (that is the name we give to meaning; the meaning of a word, a picture, a sign … anything that has some symbolical value to anyone).
But if painting a pretty picture of an apple isn’t enough to communicate the idea of a pretty apple, what then should we do to make our work more accessible and less misunderstood? This and more in the next part of the blog.
Link to the first part: http://bit.ly/2G46nz9
from Surviving Art http://bit.ly/2RQIQc1
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Reordberend
(Part 8 of ?; start; previous; next)
It was two or three days before Katherine felt strong enough to stand. A few people seemed to come and go from the hall as she drifted in and out of sleep, and she would occasionally open her eyes to find others sitting around the fire at the far end of the room. Every time it seemed to be a different set of faces. The faces seemed mostly uninterested in her, though; they did not approach or try to speak to her. There were no windows in the high stone walls, and she had no idea whether it was early or late each time she woke. Whoever had prepared her bed had taken her coat, gloves, and boots, and bandaged her hands and feet. Both still hurt, probably from frostbite. In theory her cybernetics could fix that pretty easily, but there was still no response when she pressed the standby switch. At some point, she woke to find the hall empty. There was one of those densely embroidered overcoats the others wore, draped over the end of the bed, but no boots. Presumably, she wasn’t meant to go wandering about outside.
So she decided to have a look around. She shuffled slowly around the hall. It was twenty meters long, maybe, its metal roof supported occasionally by stone pillars made out of the same rough blocks as the walls. There were side rooms at odd intervals along both walls, their doorways protected from drafts by heavy draped cloth. It was the same material as the coats and the tapestries, some kind of soft, dense synthetic fiber. Some of the rooms looked like they were for sleeping, with beds slightly less improvisational than the one Katherine had slept in. One was a pantry, stocked with dried meats. The last one, to her surprise, contained books. Hundreds of them. They looked immense, and the shelves that lined all four walls were full.
Katherine had seen only a few print books in her life, outside the archives of Trinity College. They had all been small, slim volumes with paper covers, the kind of thing you could slip into a large pocket. These books were enormous. There was a stand in the middle of the room, next to a heavy table, about right to read at if you stood. So presumably they weren’t just for show. She selected a few volumes at random, then carefully slid them off their shelves. She piled them on the table, then opened one on the stand.
She didn’t know the language of the Dry Valleys People, and their script made matters even more difficult. It was a Latin script of some kind, she supposed. The letters were approximately familiar. She could pick out the difference between Russian and Arabic and Chinese and the like on the signs in Port Alexander, and these didn’t look anything like that. But the forms were strange, with curls here and long stems there that made it hard to work out what was supposed to be what. There were two different kinds of r, for one. And accent marks she didn’t understand. But what was stranger than that was the books themselves. They weren’t printed books at all. They were all clearly handwritten, every letter and every word just a little bit different, painstakingly copied out on pages made of animal skin, bound in wooden covers. Mostly the text was dense, without any kind of obvious punctuation, and few line breaks, but occasionally she would turn a page and find spread out across a whole page, or sometimes two facing pages, ornate illustrations of people and animals and abstract forms, stained with dark mineral colors. They were like the tapestries in the hall: here and there was an obvious figure, or something that suggested the head or haunch of a beast, but they were surrounded by sinuous shapes, flourishes that looked like detached pieces of architecture, united together with a strange sense of perspective and a compositional logic she couldn’t follow.
She could make neither heads nor tails of the first two books. One was filled with illustrations of plants and animals and shapes that might have been landforms, or icebergs. The last twenty pages, maybe, were nothing but diagrams of the stars. She noted with interest that the Milky Way and the two Magellanic Clouds were all annotated with the same word. Clearly the Dry Valleys People weren’t entirely ignorant of astronomy. And where the first book looked to have been written all by the same hand, the second seemed to have been compiled by dozens of authors; the shapes of the letters seemed to change every few pages.
The third book surprised her. Its cover was more ornate than the others. It wasn’t just plain wood that had been painted; it was a frame in which carefully carved pieces of ivory had been set, depicting four great winged creatures. What looked like a lion, maybe, and some sort of bird, and a person, and some kind of cow, maybe. She wasn’t sure anybody around here had ever seen a cow or a lion in their lives, but it was a good attempt. She opened the book, and a thrill of surprise ran through her. The text was in two closely-written columns, divided by large initial capitals; but each section was further broken up with little numerals just above the line. It looked for all the world like a Bible.
Part of one, anyway. And in no language she recognized. Katherine hadn’t read much Scripture as a kid, and none at all as an adult. Her mother liked to read her stories out of the Bible before bed sometimes, but they were paraphrases as often as not, and what Katherine could remember of the Bible was mostly a lot of conjunctions, and really awkward syntax. But there were four verses she did know by heart. The book she had in front of her was in four parts; just the gospels, if she had to guess. She went to the beginning of the first one, then counted down six chapters, and from the beginning, nine verses. She began to sound them out to herself as best she could.
“Fader ure, du? Du de eyart on heyofon… heyofonu, si din nama gehalgod…” She was sure she was getting some of the sounds wrong. There was this d with a stroke through the top, and a little line over the u at the end of heofonu. But even if she was butchering it, she knew what she was saying. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. And the words in front of her weren’t so different from that.
“To becume din rikke…”
“Rice,” someone said behind her. Two syllables, sharp and clear. Reach a. Katherine turned around. It was the woman who had shown her the map. She was leaning against the door, staring at Katherine with sharp, dark eyes that made her feel intensely self-conscious. Her face was framed by the hood of her cloak, on which scraps of frost still clung. She looked… puzzled? Amused?
She pointed at the book. “Rice,” she said again. “To becume ðin rice.“ Toe bekoom a theen reach a.
She straightened up and walked over to Katherine. She pointed at the beginning of the prayer.
“Canst ðu hit?” she asked.
“I’m--I’m sorry? I don’t understand,” Katherine said.
The woman took Katherine’s hand, and put her finger under the first word. Then she pointed at Katherine. “Sprec hit. Fram onginnung.”
Katherine looked down at the text, and tried sounding out the words again.
“Fader ure… du de--”
“Ne.” The woman put a hand over Katherine’s lips, then pointed at her again. “Ne ræd. Ðu. Ðine geðeode.”
“My what? You want me to say it in my language?”
If the woman understood, she didn’t show it. She just stared at Katherine.
“Our father? Who art in heaven. Hallowed be thy name.” She started nodding as Katherine recited the words. When Katherine finished, she walked out of the room. Katherine stood there for a minute, feeling rather silly, wondering if she’d done something wrong.
When the woman returned, she held up her hand. She was holding Katherine’s cross necklace. She’d been wearing when she went overboard. She thought she’d lost it in the sea.
“Ðu eart Cristne?” the woman asked.
“Christian? Are you asking if I’m a Christian?”
The woman nodded. Katherine shook her head. “No. Not Christian.”
“Ne? Soðlice?” She held out the necklace and dropped it into Katherine’s hand.
“Ðu fricgest, ond ðu birst seo rod. Ac ðu eart ne Cristne?” She seemed to shrug.
She beckoned for Katherine to follow her, and they went back out into the main hall. There was a pair of heavy leather boots beside Katherine’s bed. The woman pointed to them and the coat, and Katherine put them on. She pointed to the fur-lined hood on the back, reminding Katherine to pull it up. Then she led her to the end of the hall, on the opposite side of the fire pit; there was a large doorway draped with layers of cloth and skins, which they pushed through. The woman fumbled with the heavy latch of a door, and they stepped out into dim half-light.
Katherine couldn’t be sure if it was very late at night, or very early in the morning. The sun was low against the ragged ridges that rose on either side of a long, low valley. Dark gray-brown slopes curved gently downward, to a floor littered with stones and debris. A sharp, bitter wind seemed to blow continuously, which Katherine’s coat only partly protected her against.
The hall was a large, long stone building that stood on one side of a little village square. Smaller houses stood around the square on the other sides, their doors facing toward the middle, all made of stone and roofed with metal, all windowless against the freezing wind. Katherine could see smaller outbuildings beyond, and paths leading down the valley, and up into the hills on either side. There couldn’t be more than a few dozen people in a settlement this size; she wondered how many villages like this there were in the Dry Valleys. She had imagined something rather cruder, to be entirely honest; the reports she had read had talked about makeshift shelters, barely adequate against the extremes of Antarctic weather.
Her companion led her across the square, to one of the small houses directly facing the hall. She opened the door, and they pushed their way through another heavy curtain, and Katherine found herself suddenly standing the middle of a small crowd of people.
There was a firepit against one wall of the house, with some small benches beside it, on which a few elderly-looking men and women sat. Their hair was gray to white, and the men all had thick, long beards. There were others sitting, on chairs, or on the floor, which was hard-packed sand and grit, covered with rugs, and maybe a half-dozen more leaning against the walls. The house had only one room, with a high ceiling, and as Katherine glanced up, she could even see, peering down from a wooden loft on one wall, more small faces. It appeared she was an object of some curiosity among the Dry Valleys People.
She felt a hand at her back. Her companion was pushing her forward, to the middle of the room. Every eye in the house suddenly seemed to be on her at once, and she looked around from face to face nervously. Some were old, some were young. All had an intensity of expression she had never seen before. It was like she’d shown up to a party conspicuously underdressed, times a million. Or she was surrounded by everyone she’d ever offended in her entire life. Come to think of it, she probably had offended them, just by being here. There was a terrible sinking feeling in her stomach.
One of the old women sitting near the fire looked at Katherine and said something.
“Come again?” Katherine said lamely.
“Nama. Ðin nama,” her companion said in her ear.
“Nama?” What? “Oh, my name.” She pointed to herself. “Katherine Alice Green,” she said slowly.
There was a little muttering, and the people by the fire seemed to be conversing among themselves. Finally, the old woman who had asked her name stood and took a couple steps toward Katherine. She had something in her hand, and Katherine realized it was Christopher’s letter of introduction. She said something else, rapid-fire, and looked at Katherine expecting an answer.
“I really don’t understand,” Katherine said. “I don’t speak your language. No module.” She pointed to her head. “No modules at all. My cybernetics are dead.”
This didn’t seem to help. The woman seemed to be getting annoyed with Katherine. She looked at her companion, and said something in an acid tone of voice, to which Katherine’s companion responded with a sharp, almost sarcastic-sounding retort. There was general muttering.
Things only seemed to get worse from there. Katherine’s companion and the old woman argued for a bit; then the people by the fire argued, loudly, among themselves. After a little while, some people from the sides of the room chimed in, and just when it seemed tempers were running a little too high, one of the men by the fire, who hadn’t spoken yet, stood slowly, said a single loud word, and everyone fell silent. He pointed at Katherine, and Katherine’s companion, and said something slowly, like he was intoning some ritual, then sat back down. This seemed to end the discussion. People began filing out of the house, the faces in the loft withdrew, and someone put a pot of something on the fire to cook. Katherine’s companion tugged on her sleeve, and led her out.
They went back to the hall. Katherine’s bed in the main room had been cleared away; instead, her companion led her to one of the side rooms, and pointed to a bed.
“Thanks,” Katherine said. She was suddenly very, very tired again; even mild exertion seemed to be draining for her. “What was that all about?”
Her companion left the room, then came back a few moments later carrying the book of Gospels. She handed it to Katherine.
“Ræd, ond leorn. Ðu sceal ure geðeode leornan, ond arolice.”
Katherine sank down onto the bed. It was exhausting, not understanding anything anyone said to you. To try to patch together meaning from the one word in ten that sounded vaguely familiar. Stupid as it was, she wanted to grab the woman and yell at her to just say something she could understand.
“I don’t understand,” she said angrily. “I don’t fucking understand.”
The woman seemed to understand her frustration, anyway. She squatted down next to the bed, and put her hand on Katherine’s knee. She closed her eyes, and seem to think very hard for a moment.
“Learn. Our tongue. Learn. From book. Swiftly.”
“Why?” asked Katherine. “What happens if I don’t?”
“Out.” The woman gestured, in the vague direction of the hills. “You, out.”
Katherine felt her stomach sinking. “If I go out there alone, I will die. Die? Like, to death. You know that, right?”
The woman nodded.
“And if I learn your tongue, I can stay?” Katherine asked.
The woman shrugged.
“They deem. Learn not, go out. You learn, they choose fate. Go or stay. I know not.”
So that was that. She would have to learn their language, and maybe, just maybe, they would let her stay if she did. Otherwise, they would send her out of the valleys, into the Antarctic wastes, where she would die. Alone.
