Good stuff from #London, and beyond. Mostly art, culture and history. #SocialAction for good as well. Keep it Simple and Be Gentle ♥️
London N1, UK
Joined July 2014
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This is not a photograph.
Every leaf and every reflection was put there by hand, in oil, by the Danish painter Peder Mørk Mønsted in 1894.
It is called Wooded path by a river, and it captures the hardest thing there is to paint: a forest in full sunlight. Light through trees never falls evenly. It scatters into countless flecks of brightness and shadow, a glow on one leaf, darkness on the next, a glint on the water that would vanish the moment a cloud passed. Get those even slightly wrong, and the whole thing collapses into a green blur.
Mønsted got every one of them right, and in doing so he captured something anyone who has stood alone in a wood will recognize immediately: that hush that falls over you, the sense of being completely at peace, and the feeling that the whole world has paused to breathe…
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This piece by artist Fumi Yanagimoto, depicting a person tenderly embracing her cat.
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Watch the classic music video for “Let Forever Be” directed by the legendary Michele Gondry, now remastered in 4k!
Vocals by the mighty Noel Gallagher, from the album ’Surrender’.
🔗 chemicalbrothers.lnk.to/LetF…
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"Si pasas tiempo con los animales, corres el riesgo de volverte una mejor persona."
Oscar Wilde 🇮🇪 (1854-1900)
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On March 11, 889, a 22-year-old Japanese emperor wrote in his diary about a new black cat he had recently acquired…
“On the 6th Day of the 2nd Month of the First Year of the Kampo era. Taking a moment of my free time, I wish to express my joy of the cat. It arrived by boat as a gift to the late Emperor, received from the hands of Minamoto no Kuwashi.
The color of the fur is peerless. None could find the words to describe it, although one said it was reminiscent of the deepest ink. It has an air about it, similar to Kanno. Its length is 5 sun, and its height is 6 sun. I affixed a bow about its neck, but it did not remain for long.
In rebellion, it narrows its eyes and extends its needles. It shows its back.
When it lies down, it curls in a circle like a coin. You cannot see its feet. It's as if it were circular Bi disk. When it stands, its cry expresses profound loneliness, like a black dragon floating above the clouds.
By nature, it likes to stalk birds. It lowers its head and works its tail. It can extend its spine to raise its height by at least 2 sun. Its color allows it to disappear at night.
I am convinced it is superior to all other cats.”
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Newly revealed discovery: this delightful Roman bronze hanging lamp in the shape of a sandalled foot has been unearthed near a Roman fort at Lympne, Kent. Filled with oil at the ankle, the lamp would have issued its flame from the end of the big toe. (ARA Issue 55/British Museum)
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Dionysos Crossing the Sea, c. 535 BC. Terracotta kylix (interior), from Vulci, Italy. Diameter 41/2 inches. (Museum Antiker Kleinkunst, Munich).
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Fragments of a Roman face pot found at the Roman settlement at Chester Le Street in County Durham. The Roman name for the 2nd century fort was Concangis.
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Grasshopper and Insects. Artist: Leonard Baskin (American, 1922-2000). 1951. Medium: Linocut, printed in green ink. Publication: A Little Book of Natural History, Plate 23. Publisher: The Gehenna Press, Worcester, Massachusetts. Collection: Philadelphia Museum of Art.
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In March of 1973, a man wrote to E. B. White, the author of Charlotte’s Web, confessing that he had lost all faith in humanity. Here was E. B. White’s reply
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Liverpool’s St George’s Hall was hiding a secret: Minton Tiles 🤎
Watch as the beauty is revealed!!
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Some councils, like Eastbourne, have done some fantastic stuff with planting, replacing the old-style regimented beds with low-maintenance, more drought-resistant, more natural planting that's great for bees and butterflies that looks vibrant and contemporary. – at Hastings, England
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Sipping my coffee ☕️ and thinking about these marvellous Minoan cups!
They look so modern it’s incredible to think they were made by Bronze Age potters some 3,800 years ago!
Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete. 📷 by me
#Archaeology
ALT My photo collage shows five cylindrical Minoan cups each with a single handle and a slightly flaring rim. Each cup has a black slip background decorated with a different geometric polychrome motif painted in white, red and orange colours. This type of Minoan pottery is known as Kamares Ware, after the Kamares Cave in central Crete where this kind of pottery was first found. Kamares Ware vessels were luxury items produced by palace workshops mainly at Phaistos and Knossos. These five cups were excavated at Phaistos and are dated 1800-1700 BC.
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We grew up watching hand-drawn Disney, and now it's gone. We don't talk about this enough.
Most people have no idea what level of work went into these films...
To draw one