Just fucking great job, Katherine, she thought to herself.
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La Ciudad religiosa
Our Airbnb host, Gabriel, noted in a lovely note he left me that the super cool photographs in his apartment were his own work. He was really responsive and gave us a number of good restaurant recommendations, so when he offered a tour of the city and explained his excellent knowledge of the art and history, we took him up on it. After a delicious breakfast at Jerry's, a local cafe where Jerry serves up delicious Ecuadorian food and chats you up in the most friendly manner, Gabriel picked us up in a little blue Toyota hatchback. We drove around the La Mariscal neighborhood and he pointed our Plaza Foch, the big nightlife area. He explained that a lot of the architecture in the nicer parts of the city was early 1900s European, as many Jews fled here ecaping persecution and wanted to build a more familiar city. Mariscal Foch (Marshall Foch) happened to be a French prime minister in the early 1900s, and thus, the area was born. On our way to the first stop we also passed by El Ejido park which had tons of old trees, including a 300 year old cypress! Since I had expressed interest in his art work we first went to el Centro de Arte Contemporaneo de Quito, where they had an exhibition he was included in. The really cool part about his pieces is that he takes double or triple exposure pictures and layers them on top of each other and although he has traveled quite extensively, all the art we saw was from Ecuador. We passed by the enormous gothic church (Basilica del Voto Nacional) I had been blown away by yesterday and he explained that, like many of the curches in Quito, they incorporate both European and indigenous ("indio") elements like gargoyles of wild animals from Ecuador, including alligators, iguanas, armadillos, pelicans, sharks and, of course, tortugas from the Galapagos! On our journey to find parking in the cramped Old Quito area he told us a little about the current politics. It seems the last president, Correa, was extremely corrupt and sold a lot of the country's land and resources to the Chinese (like mining in the Amazon). The Ecuadorian people are very ecologically minded (think, the Galapagos) so the idea that the Chinese are going to come in and ruin their natural resources is tragic. The current president, Moreno, sounded a bit better, but has only been in office for a few months. Interestingly (but maybe not surprisingly), the last mayor of Quito was also corrupt -- but Gabriel admitted that he did a lot of good things for the city, like significantly improve the bus system with larger busses. Our first stop in the Old Town was Catedral Primada de Quito. For me, the most amazing part was that this cathedral has origins back to 1535, when it was a simple adobe house with a clay tile roof and wooden framework. Shortly after, by 1562 it was named the national cathedral and they demolished the old structure and built stone foundations and brick walls but still a clay tile roof. This was on the central square that shared space with the main government building which Stephen noted, and I agree, seemed very accessible. Right down the road we went to the Centro Culutral Metropolitana which had on a sprawling feminist exhibition that showed up in most of the rooms of the 2 block building. It featured artwork by many prominent feminists as well as one by the gorilla girls, who have a famous tagline that 'women shouldn't have to be naked to be featured in the Met.' Good point! Very interestingly, on the rooftop there was a huge block that faced the government building and said, "you will not violate us," apparently in reference to a son of one of the major officials who was convicted of rape. Powerful! Then we arrived at La iglesia de la compania de Jesus and the good old Jesuits had the most extravagently decorated church I have ever seen, literally covered in gold. Every wall and the ceiling was plated in 23 ct gold, except for the area with a statue of Jesus, which was plated in 24 ct gold. Perhaps my favorite part of this church though was that on your way out into the cruel and tempting world, there was an incredible painting that pictured Hell with all of the major sins named and depicted with terrible tortures. Just a reminder to be good when you exit...! The last church we visited (though there were many, many more) was la Iglesia de San Francisco. I know this is a common name but I really do like churches that reminde me of SF. :) To be honest, after the gilded church it was a little tough to get excited about this more normal looking beautiful giant but I did like it's origin. In the legend of Catuna, it is said that the architect of SF was told he would never see it built to completion - so he sold his soul to the devil so he could live long enough to see it finalized - and he did! I guess he wwasn't a very pious man. The plaza this church was on used to be an Incan market and, currently, it's under construction, building a subway for Quito (maybe - Gabriel seemed unconvinced). After all of these churches we were starving so we headed to La Floresta neighborhood which, per Gabriel is the sort of bohemian area - though interestingly is also where all the banks and expensive resetaurants are. Not sure how I square that circle. Regardless, we went to a fantastic bahn mi restaurant because, honestly, you can only have potatoes and corn so many times! It was delicious. In the afternoon he took us to La Casa de Guayasumin who was one of Ecuador's most prolific artists. In his 70 years of paining he painted many leaders like the prince of Spain, Castro and Chavez (in more of a cubist style). He must have charged a pretty penny because his mansion was incredible, up on a beautiful hill in a neighborhood called Bella Vista and filled with priceless art. He decided before his death that instead of passing it all down to his children he preferred to keep everything as it was in his home and open it up as a museum to the public. Even though he was not religious, there was tons of religious art, some extremely sensual pieces next to the religious art (interesting), a few Picassos, a few Goyas (artists that influenced his style, showing the misery of their time), and a number of other artists who I probably should know. Before his death he also comisssioned La Capilla del Hombre (the Chapel of Man) to be built just next to his house to put even more art on display - sadly, it wasn't finished before his death in 1999. The whole estate was very cool to see - mainly because they kept so many things exactly the same as when he was alive - especially his studio in which we watched a movie on him painting a famous spanish flamenco guitar player with, "a face so long and proud and tall that it looked like a never-ending tower." On our way out, we saw a place where they found ancient pots when they were excavating the land to build - guess where the anthropoligist that came to survey the land was from? None other than FAU! After Guayasumin, we headed back to our flat and then to dinner at Zazu, a very stylish restaurant with a yummy tasting menu. For me, the highlights were the crispy grilled octopus and the ginea pig -- in my defense, I didn't really think about the little furry animal until it was being served to me. Oops! The restaurant felt very fancy with waiters watching our every move for a chance to help -- the price point was that of a casual night out in SF, clocking in at $65 per person, including a bottle of nice wine.
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The New York Times
The Queen of Change
With “The Artist’s Way,” Julia Cameron invented the way people renovate the creative soul.
By Penelope Green
Feb. 2, 2019
SANTA FE, N.M. — On any given day, someone somewhere is likely leading an Artist’s Way group, gamely knocking back the exercises of “The Artist’s Way” book, the quasi-spiritual manual for “creative recovery,” as its author Julia Cameron puts it, that has been a lodestar to blocked writers and other artistic hopefuls for more than a quarter of a century. There have been Artist’s Way clusters in the Australian outback and the Panamanian jungle; in Brazil, Russia, the United Kingdom and Japan; and also, as a cursory scan of Artist’s Way Meetups reveals, in Des Moines and Toronto. It has been taught in prisons and sober communities, at spiritual retreats and New Age centers, from Esalen to Sedona, from the Omega Institute to the Open Center, where Ms. Cameron will appear in late March, as she does most years. Adherents of “The Artist’s Way” include the authors Patricia Cornwell and Sarah Ban Breathnach. Pete Townshend, Alicia Keys and Helmut Newton have all noted its influence on their work.
So has Tim Ferriss, the hyperactive productivity guru behind “The Four Hour Workweek,” though to save time he didn’t actually read the book, “which was recommended to me by many megaselling authors,” he writes. He just did the “Morning Pages,” one of the book’s central exercises. It requires you write three pages, by hand, first thing in the morning, about whatever comes to mind. (Fortunes would seem to have been made on the journals printed to support this effort.) The book’s other main dictum is the “Artist’s Date” — two hours of alone time each week to be spent at a gallery, say, or any place where a new experience might be possible.
Elizabeth Gilbert, who has “done” the book three times, said there would be no “Eat, Pray, Love,” without “The Artist’s Way.” Without it, there might be no adult coloring books, no journaling fever. “Creativity” would not have its own publishing niche or have become a ubiquitous buzzword — the “fat-free” of the self-help world — and business pundits would not deploy it as a specious organizing principle.
The book’s enduring success — over 4 million copies have been sold since its publication in 1992 — have made its author, a shy Midwesterner who had a bit of early fame in the 1970s for practicing lively New Journalism at the Washington Post and Rolling Stone, among other publications, and for being married, briefly, to Martin Scorsese, with whom she has a daughter, Domenica — an unlikely celebrity. With its gentle affirmations, inspirational quotes, fill-in-the-blank lists and tasks — write yourself a thank-you letter, describe yourself at 80, for example — “The Artist’s Way” proposes an egalitarian view of creativity: Everyone’s got it.
The book promises to free up that inner artist in 12 weeks. It’s a template that would seem to reflect the practices of 12-step programs, particularly its invocations to a higher power. But according to Ms. Cameron, who has been sober since she was 29, “12 weeks is how long it takes for people to cook.”
Now 70, she lives in a spare adobe house in Santa Fe, overlooking an acre of scrub and the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. She moved a few years ago from Manhattan, following an exercise from her book to list 25 things you love. As she recalled, “I wrote juniper, sage brush, chili, mountains and sky and I said, ‘This is not the Chrysler Building.’” On a recent snowy afternoon, Ms. Cameron, who has enormous blue eyes and a nimbus of blonde hair, admitted to the jitters before this interview. “I asked three friends to pray for me,” she said. “I also wrote a note to myself to be funny.”
In the early 1970s, Ms. Cameron, who is the second oldest of seven children and grew up just north of Chicago, was making $67 a week working in the mail room of the Washington Post. At the same time, she was writing deft lifestyle pieces for the paper — like an East Coast Eve Babitz. “With a byline, no one knows you’re just a gofer,” she said.
In her reporting, Ms. Cameron observed an epidemic of green nail polish and other “Cabaret”-inspired behaviors in Beltway bars, and slyly reviewed a new party drug, methaqualone. She was also, by her own admission, a blackout drunk. “I thought drinking was something you did and your friends told you about it later,” she said. “In retrospect, in cozy retrospect, I was in trouble from my first drink.”
She met Mr. Scorsese on assignment for Oui magazine and fell hard for him. She did a bit of script-doctoring on “Taxi Driver,” and followed the director to Los Angeles. “I got pregnant on our wedding night,” she said. “Like a good Catholic girl.” When Mr. Scorsese took up with Liza Minnelli while all three were working on “New York, New York,” the marriage was done. (She recently made a painting depicting herself as a white horse and Mr. Scorsese as a lily. “I wanted to make a picture about me and Marty,” she said. “He was magical-seeming to me and when I look at it I think, ‘Oh, she’s fascinated, but she doesn’t understand.’”)
In her memoir, “Floor Sample,” published in 2006, Ms. Cameron recounts the brutality of Hollywood, of her life there as a screenwriter and a drunk. Pauline Kael, she writes, described her as a “pornographic Victorian valentine, like a young Angela Lansbury.” Don’t marry her for tax reasons, Ms. Kael warns Mr. Scorsese. Andy Warhol, who escorts her to the premiere of “New York, New York,” inscribes her into his diary as a “lush.” A cocaine dealer soothes her — “You have a tiny little wife’s habit” — and a doctor shoos her away from his hospital when she asks for help, telling her she’s no alcoholic, just a “sensitive young woman.” She goes into labor in full makeup and a Chinese dressing gown, vowing to be “no trouble.”
“I think it’s fair to say that drinking and drugs stopped looking like a path to success,” she said. “So I luckily stopped. I had a couple of sober friends and they said, ‘Try and let the higher power write through you.’ And I said, What if he doesn’t want to?’ They said, ‘Just try it.’”
So she did. She wrote novels and screenplays. She wrote poems and musicals. She wasn’t always well-reviewed, but she took the knocks with typical grit, and she schooled others to do so as well. “I have unblocked poets, lawyers and painters,” she said. She taught her tools in living rooms and classrooms — “if someone was dumb enough to lend us one,” she said — and back in New York, at the Feminist Art Institute. Over the years, she refined her tools, typed them up, and sold Xeroxed copies in local bookstores for $20. It was her second husband, Mark Bryan, a writer, who needled her into making the pages into a proper book.
The first printing was about 9,000 copies, said Joel Fotinos, formerly the publisher at Tarcher/Penguin, which published the book in 1992. There was concern that it wouldn’t sell. “Part of the reason,” Mr. Fotinos said, “was that this was a book that wasn’t like anything else. We didn’t know where to put it on the shelves — did it go in religion or self-help? Eventually there was a category called ‘creativity,’ and ‘The Artist’s Way’ launched it.” Now an editorial director at St. Martin’s Press, Mr. Fotinos said he is deluged with pitches from authors claiming they’ve written “the new Artist’s Way.”
“But for Julia, creativity was a tool for survival,” he said. “It was literally her medicine and that’s why the book is so authentic, and resonates with so many people.”
“I am my tool kits,” Ms. Cameron said.
And, indeed, “The Artist’s Way” is stuffed with tools: worksheets to be filled with thoughts about money, childhood games, old hurts; wish lists and exercises, many of which seem exhaustive and exhausting — “Write down any resistance, angers and fears,” e.g. — and others that are more practical: “Take a 20 minutes walk,” “Mend any mending” and “repot any pinched and languishing plants.” It anticipates the work of the indefatigable Gretchen Rubin, the happiness maven, if Ms. Rubin were a bit kinder but less Type-A.
“When I teach, it’s like watching the lights come on,” said Ms. Cameron. “My students don’t get lectured to. I think they feel safe. Rather than try and fix themselves, they learn to accept themselves. I think my work makes people autonomous. I feel like people fall in love with themselves.”
Anne Lamott, the inspirational writer and novelist, said that when she was teaching writing full-time, her own students swore by “The Artist’s Way.” “That exercise — three pages of automatic writing — was a sacrament for people,” Ms. Lamott wrote in a recent email. “They could plug into something bigger than the rat exercise wheel of self-loathing and grandiosity that every writer experiences: ‘This could very easily end up being an Oprah Book,’ or ‘Who do I think I’m fooling? I’m a subhuman blowhard.’”
“She’s given you an assignment that is doable, and I think it’s kind of a cognitive centering device. Like scribbly meditation,” Ms. Lamott wrote. “It’s sort of like how manicurists put smooth pebbles in the warm soaking water, so your fingers have something to do, and you don’t climb the walls.”
In the wild.CreditRamsay de Give for The New York Times
Ms. Cameron continues to write her Morning Pages every day, even though she continues, as she said, to be grouchy upon awakening. She eats oatmeal at a local cafe and walks Lily, an eager white Westie. She reads no newspapers, or social media (perhaps the most grueling tenet of “The Artist’s Way” is a week of “reading deprivation”), though an assistant runs a Twitter and Instagram account on her behalf. She writes for hours, mostly musicals, collaborating with her daughter, a film director, and others.
Ms. Cameron may be a veteran of the modern self-care movement but her life has not been all moonbeams and rainbows, and it shows. She was candid in conversation, if not quite at ease. “So I haven’t proven myself to be hilarious,” she said with a flash of dry humor, adding that even after so many years, she still gets stage-fright before beginning a workshop.
She has written about her own internal critic, imagining a gay British interior designer she calls Nigel. “And nothing is ever good enough for Nigel,” she said. But she soldiers on.
She will tell you that she has good boundaries. But like many successful women, she brushes off her achievements, attributing her unlooked-for wins to luck.
“If you have to learn how to do a movie, you might learn from Martin Scorsese. If you have to learn about entrepreneurship, you might learn from Mark” — her second husband. “So I’m very lucky,” she said. “If I have a hard time blowing my own horn, I’ve been attracted to people who blew it for me.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/style/julia-cameron-the-artists-way.html
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Tag Post
I don't usually do this sort of thing, but since I was tagged by @justaddtacosauce I'll make an exception. 😛 1. What is your favorite piece of art? 2. Describe your dream house. 3. What are your favorite songs? 4. Where do you want to be right now? 5. Who did you last talk to (and what was it about?) 6. Would you ever wear a flower crown in real life? 7. What is your favorite food or drink? 8. What is the cutest thing anyone has done for you? 9. Make a mood board for yourself. 10. What is your Myers Briggs type, zodiac sign, and Hogwarts house? 11. Tell me about your crush. 1. what’s your favorite piece of art? Ah, this is quite easy! It's a piece by an artist named Jung Shan. She uses a traditional Chinese ink painting style to depict Japanese martial artists and warriors. Though it may seem incongruous, the flowing Chinese style perfectly captures the sharp circles that are common to most Japanese combat arts. It's a unique marriage of culture and beauty that never fails to take my breath away. I'll post the specific image that I was referring to after I post this. 2. describe your dream house? This. Is going to be a long answer. I have thought about it extensively over the years. Honestly? I want a castle. There are so many derelict ruins dotting the misty countryside of Wales. Scores of families are actively looking to sell what's left of their ancestral fiefdom and manor! I mean, why not? It wouldn't be cheap, but someday, when I am old and wealthy, I want to buy and restore a castle on a seaside cliff in Wales. I will line every wall with bookshelves of polished mahogany so that the entire castle will seem as one enormous, silent cathedral of knowledge and hidden stories. The windows will be high and large and all about them will be hung velvet curtains of the deepest red. There will be vast stone fireplaces and beautifully wrought chandeliers and here and there a suit of armor or a mounted sword will quietly remind passerby that the floors they tread were once a part of a fortress. Somewhere I will install at least one secret door. In nearly every room there will be high backed armchairs and poufs for my many friends to rest in and enjoy the innumerable stories that line my walls. I want my house to be a sanctuary from the outside world where the people I love can trade their troubles for the solace of a good book and a cup of tea. Everyone who knows me will know that they are welcome to stay in my castle of stories for as long as they wish provided that they are quiet and kind to the books and other guests. 3. what’re your favorite songs? Oh there are so many... I have always been fond of Für Elise. Lately I've been listening to Another New World by the Punch Brothers. YouTube it. It's a goddamn work of art. 4. where do you want to be right now? Right now? At this very moment? I wish I were in Wildwood Missouri. Or Wales. Wales would be nice. Generally I'm pretty happy in California, but right now I would much rather be elsewhere. 5. who did you last talk to (bonus points if you say what it was about) My mother has just surprised me with Starbucks hot chocolate, so my last human interaction was thanking her profusely. 6. would you wear a flower crown irl? I'm not much of a flower crown guy but I would absolutely wear one if someone I'm close to made it for me. 7. favorite food or drink? I am immensely fond of tea. 8. cutest thing anyone has ever done for you? A good friend once wrote me a very touching poem. I have never forgotten the gesture, especially since they claimed to hate poetry. 9. make a moodboard for yourself ...what's a mood board? 10. myer briggs type, zodiac sign, and hogwarts house? Oh lord. Okay. I consistently test as an INFJ. I hate the zodiac signs and everything to do with them. I am definitely a Gryffindor but honestly that's mostly a moral choice. I could have just as easily been a Slytherin. 11. tell me about your crush (if you have one, if not just talk about someone you love) Ohhkay. It's no secret that I like @justaddtacosauce . In all my life-- and I say this with absolute sincerity-- in all my life, I have never met anyone as fundamentally kind and good as Lily. There is a purity of intent about her that is truly awe inspiring; she really does want the best for everyone around her, especially her friends. There is not a mean bone in body. In fact, I don't think she's even capable of real cruelty. It's just not who she is. There's a reason I call her sunshine, after all. She brightens every room with the open warmth that she always seems to exude; it really is quite difficult to be in a bad mood around Lily. Ask any of her friends. I guarantee you will not find a single one of them who would disagree with all that I have just said. IN ADDITION (ha you thought I was done) Lily is an actual Valkyrie. Athletic and determined to her very long bones, she is definitely someone I would want to have next to me when the zombies come for humanity. I pity her opponents on and off the volleyball court. If you haven't already, you should absolutely follow her blog. It's an excellent pick-me-up if you ever need one. I'm not going to tag anyone for this because most of the people I follow on tumblr run purely martial arts blogs. If anyone wants to pick it up, though, they're more than welcome to!
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Riddle of Nature
"Hugo looks up the sky,it seems like a doomed mind in denial."-inspired from Necromancer.
Waves roared into the sands of Algrave,one of the finest sand beaches in Europe.It lies to southern tip of Portugal. Hugo Alves,the third child of Alves Mountinho glazed at the distant tides expressionless.Sun has risen in the far East,and another day written to history.
" There is no pattern in life,everything is chaos",Hugo screamed.
Julio started whining.The furry Tibetan Spaniel also known as Tibbie,a little gift from his uncle on his 10th birthday ,his companion since.He stood 10 inches high at the shoulders and weighed around 11 pounds,yet the little breed feared sound of crackers and loud voices.
"Stop it Julio.Stop it.You are irritating me", shouted Hugo and they walked back from the beach.
Algrave has many Moorish castles and traditional villages.Alfredo lived in an olden stone cottage in Sagres,the south west coast of Algrave.
Hugo knocks at the door hard.
" Grandpa its me".
" Wait up child".Alfredo opens the door with a lantern in his hand.
Hugo slams the door behind and drops into the broken couch.The house was never the way it is now, when Camilla was around.Love of his life.She left him alone, in this world 10 yrs back and a day hasn't past since not thinking of her.Alfredo believes, if not in this world,in another they will live together for ever.
Hugo looks at his grandpa in desperation.
" Success cannot elude a trier for long,my boy.Like a prey eluding cheetah's claws,it beats you again and again.But remember its round the corner. Don’t give up so easy."
"That was a mistake I made",Alfredo sighs and looks at Camilla's photo hanging on the wall."But you shouldn't".
" I made some bread and Bacalhau for you".Bacalhau, dried, salted cod is one of the national dishes of Portugal.
"Eat and go home before its too late.I don’t want your Dad on my doorsteps".
Alves picks 2 surf boards and tucks it into his 1962 model Green Ford F-250 pick up truck.The only ancestral asset he inherited from his father Alfredo,or the only thing Alfredo could give his son.With the exception of some torn interior upholstery and few car body paint scratches,truck was well maintained.
Alfredo runs a Surf shop in Praia de Salema Beach in Salema,a village which is home to a number of fishermen who still cast their Chinese nets daily.
"Elisa...Elisa.Get me those helmets,will you?.Where is Ema?" asks Alves.
The 2 elder sisters of Hugo,runs a Flower shop in Vila do Bispo,Salema. With onset of Spring western Atlantic coast from Sagres to Odeceixe looked like a Vincent van Gogh's piece of art,the scenery is breathtaking.
"She left ,Pai",shouts Elisa from the kitchen."Where?"
"To deliver a bouquet to Mrs Penelope."
"Did she eat something?"
"não."
"Am ready for work",Alves slams the car hood.
"Soup will be ready in a minute."
"Hugo,its 8.Get up.Let me fix breakfast for you",Elisa pulls out the blanket form Hugo's coat.
Elisa was more of a mother to him than a sister.When Diane left Alves ,Hugo was 3.They had their differences,enough to make a huge difference in any kid with estranged parents.
" If he doesn't want to go to Lisbon,let him come to Surf shop.I wont let him roam in these beaches with his dog and of no use to family.",said Alves
Hugo picks up a shell washed up onto the beach,gives a close look into the surface of the shell.Picks up another one with more prominent design. Throws the other one back to the sea,to be brought back again by the waves.
Julio is playing with the crabs.Jumping and barking,while crabs finding their way back to their crabitats in one piece.He keeps poking every tiny drilled holes on his way.
"Vamos(lets go),Julio,Go fetch this one", throws a shell as far he could.
Far away one could see a bunch of boys playing beach football.Hugo loved football like any other Portuguese,but he never played the game.For that matter,any game.
He walked towards them.
"Antonio with the ball on to the left,dribbles across the full back and a beautiful cross into the box, and that's Claudio",voice raising.." who takes it on his chest turns around, a volley and he drills it into the net , that's' GOAAAAAAAAL..GOAL" screams Erico,who entertained the local kids with his live commentary of the game.
"Sporting Salema lead by a goal".
Then came Bicycle style goal celebration from Claudio the goalscorer, Hugo's best friend since primary school.
"lindo maravilhoso,Claudio",Hugo appreciates his friend.
"Obrigado...amigo",Claudio shouts back.
"You want to play ball?" asks Antonio with a teasing voice.Hugo stares at him
"Leave him alone",Claudio pulls back Antonio.Julio started barking
"Oh! I dont want to provoke your superior intellect by begging you to play this silly game,am sorry",laughs Antonio." You better stop Anton"
Hugo did not say a word,he walked past an sat with the kids.He never liked to play this game,but he loved watching it,except for the fact he should suffer through Antonio's bullies every time.
Unlike others Hugo was not thrilled when a goal was scored,he was thrilled to know how a goal was scored.He carried a pencil and a piece of paper all time.
Like a coach, who pictures a game strategy on a white board,he notes each and every move the team makes and their opponents.He marks each and every player on the field, how they move ,where do they pass the ball to ,where the striker is,and everything on the field.He was so meticulous.He captured them from end to end.At the end of the game ,he sat alone and looked at them -for patterns and repetitions.
Its early Sunday morning.Trees are all covered in frost,and its foggy everywhere .As sun emerged over the horizon,light pierced in through the greenish blue leaves of Eucalyptus.The first rays of the morning sun pierced into the stained glass window of the bedroom.The window depicted a Bullfight -with a Bull and the Forcados, which shined like a painting on a wall.Its Bullfighting day -the most celebrated event of any country influenced by Spanish culture -on Thursdays and Sundays from Easter through October . Bullfighting is a revered part of a culture and not a sport. Compared to Spanish bullfighting it may seem Portuguese style of bullfighting humane or less cruel since the bull will see another day light.
Alfredo was one among a few who came forward in the past to ban the public killing of bulls,even though later it was legalized by the government.
Usually the seats in the bullring are steps of stone or concrete,so Alfredo rented 3 cushions.
"Come its Puerto (door) 1", shouts Ema, grabs the ticket from Hugo's hand ," its 1st row ,Numero 7,8,9",she continued.
Crowd started flowing in,and people are squeezed against other people on all sides.
They have the sun section,the cheapest ones.They sat on the nearest stand to the arena,close to ground level.
In front of them is the staging area,also called the alley.The central arena is surrounded by the alley,a place where bull fighters takes shelter once they are tired of messing with the bull.A wooden wall,around 150 cm thick, separates the arena from the alley.There are small splits in these walls that allow humans to get through,but are too narrow for a bull.
Following the age old tradition,the event started with a bugle sound ,and came a huge roar from the crowd showing excitement.
Hugo was sitting beside his grandpa and sister Ema. It excites him to see how the toureiro(Matadores) go head on with a raging bull,risking his life.
" Where do they get the courage,grandpa?"
"Sometimes poverty and hunger are so excruciating and agonizing ,this could be one's best resort to earn his daily bread",replied Alfredo.
After 20 minutes ,the first bull fight is over and time for the second.Suddenly Hugo found himself on the alley.He slipped.
All he could see on the corridor was bullfighters running in and out to the arena.Alfredo and Ema didn't notice that Hugo has gone down.All of a sudden a bull jumped over the wall into the alley,and there was mayhem and disorder.The angry animal was raging towards Hugo,he could already feel the pain he is about to suffer,he ran through the alley,bystanders started shouting.
"A kid has fallen down,somebody help...ajude..ajude"
Then came another bull ,from the other side.Seeing this Hugo stepped on the foothold in the wall and jumped.For a moment,his heart skipped,next second his adrenaline was shooting up.He was never inside an arena before in his life.But that was not the grounds for his heart pumping up.He could see 5 of them,and the entire crowd looking upon.He ran in circles. Metadores and Forcados tried to distract the bulls.But one animal was so determined to stab him.He blacked out.
And after a while,there he is,on the ground and the bull on top of him.All he did was pray and then he shouted
"No way,I can't die.I am the focal character in this story"
He could feel a slimy tongue over his mouth and forehead,he opened his eyes.
He is down on the floor,Julio on top of him with all the affection in the world,pouring from its mouth.
"Oh,Julio, Stop.Go away.."
It was bullfighting day, and rest was all a dream.
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10 Funerary Practices from Around the World
Fantasy Coffins – Ghana
We expect coffins at a funeral – it’s nothing out of the ordinary. So what’s so special about Ghana’s coffins? Among the Ga-Adangbe People of the Greater Accra Region, Ghana, the dead are laid to rest inside works of art. The Ga-Adangbe believe that their ancestors have great influence over their daily lives and sending them off in style – even if one coffin can cost an entire year’s salary – is supposed to win their favor. Each fantasy coffin or abebuu adekai (proverbial coffin) is custom-made, hand-carved and painted in bright colors to represent the life and personality of the deceased. So a fisherman can be buried in a model of their boat or their favorite fish and a tribal chief can be buried inside a leopard-shaped coffin.
The practice is said to have begun in the 1940s when Seth Kane Kwei – who was famous for making carved chairs – made a palanquin for the chief. When the chief died, he convinced the family to bury him inside the palanquin instead of letting it go to waste. In the 1950s, he carved an airplane-shaped coffin for his grandmother who had always dreamed of flying but never got the chance. Since then, coffin-making has become an art and museums across the world have commissioned fantasy coffins for exhibits.
Jar Burial – Southeast Asia
Like coffins, jars really aren’t unusual. Most cremated remains are stored in jars and urns. What makes jar burials unusual is that they don’t contain ashes but bones – even whole bodies. Jar burials can be found across Southeast Asia and even in Korea and Japan. However, the most well-known burial jars were found in the caves of Indonesia and the Philippines. One of the most famous of these jars is the Manunggul Jar discovered in Palawan, Philippines and is considered a work by a master potter. This jar is depicts two human figures riding in a boat, representing the soul of the dead and the ferryman to the underworld.
These massive jars have been used for centuries to store the bones of the deceased. The body is first buried in the ground and allowed to decompose. After a period of time, the remains are dug up and cleaned then transferred to the ornate jars for secondary burial. While most of these jars are ancient, the practice has lasted until modern times among the Berawan and Kelabit ethnic groups of Indonesia who used imported Chinese stoneware jars for both primary and secondary burials.
Tree and Scaffold Burials – North America
The different Native American peoples practiced a wide variety of burial customs. Aerial sepultures – above ground “burials” on high platforms unreachable by scavengers – is primarily found among the Plains Indians and the groups in the Pacific Northwest. The bodies were left to decay over time and loud wailing and mourning is usually done around the platform as an expression of grief.
A variety of platforms were used between different groups. Where trees were plentiful, they were used and the body can be laid out on its back or wrapped in a cloth and hung from the branches. In other areas where trees are few or their shape is not suitable, scaffolds may be built or open coffins are raised on stilts. Regardless of the type of the platform used, food offerings are also usually hung beside the bodies and personal belongings might be placed with the body especially in the case of powerful persons within the community.
Cave Burials – Hawai’i
In Hawai’i, there are many different ways of burying the dead. One of the most common practices was to inter the deceased inside caves. In fact, burial caves can be found on all Hawaiian islands. Bodies were traditionally curled into fetal position and left sitting inside lava tubes, rockshelters and deep within caverns with food, cloth and other grave goods. But newer bodies found near the mouths of caves – anthropologists theorize this was after Hawai’i adopted Christianity – were laid out on their backs, showing the changing attitudes of the Hawaiian people towards death.
One gravesite can be reserved for one person but most are familial burial grounds. Most people buried in caves are commoners (maka'ainana), but some caves, such as the Forbes’ Cave, were reserved for royalty (ali’i) that were distinguished by their luxurious grave goods. To prevent theft, a wall of false rock is sometimes used to disguise the cave entrance and guarded by a kahu (family retainer). Sadly, gravesites have been looted ever since cave burials fell out of practice.
Towers of Silence – The Middle East and India
According to Zoroastrianism, when a person dies, the body is invaded by the corpse demon (nasu daeva), making it unclean (nasu). Burial – both in the ground and at sea – and cremation are not practiced because the bodies of the dead are believed to pollute the earth, water and fire and make them unfit for use by the living. To prevent contamination, Zoroastrians put their dead in high places far away from their cities.
The tower of silence (dakhma) is a flat, circular and roofless building made to contain the dead. It is built in concentric circles meant to separate bodies based on sex and age – men are placed in the outermost ring, women in the middle ring, and children in the innermost ring. Carrion birds such as vultures and buzzards have learned to hang around these places and make quick work of the body. When only the bones are left, they are moved either to the ossuary well at the center of the dakhma or to a columbary nearby. The exposure to the sun and wind disintegrates the bones into powder which is then washed out into the sea by the rain.
Sky Burials – Tibet
Sky burial or bya gtor (literally “alms for the birds”) involves feeding the bodies of the dead to the vultures which are considered the corporeal forms of angels (dakhini) in Tibetan belief. While it has its similarities with the Zoroastrian funeral practice this Tibetan tradition has a very different reason for being. Instead of believing that dead bodies are unclean, Tibetan Buddhists believe that corpses are empty vessels once the soul has left to be reincarnated so there is no reason to keep them around.
The ceremony begins by washing the corpse and chanting. The body is then hauled up into the mountains and juniper incense is lit to attract vultures. Professional body breakers called rogyapa chop up the body and smash the bones to make the work easier for the vultures. The ground up bones mixed with tsampa (roasted barley flour) are served first before the internal organs and finally the flesh. It might sound macabre, but bya gtor is the Tibetans’ way of returning the body to the circle of life and is considered an immense show of generosity and compassion – by feeding dead flesh to the vultures, they spare the life of another animal that could have been the birds’ meal.
Fire Mummies – Philippines
Thanks to media, when we think of mummies, we think of Egypt and dead pharaohs wrapped in gauze. But it’s not the bandages that make the mummy. Mummies are actually any preserved body and can be made in a variety of ways. Smoking the bodies is one of the rarer ways to make mummies, but this is exactly what is done with the fire mummies of the Philippines. These mummies made by the Ibaloi ethnic group can be found in the caves of Benguet, lying curled up in a fetal position inside open coffins. Scientists can’t decide whether the practice began in 1200 CE or if it’s much older, but they do agree that it stopped when the Spaniards colonized the archipelago.
As morbid as it sounds, the mummification process begins shortly before death and the soon-to-be mummy participates. The dying drink a very salty concoction meant to speed up dehydration. After death, the body is washed and put in a sitting position above a fire to be smoked until all water content in the body has evaporated while tobacco smoke is blown into the corpse’s mouth to dry out the internal organs. This process can take anywhere from a couple of weeks to a few months. When it’s done, the body is laid to rest in a coffin and placed inside one of the caves where they can still be found today.
Wet Mummies – China
We’ve already established that the most famous mummies are from Egypt. But the oldest and best-preserved mummy is in China. The Lady of Dai has been dead for over 2,100 years, but she looked like she had just been dead for a few hours – a few days at the most – when her tomb was opened. Even her eyelashes haven’t fallen out yet. She was so well-preserved that scientists were able to run an autopsy on her body and find out that she died of a coronary heart attack. A wealthy noble from the Han dynasty, stepping into her tomb is like stepping back through time.
In Ancient China, a lot of care was taken to preserve the bodies of the dead and provide them with the luxuries they would need in the afterlife. Unlike the Egyptians or the Ibaloi, the Chinese didn’t dehydrate bodies to preserve them. They did the reverse and soaked them in embalming solutions. Each mortician had their own secret formula and scientists today haven’t even figured out what they put into them. The bodies are then sealed away tightly away and the lack of oxygen prevents bacteria from surviving long enough to begin decomposing the body. The Lady of Dai’s tomb was sealed so well – and the floor was sprinkled with charcoal and white clay to neutralize bacteria – that even the feast she was buried with had not decayed and the paint on her pottery had not even started to fade. Another wet mummy – from the Ming dynasty this time – was found entombed in a stone coffin underground during road construction.
Skull Burial – Kiribati
For the I-Kiribati, the dead don’t leave and that is meant very literally. The family waits until the body is partially decomposed before cutting off the head and burying the rest. The head is cleaned and the flesh is removed so the skull can be taken home and put on a high shelf – it is never left on the floor to avoid accidentally flashing the ancestor. Other bones can also be kept to make tools and the body can be dug up later to take some more.
The skull is still considered a part of the family that must be given respect. Relatives still regularly talk to it and ask it for favors, usually of the supernatural kind. Daily food offerings are made and the deceased’s favorite relative is required to eat it by the end of the day. Tobacco is also a popular offering and a living relative would blow the smoke into the skull’s jaws. Great care is taken to make sure that the skull is never offended and remains happy.
Funerary Cannibalism – Papua New Guinea
Cannibalism tends to leave a bad taste in our mouths. When we hear about it, we think of horrible crimes committed by the likes of Armin Meiwes and Sagawa Issei. But here’s the thing: Cannibalism comes in different flavors. The kind practiced by several Papuan tribes is called funerary endocannibalism – eating dead relatives as a show of grief and respect. The most famous of these tribes is the South Fore because of a mad cow-like prion disease called kuru (also called the “shaking disease”) which spreads through the ingestion of an infected brain. Because of this, the practice has since been banned in Papua New Guinea.
Among the South Fore, it was believed that a person had five souls, three of which stayed in the world of the living – the parts containing good qualities, occult power and bad luck. Eating the body was supposed to ensure that the good qualities and magic possessed by the dead will be inherited by descendants and the bad luck would be contained. It was considered normal to give one’s relatives instructions about how their body was going to be divided after death. There are even traditions regarding who is allowed to have which part. After a period of mourning, the body is washed, taken to a shady grove and prepared by the women of the family. A lot of care is taken so that nothing touches the ground or becomes wasted – even the bones are ground and mixed with plantains to be eaten. Usually, it is the kinswomen that consume most of the body. Men are only allowed small portions. Once the body is devoured, the family engages in various purification rituals.
#funeral#funerary practices#burial#fantasy coffin#jar burial#tree burial#scaffold burial#cave burial#tower of silence#sky burial#fire mummy#wet mummy#skull burial#funerary endocannibalism#cannibalism#death#culture#customs
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The 2019 Sprudge Guide To Teamakers and Ceramics
I hesitated in writing this guide. The world of teaware is vast and intimidating, and can be a money pit of fakes and forgeries. It is also where so much of the joy in loving tea can be derived. Ultimately our team felt Tea Week would be incomplete without some sort of feature on teaware. My very best attempt at this here in 2019 is what follows.
For coffee lovers, you might think of teaware as like the espresso machine of the tea world. To casual drinkers or the untrained eye, it just looks like a nice object that makes the thing you drink—and nothing more. But for those who obsess it can become an endless quest of sourcing and seeking, of pride and cost. A life’s pursuit, even. There is no small amount of money to be spent at the top end of teaware buying—may I call your attention to the infamous Chengua-era “chicken cup,” which sold for $35 million at Sotheby’s in 2014. For our purposes this guide caps objects at the $500 range, with prices average considerably less for most of the offerings.
Photo by Anthony Jordan III.
Note that this guide only barely touches on the world of Yixing, the traditional tea pottery of Jiangsu, made using porous clay in a style dating back to the 10th century. This is its own whole world, a vast guide I don’t feel prepared to lead at this time—perhaps in a few more years.
For now, these wholesalers and makers are more than enough to get you started and find new favorites. The guide below is hopelessly biased towards my own personal taste but hey—teaware is supposed to be personal. That’s part of the fun, and it’s something I hope you are inspired to explore further with support from this guide
A Solid Foundation
Photo courtesy of Rishi Tea.
Rishi Tea
Rishi is a truly solid place to get started with home teawares, offering for example this workhorse starter gaiwan for $12, and this cute little basic tea tray for $25. They’ve also got a lovely collection of flex items, like this stunning blue studio-made celadon “fairness pitcher” from Taiwan, or this rustic clay and mineral cup. Rishi ships free domestic at $25, which is plenty to get started making gong fu cha—pair that $12 gaiwan with, say, a couple of oolong samples (we like Rishi’s Iron Goddess of Mercy and Phoenix Dancong) and you are off to the races.
Photo by Anthony Jordan III.
Breville
Breville is the presenting sponsor of Tea Week on Sprudge—for which we thank them!—but they also produce a range of tea-focused hot water boilers and teamakers we have no lie legit been happily using in Sprudge Studios for the last few years, long before this content package was a twinkle in the editorial eye. The Breville Tea Maker Compact‘s tech allows you to set up brew parameters for whatever kind of tea you’re into; the machine’s automated basket then plunges your brew into water heated to your temp of choice. When the cycle is done, the basket lifts out of the water, ensuring you won’t oversteep. I’d liken this machine to something like a nice home batch brewer, a simplifier that’s perfect for tea making on a busy morning or for large groups (for which the classic Tea Maker is a bigger, better fit).
Another option is the Breville Smart Tea Infuser, which we especially dig these Tea Makers for their handiness with single-steep tisanes, like those from Smith Tea, Song Tea, and Tea Dealers featured in our tisane spotlight. We also really like their IQ Kettle Pure (pictured above) for heating water consistently and at scale—you can transfer from there into a ceramic kettle for service, or pour directly from the Breville IQ.
If you are looking for a fusion of tea, taste and tech, this is the gear for you.
Photo courtesy of Manual.
Manual Tea Maker No1
Chicago tinkerer Creighton Barman puts out new stuff each year, typically pre-funded on Kickstarter, but we’re still in love with this 2016 release, the Tea Maker No1, a modernist reinterpretation of the gaiwan built for ease of brewing. Double-walled glass is the hook here, which keeps the Tea Maker cool to the touch throughout the brewing process, and also gives you peek-a-boo viewing at all that beautiful steeping action. I think these gaiwans offer a rare degree of utility no matter where you are in terms of tea knowledge and experience—they are rad and very forgiving for beginners who are still mastering the whole gaiwan thing, but also fun for experts who want to incorporate western and modern influences into their teaware collection.
Let’s Geek Out
Photo by Anthony Jordan III.
Bitterleaf
With full respect to Bitterleaf’s collection of teas for drinking (featured in our buying guide), the site’s assortment of teawares, tea tools, tea pets, and assorted Chinese tea ephemera is truly deep and excellent.
From beautiful little studio tea cups (starting around $8) to Chaozhou teapots in a range of classic styles (more like $80) to really cute hand-painted animal vessels ($35) to all manner of entry-level trays and supports (prices vary) and much more, there are hundreds of pieces of tea kit to shop from and swoon over at Bitterleaf. I especially like their selection of “tea pets,” little clay figurines typically depicting children or animals, incorporated into tea service as a symbol of good luck. You “feed” the tea pet with excess water or tea throughout the teamaking process, with the clay left to develop a lovely luster over repeat feedings. (It’s fun. Don’t @ me.)
Photo by Anthony Jordan III.
Song Tea
Song Tea are also featured in our tea buying guide for their literally life-changing (as in it changed my life) compendium of meticulously curated tea offerings. But the ceramics offered by Song are on another level. Founder Peter Luong has an eye for relatively young and emerging artists, making commissions across his travels to Taiwan. Works by artists like Zhang Yun Chen (Nantou), Qiu Qing Yun (Meinong), and Hu Tie Ha (Jiefen) evoke what’s possible at the blurred edge of collectible art and practical working pottery. I cannot realistically see myself being someone who collects art to hang on the wall, but the idea of owning this Husk #2 tea bowl by Zhang Yun Chen gives me heart palpitations. If you are, say, truly enjoying tea week and would like to, you know, say thank you as a grateful reader or whatever, please buy this for me. DMs are open.
Photo courtesy of Pu.Erh.Sk
Pu-Erh.Sk
Based in Slovakia, Pu-Erh.sk is an online webshop shipping worldwide, focused on sheng and shou Pu’er teas from Yunnan. Their tea sourcing is concise and well-considered—the gushu heads love ‘em—but for me the site’s focus on Eastern European ceramicists and teaware artisans has been a revelation. Czech artists like Jiří Duchek and Jura Lang are building truly compelling, one-of-a-kind teawares that fuse traditional regional clays with far-flung design influences from the east and west. Pieces like this gorgeous Jura Lang shiboridashi (a kind of Japanese easy gaiwan) are handmade, wood-fired, visually stunning, and sure to grow in beauty over repeated use. For beginning collectors and enthusiasts to be able to get in the door with an artist-specific work like this at just €65 is really special. Elsewhere on the site, Swedish artist Stefan Andersson makes a range of gorgeous wares, while Norwegian brand Ad.Infinitum offers bespoke and vintage tea ceremony linens. All of these makers are brands with followings in their own right, collected by Pu-Erh.sk for easy ordering and global shipping.
Everybody’s taste is different, and a lot of tea ceramics collections start and end in Asia, with no deviation. But I really grok the vibe of this stuff coming out of Eastern Europe. To get in at the cutting edge of small maker European ceramics artistry, go here.
Ceramicists To Watch—And Collect
*A note: While I am personally passionate about ceramics and hopelessly biased towards its validity and urgency as an art form, I also think you—whomever you are reading this—might really dig works from the artists below. The idea of placing a commission with an individual artist might seem intimidating or overly expensive, but we’re not talking George Ohr here; works from these artists don’t typically cost more than $100 for a single piece of teaware, and more like $30-$50 for a handmade cup or set of cups. For less cost than a single dinner at a fancy restaurant you can own and put into daily use your own personal work from a talented artist. It will make your tea taste better, your kitchen look cuter, and who knows—in 50 years you might get a segment on the Antiques Roadshow.
Here are a few talented and emerging ceramicists to follow.
Photo via Song Tea.
Lilith Rockett
Portland ceramicist Lilith Rockett works across a range of expressions for home pottery, including plates, lighting, vases, and abstract decorative objects. Her style—lustrous soft milky white porcelain, entirely handmade—translates well into tea, especially the stunning wheel-thrown porcelain gaiwan. A significant amount of tea consumed for the purposes of Tea Week on Sprudge was steeped in just such a piece. Rockett has a webshop, and also accepts limited commissions. You can find her work at some of the best restaurants in the United States, including The French Laundry (Napa), Smyth (Chicago), Saison (San Francisco), and Nodoguro (Portland).
Follow Lilith Rockett on Instagram.
Photo via Carole Neilson.
Carole Neilson
Buzzy San Francisco-based artist Carole Neilson fuses the rural pottery traditions of her native Alsace with an irresistible contemporary immediacy. Her eye-catching signature glazes evoke smoke fumes and clouds of dust, making for pottery with an earth-dappled glow. Neilson’s range of works include original sculpture pieces and stunning bowl and plate sets, but for tea (and coffee!) drinkers her small cups and pitchers make a lively addition to any collection. Neilson’s work is blowing up, with a growing list of stockists, gallery exhibitions at spaces like Hugomento, pop-up dinners around the country (including a recent dinner at Omaha’s Archetype Coffee), and a successful recent series of artist grants. She is truly an artist to watch. Neilson has a webshop and accepts limited commissions.
Follow Carole Neilson Ceramics on Instagram.
Photo by Anthony Jordan III.
Qi Pottery
Kim Whyee Kee of Qi Pottery first learned his art behind bars. After serving time in the Singaporean corrections system for gang-related crimes, Kee graduated from an arts college, helped co-found a variety of initiatives working with at-risk youth, and launched Qi Pottery in 2016. His style echoes ancient tea traditions, but does so through a burst of heart-stopping colors that demand attention. Vivid pinks, deep blues, mesmerizing blacks, coral reds—Easter egg pastels that fuse the practical nature of teaware with the elegance of a home statement piece. But this is no gimmick maker—Qi Pottery’s mastery extends to more simple forms, like these beautiful rusted large format cups.
Photo by Anthony Jordan III.
It’s simply some of the most beautiful ceramics work I’ve ever seen, and for an artist with just a few public showings so far, you can certainly expect these pieces to become more and more sought after and valuable over the years. Qi Pottery has a website, but no webstore. If you’re interested in purchasing an existing piece or making a commission, please contact the artist directly via email or Instagram.
Follow Kim Whye Kee of Qi Pottery on Instagram.
Photo by Anthony Jordan III.
Arturo Alvarez
A full-time artist dedicated to original teawares, Arturo Alvarez is based in Olympia, Washington, and crafts art in a range of styles and expressions. We commissioned Alvarez for our office tea set at Sprudge Studios (we’ll be serving tea there this week as part of the Tea Week fun), and follow his regular updates on Instagram, where his account @your_pencil is part of a thriving Instagram ceramics community. Perhaps his most distinctive pieces involve incorporating found materials, including driftwood handles made from wood found across Puget Sound beaches, but this is an artist growing and advancing his craft before our very eyes, letting it all play out online. Follow him and watch along—it feels like he’s debuting new pieces almost every day.
Photo by Anthony Jordan III.
Arturo Alvarez sells a limited number of teawares online via Etsy. Contact the artist directly via Instagram for commissions or to purchase pieces featured on his account.
Follow Arturo Alvarez on Instagram.
Photo by Anthony Jordan III.
Andrzej Bero
A teaware potter out of Warsaw, Andrzej Bero specializes in the shiboridashi—a gaiwan variant that’s easy to use and, in the right hands, a piece of working art. Bero’s shibos are made from clay that feels coarse and tactile to the touch, in a range of dark reds, greens, and blues. This style translates especially well to larger pieces, like his 300ml teapots, which are hotly in demand for tea services around the world. Andrzej Bero has a website but no webstore; a limited number of his works are available for purchase via the aforementioned Pu-Erh.sk. Contact the artist directly for commissions and availability.
Follow Andrzej Bero on Instagram.
Jordan Michelman is a co-founder and editor at Sprudge Media Network. Read more Jordan Michelman on Sprudge.
Editor: Scott Norton.
Top photo by Anthony Jordan III (@ace_lace).
Sprudge Tea Week is presented by Breville USA.
The post The 2019 Sprudge Guide To Teamakers and Ceramics appeared first on Sprudge.
The 2019 Sprudge Guide To Teamakers and Ceramics published first on https://medium.com/@LinLinCoffee
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The 2019 Sprudge Guide To Teamakers and Ceramics
I hesitated in writing this guide. The world of teaware is vast and intimidating, and can be a money pit of fakes and forgeries. It is also where so much of the joy in loving tea can be derived. Ultimately our team felt Tea Week would be incomplete without some sort of feature on teaware. My very best attempt at this here in 2019 is what follows.
For coffee lovers, you might think of teaware as like the espresso machine of the tea world. To casual drinkers or the untrained eye, it just looks like a nice object that makes the thing you drink—and nothing more. But for those who obsess it can become an endless quest of sourcing and seeking, of pride and cost. A life’s pursuit, even. There is no small amount of money to be spent at the top end of teaware buying—may I call your attention to the infamous Chengua-era “chicken cup,” which sold for $35 million at Sotheby’s in 2014. For our purposes this guide caps objects at the $500 range, with prices average considerably less for most of the offerings.
Photo by Anthony Jordan III.
Note that this guide only barely touches on the world of Yixing, the traditional tea pottery of Jiangsu, made using porous clay in a style dating back to the 10th century. This is its own whole world, a vast guide I don’t feel prepared to lead at this time—perhaps in a few more years.
For now, these wholesalers and makers are more than enough to get you started and find new favorites. The guide below is hopelessly biased towards my own personal taste but hey—teaware is supposed to be personal. That’s part of the fun, and it’s something I hope you are inspired to explore further with support from this guide
A Solid Foundation
Photo courtesy of Rishi Tea.
Rishi Tea
Rishi is a truly solid place to get started with home teawares, offering for example this workhorse starter gaiwan for $12, and this cute little basic tea tray for $25. They’ve also got a lovely collection of flex items, like this stunning blue studio-made celadon “fairness pitcher” from Taiwan, or this rustic clay and mineral cup. Rishi ships free domestic at $25, which is plenty to get started making gong fu cha—pair that $12 gaiwan with, say, a couple of oolong samples (we like Rishi’s Iron Goddess of Mercy and Phoenix Dancong) and you are off to the races.
Photo by Anthony Jordan III.
Breville
Breville is the presenting sponsor of Tea Week on Sprudge—for which we thank them!—but they also produce a range of tea-focused hot water boilers and teamakers we have no lie legit been happily using in Sprudge Studios for the last few years, long before this content package was a twinkle in the editorial eye. The Breville Tea Maker Compact‘s tech allows you to set up brew parameters for whatever kind of tea you’re into; the machine’s automated basket then plunges your brew into water heated to your temp of choice. When the cycle is done, the basket lifts out of the water, ensuring you won’t oversteep. I’d liken this machine to something like a nice home batch brewer, a simplifier that’s perfect for tea making on a busy morning or for large groups (for which the classic Tea Maker is a bigger, better fit).
Another option is the Breville Smart Tea Infuser, which we especially dig these Tea Makers for their handiness with single-steep tisanes, like those from Smith Tea, Song Tea, and Tea Dealers featured in our tisane spotlight. We also really like their IQ Kettle Pure (pictured above) for heating water consistently and at scale—you can transfer from there into a ceramic kettle for service, or pour directly from the Breville IQ.
If you are looking for a fusion of tea, taste and tech, this is the gear for you.
Photo courtesy of Manual.
Manual Tea Maker No1
Chicago tinkerer Creighton Barman puts out new stuff each year, typically pre-funded on Kickstarter, but we’re still in love with this 2016 release, the Tea Maker No1, a modernist reinterpretation of the gaiwan built for ease of brewing. Double-walled glass is the hook here, which keeps the Tea Maker cool to the touch throughout the brewing process, and also gives you peek-a-boo viewing at all that beautiful steeping action. I think these gaiwans offer a rare degree of utility no matter where you are in terms of tea knowledge and experience—they are rad and very forgiving for beginners who are still mastering the whole gaiwan thing, but also fun for experts who want to incorporate western and modern influences into their teaware collection.
Let’s Geek Out
Photo by Anthony Jordan III.
Bitterleaf
With full respect to Bitterleaf’s collection of teas for drinking (featured in our buying guide), the site’s assortment of teawares, tea tools, tea pets, and assorted Chinese tea ephemera is truly deep and excellent.
From beautiful little studio tea cups (starting around $8) to Chaozhou teapots in a range of classic styles (more like $80) to really cute hand-painted animal vessels ($35) to all manner of entry-level trays and supports (prices vary) and much more, there are hundreds of pieces of tea kit to shop from and swoon over at Bitterleaf. I especially like their selection of “tea pets,” little clay figurines typically depicting children or animals, incorporated into tea service as a symbol of good luck. You “feed” the tea pet with excess water or tea throughout the teamaking process, with the clay left to develop a lovely luster over repeat feedings. (It’s fun. Don’t @ me.)
Photo by Anthony Jordan III.
Song Tea
Song Tea are also featured in our tea buying guide for their literally life-changing (as in it changed my life) compendium of meticulously curated tea offerings. But the ceramics offered by Song are on another level. Founder Peter Luong has an eye for relatively young and emerging artists, making commissions across his travels to Taiwan. Works by artists like Zhang Yun Chen (Nantou), Qiu Qing Yun (Meinong), and Hu Tie Ha (Jiefen) evoke what’s possible at the blurred edge of collectible art and practical working pottery. I cannot realistically see myself being someone who collects art to hang on the wall, but the idea of owning this Husk #2 tea bowl by Zhang Yun Chen gives me heart palpitations. If you are, say, truly enjoying tea week and would like to, you know, say thank you as a grateful reader or whatever, please buy this for me. DMs are open.
Photo courtesy of Pu.Erh.Sk
Pu-Erh.Sk
Based in Slovakia, Pu-Erh.sk is an online webshop shipping worldwide, focused on sheng and shou Pu’er teas from Yunnan. Their tea sourcing is concise and well-considered—the gushu heads love ‘em—but for me the site’s focus on Eastern European ceramicists and teaware artisans has been a revelation. Czech artists like Jiří Duchek and Jura Lang are building truly compelling, one-of-a-kind teawares that fuse traditional regional clays with far-flung design influences from the east and west. Pieces like this gorgeous Jura Lang shiboridashi (a kind of Japanese easy gaiwan) are handmade, wood-fired, visually stunning, and sure to grow in beauty over repeated use. For beginning collectors and enthusiasts to be able to get in the door with an artist-specific work like this at just €65 is really special. Elsewhere on the site, Swedish artist Stefan Andersson makes a range of gorgeous wares, while Norwegian brand Ad.Infinitum offers bespoke and vintage tea ceremony linens. All of these makers are brands with followings in their own right, collected by Pu-Erh.sk for easy ordering and global shipping.
Everybody’s taste is different, and a lot of tea ceramics collections start and end in Asia, with no deviation. But I really grok the vibe of this stuff coming out of Eastern Europe. To get in at the cutting edge of small maker European ceramics artistry, go here.
Ceramicists To Watch—And Collect
*A note: While I am personally passionate about ceramics and hopelessly biased towards its validity and urgency as an art form, I also think you—whomever you are reading this—might really dig works from the artists below. The idea of placing a commission with an individual artist might seem intimidating or overly expensive, but we’re not talking George Ohr here; works from these artists don’t typically cost more than $100 for a single piece of teaware, and more like $30-$50 for a handmade cup or set of cups. For less cost than a single dinner at a fancy restaurant you can own and put into daily use your own personal work from a talented artist. It will make your tea taste better, your kitchen look cuter, and who knows—in 50 years you might get a segment on the Antiques Roadshow.
Here are a few talented and emerging ceramicists to follow.
Photo via Song Tea.
Lilith Rockett
Portland ceramicist Lilith Rockett works across a range of expressions for home pottery, including plates, lighting, vases, and abstract decorative objects. Her style—lustrous soft milky white porcelain, entirely handmade—translates well into tea, especially the stunning wheel-thrown porcelain gaiwan. A significant amount of tea consumed for the purposes of Tea Week on Sprudge was steeped in just such a piece. Rockett has a webshop, and also accepts limited commissions. You can find her work at some of the best restaurants in the United States, including The French Laundry (Napa), Smyth (Chicago), Saison (San Francisco), and Nodoguro (Portland).
Follow Lilith Rockett on Instagram.
Photo via Carole Neilson.
Carole Neilson
Buzzy San Francisco-based artist Carole Neilson fuses the rural pottery traditions of her native Alsace with an irresistible contemporary immediacy. Her eye-catching signature glazes evoke smoke fumes and clouds of dust, making for pottery with an earth-dappled glow. Neilson’s range of works include original sculpture pieces and stunning bowl and plate sets, but for tea (and coffee!) drinkers her small cups and pitchers make a lively addition to any collection. Neilson’s work is blowing up, with a growing list of stockists, gallery exhibitions at spaces like Hugomento, pop-up dinners around the country (including a recent dinner at Omaha’s Archetype Coffee), and a successful recent series of artist grants. She is truly an artist to watch. Neilson has a webshop and accepts limited commissions.
Follow Carole Neilson Ceramics on Instagram.
Photo by Anthony Jordan III.
Qi Pottery
Kim Whyee Kee of Qi Pottery first learned his art behind bars. After serving time in the Singaporean corrections system for gang-related crimes, Kee graduated from an arts college, helped co-found a variety of initiatives working with at-risk youth, and launched Qi Pottery in 2016. His style echoes ancient tea traditions, but does so through a burst of heart-stopping colors that demand attention. Vivid pinks, deep blues, mesmerizing blacks, coral reds—Easter egg pastels that fuse the practical nature of teaware with the elegance of a home statement piece. But this is no gimmick maker—Qi Pottery’s mastery extends to more simple forms, like these beautiful rusted large format cups.
Photo by Anthony Jordan III.
It’s simply some of the most beautiful ceramics work I’ve ever seen, and for an artist with just a few public showings so far, you can certainly expect these pieces to become more and more sought after and valuable over the years. Qi Pottery has a website, but no webstore. If you’re interested in purchasing an existing piece or making a commission, please contact the artist directly via email or Instagram.
Follow Kim Whye Kee of Qi Pottery on Instagram.
Photo by Anthony Jordan III.
Arturo Alvarez
A full-time artist dedicated to original teawares, Arturo Alvarez is based in Olympia, Washington, and crafts art in a range of styles and expressions. We commissioned Alvarez for our office tea set at Sprudge Studios (we’ll be serving tea there this week as part of the Tea Week fun), and follow his regular updates on Instagram, where his account @your_pencil is part of a thriving Instagram ceramics community. Perhaps his most distinctive pieces involve incorporating found materials, including driftwood handles made from wood found across Puget Sound beaches, but this is an artist growing and advancing his craft before our very eyes, letting it all play out online. Follow him and watch along—it feels like he’s debuting new pieces almost every day.
Photo by Anthony Jordan III.
Arturo Alvarez sells a limited number of teawares online via Etsy. Contact the artist directly via Instagram for commissions or to purchase pieces featured on his account.
Follow Arturo Alvarez on Instagram.
Photo by Anthony Jordan III.
Andrzej Bero
A teaware potter out of Warsaw, Andrzej Bero specializes in the shiboridashi—a gaiwan variant that’s easy to use and, in the right hands, a piece of working art. Bero’s shibos are made from clay that feels coarse and tactile to the touch, in a range of dark reds, greens, and blues. This style translates especially well to larger pieces, like his 300ml teapots, which are hotly in demand for tea services around the world. Andrzej Bero has a website but no webstore; a limited number of his works are available for purchase via the aforementioned Pu-Erh.sk. Contact the artist directly for commissions and availability.
Follow Andrzej Bero on Instagram.
Jordan Michelman is a co-founder and editor at Sprudge Media Network. Read more Jordan Michelman on Sprudge.
Editor: Scott Norton.
Top photo by Anthony Jordan III (@ace_lace).
Sprudge Tea Week is presented by Breville USA.
The post The 2019 Sprudge Guide To Teamakers and Ceramics appeared first on Sprudge.
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The 2019 Sprudge Guide To Teamakers and Ceramics
I hesitated in writing this guide. The world of teaware is vast and intimidating, and can be a money pit of fakes and forgeries. It is also where so much of the joy in loving tea can be derived. Ultimately our team felt Tea Week would be incomplete without some sort of feature on teaware. My very best attempt at this here in 2019 is what follows.
For coffee lovers, you might think of teaware as like the espresso machine of the tea world. To casual drinkers or the untrained eye, it just looks like a nice object that makes the thing you drink—and nothing more. But for those who obsess it can become an endless quest of sourcing and seeking, of pride and cost. A life’s pursuit, even. There is no small amount of money to be spent at the top end of teaware buying—may I call your attention to the infamous Chengua-era “chicken cup,” which sold for $35 million at Sotheby’s in 2014. For our purposes this guide caps objects at the $500 range, with prices average considerably less for most of the offerings.
Photo by Anthony Jordan III.
Note that this guide only barely touches on the world of Yixing, the traditional tea pottery of Jiangsu, made using porous clay in a style dating back to the 10th century. This is its own whole world, a vast guide I don’t feel prepared to lead at this time—perhaps in a few more years.
For now, these wholesalers and makers are more than enough to get you started and find new favorites. The guide below is hopelessly biased towards my own personal taste but hey—teaware is supposed to be personal. That’s part of the fun, and it’s something I hope you are inspired to explore further with support from this guide
A Solid Foundation
Photo courtesy of Rishi Tea.
Rishi Tea
Rishi is a truly solid place to get started with home teawares, offering for example this workhorse starter gaiwan for $12, and this cute little basic tea tray for $25. They’ve also got a lovely collection of flex items, like this stunning blue studio-made celadon “fairness pitcher” from Taiwan, or this rustic clay and mineral cup. Rishi ships free domestic at $25, which is plenty to get started making gong fu cha—pair that $12 gaiwan with, say, a couple of oolong samples (we like Rishi’s Iron Goddess of Mercy and Phoenix Dancong) and you are off to the races.
Photo by Anthony Jordan III.
Breville
Breville is the presenting sponsor of Tea Week on Sprudge—for which we thank them!—but they also produce a range of tea-focused hot water boilers and teamakers we have no lie legit been happily using in Sprudge Studios for the last few years, long before this content package was a twinkle in the editorial eye. The Breville Tea Maker Compact‘s tech allows you to set up brew parameters for whatever kind of tea you’re into; the machine’s automated basket then plunges your brew into water heated to your temp of choice. When the cycle is done, the basket lifts out of the water, ensuring you won’t oversteep. I’d liken this machine to something like a nice home batch brewer, a simplifier that’s perfect for tea making on a busy morning or for large groups (for which the classic Tea Maker is a bigger, better fit).
Another option is the Breville Smart Tea Infuser, which we especially dig these Tea Makers for their handiness with single-steep tisanes, like those from Smith Tea, Song Tea, and Tea Dealers featured in our tisane spotlight. We also really like their IQ Kettle Pure (pictured above) for heating water consistently and at scale—you can transfer from there into a ceramic kettle for service, or pour directly from the Breville IQ.
If you are looking for a fusion of tea, taste and tech, this is the gear for you.
Photo courtesy of Manual.
Manual Tea Maker No1
Chicago tinkerer Creighton Barman puts out new stuff each year, typically pre-funded on Kickstarter, but we’re still in love with this 2016 release, the Tea Maker No1, a modernist reinterpretation of the gaiwan built for ease of brewing. Double-walled glass is the hook here, which keeps the Tea Maker cool to the touch throughout the brewing process, and also gives you peek-a-boo viewing at all that beautiful steeping action. I think these gaiwans offer a rare degree of utility no matter where you are in terms of tea knowledge and experience—they are rad and very forgiving for beginners who are still mastering the whole gaiwan thing, but also fun for experts who want to incorporate western and modern influences into their teaware collection.
Let’s Geek Out
Photo by Anthony Jordan III.
Bitterleaf
With full respect to Bitterleaf’s collection of teas for drinking (featured in our buying guide), the site’s assortment of teawares, tea tools, tea pets, and assorted Chinese tea ephemera is truly deep and excellent.
From beautiful little studio tea cups (starting around $8) to Chaozhou teapots in a range of classic styles (more like $80) to really cute hand-painted animal vessels ($35) to all manner of entry-level trays and supports (prices vary) and much more, there are hundreds of pieces of tea kit to shop from and swoon over at Bitterleaf. I especially like their selection of “tea pets,” little clay figurines typically depicting children or animals, incorporated into tea service as a symbol of good luck. You “feed” the tea pet with excess water or tea throughout the teamaking process, with the clay left to develop a lovely luster over repeat feedings. (It’s fun. Don’t @ me.)
Photo by Anthony Jordan III.
Song Tea
Song Tea are also featured in our tea buying guide for their literally life-changing (as in it changed my life) compendium of meticulously curated tea offerings. But the ceramics offered by Song are on another level. Founder Peter Luong has an eye for relatively young and emerging artists, making commissions across his travels to Taiwan. Works by artists like Zhang Yun Chen (Nantou), Qiu Qing Yun (Meinong), and Hu Tie Ha (Jiefen) evoke what’s possible at the blurred edge of collectible art and practical working pottery. I cannot realistically see myself being someone who collects art to hang on the wall, but the idea of owning this Husk #2 tea bowl by Zhang Yun Chen gives me heart palpitations. If you are, say, truly enjoying tea week and would like to, you know, say thank you as a grateful reader or whatever, please buy this for me. DMs are open.
Photo courtesy of Pu.Erh.Sk
Pu-Erh.Sk
Based in Slovakia, Pu-Erh.sk is an online webshop shipping worldwide, focused on sheng and shou Pu’er teas from Yunnan. Their tea sourcing is concise and well-considered—the gushu heads love ‘em—but for me the site’s focus on Eastern European ceramicists and teaware artisans has been a revelation. Czech artists like Jiří Duchek and Jura Lang are building truly compelling, one-of-a-kind teawares that fuse traditional regional clays with far-flung design influences from the east and west. Pieces like this gorgeous Jura Lang shiboridashi (a kind of Japanese easy gaiwan) are handmade, wood-fired, visually stunning, and sure to grow in beauty over repeated use. For beginning collectors and enthusiasts to be able to get in the door with an artist-specific work like this at just €65 is really special. Elsewhere on the site, Swedish artist Stefan Andersson makes a range of gorgeous wares, while Norwegian brand Ad.Infinitum offers bespoke and vintage tea ceremony linens. All of these makers are brands with followings in their own right, collected by Pu-Erh.sk for easy ordering and global shipping.
Everybody’s taste is different, and a lot of tea ceramics collections start and end in Asia, with no deviation. But I really grok the vibe of this stuff coming out of Eastern Europe. To get in at the cutting edge of small maker European ceramics artistry, go here.
Ceramicists To Watch—And Collect
*A note: While I am personally passionate about ceramics and hopelessly biased towards its validity and urgency as an art form, I also think you—whomever you are reading this—might really dig works from the artists below. The idea of placing a commission with an individual artist might seem intimidating or overly expensive, but we’re not talking George Ohr here; works from these artists don’t typically cost more than $100 for a single piece of teaware, and more like $30-$50 for a handmade cup or set of cups. For less cost than a single dinner at a fancy restaurant you can own and put into daily use your own personal work from a talented artist. It will make your tea taste better, your kitchen look cuter, and who knows—in 50 years you might get a segment on the Antiques Roadshow.
Here are a few talented and emerging ceramicists to follow.
Photo via Song Tea.
Lilith Rockett
Portland ceramicist Lilith Rockett works across a range of expressions for home pottery, including plates, lighting, vases, and abstract decorative objects. Her style—lustrous soft milky white porcelain, entirely handmade—translates well into tea, especially the stunning wheel-thrown porcelain gaiwan. A significant amount of tea consumed for the purposes of Tea Week on Sprudge was steeped in just such a piece. Rockett has a webshop, and also accepts limited commissions. You can find her work at some of the best restaurants in the United States, including The French Laundry (Napa), Smyth (Chicago), Saison (San Francisco), and Nodoguro (Portland).
Follow Lilith Rockett on Instagram.
Photo via Carole Neilson.
Carole Neilson
Buzzy San Francisco-based artist Carole Neilson fuses the rural pottery traditions of her native Alsace with an irresistible contemporary immediacy. Her eye-catching signature glazes evoke smoke fumes and clouds of dust, making for pottery with an earth-dappled glow. Neilson’s range of works include original sculpture pieces and stunning bowl and plate sets, but for tea (and coffee!) drinkers her small cups and pitchers make a lively addition to any collection. Neilson’s work is blowing up, with a growing list of stockists, gallery exhibitions at spaces like Hugomento, pop-up dinners around the country (including a recent dinner at Omaha’s Archetype Coffee), and a successful recent series of artist grants. She is truly an artist to watch. Neilson has a webshop and accepts limited commissions.
Follow Carole Neilson Ceramics on Instagram.
Photo by Anthony Jordan III.
Qi Pottery
Kim Whyee Kee of Qi Pottery first learned his art behind bars. After serving time in the Singaporean corrections system for gang-related crimes, Kee graduated from an arts college, helped co-found a variety of initiatives working with at-risk youth, and launched Qi Pottery in 2016. His style echoes ancient tea traditions, but does so through a burst of heart-stopping colors that demand attention. Vivid pinks, deep blues, mesmerizing blacks, coral reds—Easter egg pastels that fuse the practical nature of teaware with the elegance of a home statement piece. But this is no gimmick maker—Qi Pottery’s mastery extends to more simple forms, like these beautiful rusted large format cups.
Photo by Anthony Jordan III.
It’s simply some of the most beautiful ceramics work I’ve ever seen, and for an artist with just a few public showings so far, you can certainly expect these pieces to become more and more sought after and valuable over the years. Qi Pottery has a website, but no webstore. If you’re interested in purchasing an existing piece or making a commission, please contact the artist directly via email or Instagram.
Follow Kim Whye Kee of Qi Pottery on Instagram.
Photo by Anthony Jordan III.
Arturo Alvarez
A full-time artist dedicated to original teawares, Arturo Alvarez is based in Olympia, Washington, and crafts art in a range of styles and expressions. We commissioned Alvarez for our office tea set at Sprudge Studios (we’ll be serving tea there this week as part of the Tea Week fun), and follow his regular updates on Instagram, where his account @your_pencil is part of a thriving Instagram ceramics community. Perhaps his most distinctive pieces involve incorporating found materials, including driftwood handles made from wood found across Puget Sound beaches, but this is an artist growing and advancing his craft before our very eyes, letting it all play out online. Follow him and watch along—it feels like he’s debuting new pieces almost every day.
Photo by Anthony Jordan III.
Arturo Alvarez sells a limited number of teawares online via Etsy. Contact the artist directly via Instagram for commissions or to purchase pieces featured on his account.
Follow Arturo Alvarez on Instagram.
Photo by Anthony Jordan III.
Andrzej Bero
A teaware potter out of Warsaw, Andrzej Bero specializes in the shiboridashi—a gaiwan variant that’s easy to use and, in the right hands, a piece of working art. Bero’s shibos are made from clay that feels coarse and tactile to the touch, in a range of dark reds, greens, and blues. This style translates especially well to larger pieces, like his 300ml teapots, which are hotly in demand for tea services around the world. Andrzej Bero has a website but no webstore; a limited number of his works are available for purchase via the aforementioned Pu-Erh.sk. Contact the artist directly for commissions and availability.
Follow Andrzej Bero on Instagram.
Jordan Michelman is a co-founder and editor at Sprudge Media Network. Read more Jordan Michelman on Sprudge.
Editor: Scott Norton.
Top photo by Anthony Jordan III (@ace_lace).
Sprudge Tea Week is presented by Breville USA.
The post The 2019 Sprudge Guide To Teamakers and Ceramics appeared first on Sprudge.
from Sprudge https://ift.tt/2TkAiuQ
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IS THIS ART?
Countless figures throughout history have tried to explain this incredibly complex question: What is art? And more importantly, what isn’t art?
But still the institutions have no real answer, no common ground upon which they could define a normative of what defines art. Brut art is a problem, so are other outsider artists, and home schooled creatives that defy or just never become part of the institutional system.
It’s the carpenters that put more than the usual love and attention to detail in building their “consumer objects”. It’s the iPhones and iPads and other designer products that always walk the thin line between art and function.
Then you have others that do not agree with the institutional idea that one needs to even be part of the system to be considered an artist. You only need to have ideas and communicate them with the world via your production.
And in the philosophy of aesthetics — the field that studies this question ontologically — there is even more confusion. A materialist philosopher that believes all reality is only material and no immaterial reality can ever exist, will tell you art is pure matter, pure reciprocity between the object and its perceiver.
But they might also say that art doesn’t even need spectators to exist — like the whole status of art is somehow imbued inside the object that it is representing. Almost comically, some believe art is a magical aura (but of course physical, never metaphysical or non-material) that lives in an object, a special part — almost like an extra organ of the body of that object — that pumps pure artistic energy through it and makes us instantly experience art, if we indeed are knowledgable and receptive enough to perceive it.
But it’s all a load of incoherent and over-theorised bull if you ask me.
For me, all of this began with Descartes, when he decided to divide reality into two connected but distinct realities: the material and immaterial world.
There are even jokes about how the common person in the street is always a cartesian — a follower of Descartes — even if they themselves don’t know it; all average people believe in a body and in a soul as two distinct entities.
Now, I won’t go into the fallacies of such beliefs too much as this is an art channel not a philosophy discussion, but just to give a bit of context, I’d like to present three interesting and extremely precise arguments for the contrary — that art is not an object, but an experience.
Because if art is an experience, we surely can come to understand that truly it is impossible to create a functional theory, a list of checkboxes that anything considered art has to tick to really become art, or even fine art.
The first is by Thomas Nagel, the author of the story titled What It Is Like To Be A Bat, who posed an interesting proposition:
While humans can understand and imagine the behaviours of creatures, in this case a bat; merely being able to imagine how it would feel to be able to fly, navigate by sonar, hang upside down and eat insects, would never really be the same as a bat’s perspective.
Nagel claims that even if we were able to gradually turn into bats (think Kafka, but more uplifting), our brains would not have been wired as a bat’s from birth; therefore, we would only be able to experience the life and behaviours of a bat, rather than their mindset.
To behave as something isn’t equal to being something, regardless of how much it looks, swims and quacks like a duck, the shocker is, it might just be a rubber ducky.
And this goes for our language and communication problem too; I could paint a picture of an apple being picked by a woman somewhere in a forest. Some would see a nice lady picking apples, others would see the highly complex concept of Ancestral Sin. Same painting, same communication, immensely different results.
The next story, written by Frank Jackson is also about a woman who’s life is changed because of an apple — not because of eating it but merely by looking at it! Titled What Mary Didn’t Know, it describes a very curious lady who loved natural sciences — the field of colour theory especially.
She knew everything there was to know about colours; their wavelengths, the numerous psychological effects colours have on us, the various types of receptors that are utilised in our bodies to see them … just about everything. But she had one issue. She had been educated about all of this in a black-and-white room.
Black-and-white books, TV screens, and furniture — for some weird reason even Mary herself is black-and-white, but it is a story and if it was OK for Little Red Riding Hood to be red, I guess Mary can be colourless too.
So Jackson argued: Even though Mary had all the same information about colours that we do, she had never really experienced them and was therefore missing one crucial piece of information; one important bit of quaila, as philosophers like to call these magical bits of subjective experience, namely actually seeing red.
Jackson proposed that when Mary stepped out of her room and saw a red, juicy apple, she not only saw colour for the first time, she in fact learned something new. Something that she couldn’t have learned through any text book or black-and-white YouTube video.
She gained a new emotional and preceptorial experience — seeing red. (Remember all those people who told us that we can’t learn everything from books, well they were right in a way!)
And the last, and my personal favourite story curiously also evolves around red (philosophers love it for some reason). One of the greatest minds of the 21st century, John Searle wrote a wonderful tale about a talking room.
Titled The Chinese Room, this wonderful tale of speaking Asian walls stirred the lines of cognitive scientists when first presented in 1980. It describes a room, where one would input a piece of written-down information — be it a question, a statement or just a remark about the weather — and the room, after a period of time, would answer back. All in Chinese for some weird reason, probably because Searle himself said he’s awful at speaking Mandarin (The man speaks more than 6 languages fluently though!).
Well, the room wasn’t some magical artefact from a forgotten time, it was operated by one person. And the interesting fact was, that parson had no idea how to speak or write Mandarin. What he did have though was an assortment of instructions and guidelines on what to do and a giant library of cards with Chinese signs, decorating the walls of the room.
Whenever text was slid through the opening in the main wall, he would open the instruction books at the appropriate page depicting the combination of symbols (he was obviously really efficient at what he did and compensated generously for his job, probably owned a villa and a few Ferraris too).
After locating the right page in the manual, he would then find the appropriate cards on the shelves of the room, align them in the order depicted in the instructions and return the answer back though the slit in the wall. And the person on the outside would be absolutely amazed of how wonderful a computer this contraption was!
But the point of Searle’s work wasn’t to explain away computers by using miniature librarians living in our processors and memory units, he wanted to point out a simple yet profound truth about communication, computation and the mind. One that we have heard twice before, albeit in different iterations and with slightly different points.
Syntax (that is the assortment of signals; be it voice signals, written words or electric currents going to the processors of our computers) does not equal semantics (that is the name we give to meaning; the meaning of a word, a picture, a sign … anything that has some symbolical value to anyone).
The only true way to experience art is to, well, experience it. It’s impossible to not experience something if we wish to even try to comprehend it, let alone understand fully what it is about.
It’s like dreaming about something you have never experienced — I know, dreams almost never look like reality, but to be honest, our dreams don’t just appear as a beam of light from god or some bored alien on Mars that decided to give us a transcendental experience because we’re the chosen one to guide human kind into onto the next level of existence.
It’s all just pieced together by everything we experience during our waking days. Every bit of information was consciously or unconsciously experienced and internalised. It’s the same with art.
You need to be present, you are indeed the key to the question of: What art is? Without anyone to view the Mona Lisa, there is no art, just a peculiar object.
Because to know what art is, we also need to know what art isn’t.
But when does art stop to be? Or what if it never even become perceivable to us as art?
In the moment where there are no more men, no more women, and no more children.
And what happens to art then?
It is, like all that is created from an ego, bound to its creator. When he perishes, so does the essence of all his children, leaving behind a heap of empty material shells. But the intricate architectural dams of beavers, the beautiful patterns of various animals and the chirping and poems of all the beautifully performing singing birds. These don’t perish.
Even if there is no man to hear the song, see the pattern and enjoy the complexity of animal life and their creations they still serve an immediate function.
If there is a female Nightingale around, the song is heard, if there are beavers, they will enjoy and understand the dams and the tigers will comprehend their intricate skin patterns — each species forming its own personal language.
And when they’re gone, so are all their features, all their creations.
And you know why?
Because even if today the thought of a non-sociocentric universe is impossible for most, some things in the world actually weren’t made by us. Neither to amuse or to teach. And because of that, they can last quite a bit longer than our concept of art ever will.
Art is an experience, not an object. But it isn’t only a material experience — and no, I’m not saying it’s magic that makes us live and die, because the last time I checked nobody wrote Emet on my head and magically made me a real boy the way the golem becomes alive in Jewish folklore.
But the point to take home is, the more you know, the more you understand about the world around you, the more things will give you the same experience of art, of the sublime.
Because while surely not any object can produce the same power of artistic pleasure — for me it’s a mid-late Rothko painting, for you it might be a conceptual piece with hay and neon or a realistic portrait of Loui XV or just a nice handmade drawing of your child about how much they love you.
The object is only as important as our understanding of it. That’s why learning is paramount. To be a good artist, and even a good spectator we need to constantly expand our horizons. Because the day we stop learning is the day we create a canon in our life.
And as with every determinate belief that only so and so is an artist and the others are imposters, we inevitably become blind to the ineffable vastness of what art really is.
Art is everything. But to the inexperienced and blind, it is less than nothing, because even nothing takes something form us, whereas a foreign object to a closed mind doesn’t even register. It is like it never even existed.
So to truly experience reality — at least a much of it as we possibly can — we need to stay humble, open and childlike in our awe towards the world. If nothing else, we owe it to either God or our parents or ourselves or just to the lovely abyss that the nihilists of us enjoy staring down.
We owe it to whatever makes us stand-up in the morning to give everything the world has to offer a chance. Maybe we will find a new thing we like, but it’s much more likely we’ll discover a previously completely hidden part of reality that was really just hiding in plain sight.
What is art then?
Everything for those of us that aren’t afraid to look.
from Surviving Art http://bit.ly/2WJW4tG
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Travel Diaries: Lima, Peru
Oh man! I promised Peru trip posts much sooner than now. We went in July of 2017. But, ended up pregnant with our second little one shortly after, then Hurricane Harvey happened, then the holidays, and here we are!
So, I'll just start from the beginning.
Our first full day was spent in Lima (our flight in was delayed putting us in Lima after midnight). We visited Casa Diez Canseco before noon and were having lunch at the home.
At Casa Diez Canseco we tried a few local food and drinks including our first pisco sours of the trip. The Peruvians compare the pisco sour to margaritas, but I thought they were even better! Pisco drinks like vodka, in my opinion, and is made by distilling fermented grape juice into a high-proof spirit.
A Peruvian Pisco Sour uses Peruvian pisco as the base liquor and adds freshly squeezed lime juice, syrup, ice, egg white, and Angostura bitters.
We learned about the Diez-Canseco family from Francisco Diez-Canseco (top left photo). He currently exports quinoa from Peru to other countries and has a long history in politics, both himself and his family. Their beautiful family home includes heirlooms like a telegram from JFK to their family when Francisco's grandfather passed.
Following our tour of the home, we enjoyed a lovely lunch of Peruvian dishes looking out to the pool area. If you have the opportunity to visit Casa Diez Canseco, I would highly recommend it! I took so many photos of the solid wood ornate columns, ceiling details, art on the walls, and other gorgeous decor, but that would take an entire post of its own to share!
Next we visited the Monastery of San Francisco in Lima. The pretty yellow exterior and grand entrance were definitely photo worthy in the baroque style. In 1991, it was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List. When visiting the Monastery of San Francisco, you can see the church, monastery, library, and catacombs.
The inside of the building includes original paintings along the walls lining the courtyard depicting the life of St. Francis of Assisi (top left) and beautifully ornate ceilings (top right). The bottom right photo is somewhat of a family tree of the church showing cardinals and popes and such (if my memory serves me right).
Now, the catacombs were quite interesting to both Mr. B and I. Those are real skulls in the bottom left photo! You have to duck if you're somewhat tall (we both had to) to enter the catacombs' small opening. Over 25,000 people were buried there through the early 1800s when it was closed and then reopened by archeologists in 1947 where the bones were all separated like they are displayed now (in sections by body part - definitely a grim experience).
After the monastery, we headed over to the historic center of Lima and the Plaza Mayor (or Plaza de Armas of Lima). Palm trees, colorful buildings, and vibrant flowering plants line the square that once served as a market, bull fighting ring, and even gallows. A few of the buildings creating the plaza include the Government Palace, Cathedral of Lima, and the Archbishop's Palace of Lima.
Following a full day of sights, we found ourselves at Tanta in San Isidro for dinner. When reading different lists of places to eat in Lima, Tanta was a consistent listing (even though it is a chain) by world reknowned Chef Gaston Acurio.
We started our meal with different pisco drinks (both delicious... mine had muddled berries) and ceviche and empanadas. The seafood in Lima is super fresh and the food is flavored well with spices - makes these Louisiana born and raised kids very happy! Entrée wise, I HAD to try the chaufa after reading about the Asian influenced Peruvian dish - tastes like fried rice to me. Its a culinary tradition based on Chinese Cantonese elements fused with traditional Peruvian ingredients, and it was not my last of the trip! Needless to say, I liked it.
If you make it to Peru and don't find time to go to Tanta, there is one in the Lima airport, as well as a location in the US! You'll find Chef Gaston Acurio's Tanta in Chicago. Back to the airport in the morning for us as Cusco was our next destination.
THE LOOK:
Top: Line & Dot Embroidered Top from Cakewalk Style Shop (Sold out, but check out these two: Line & Dot and R & J Couture)
Shorts: Citizens of Humanity
Shoes: Prada Suede Ankle-Wrap Espadrille
Sunglasses: Ilesteva Leonard II Mask Sunglasses
Bag: Marc Jacobs (Previous Season, but here's a new MJ Cross body)
Chokers: Baanou: Hamsa Choker and Velvet Choker
*To read about why I chose this outfit for the day and how it fared during our sightseeing, click here for the outfit post (or search Lima in the search bar on the top right).
#travel#peru#lima#outfit#what to wear#what to pack#what to pack for peru#travel blogger#style#travel style#Houston blogger#wanderlust#south america#south America travels#travel guide#where to visit in lima#where to eat in lima#casa diez canseco
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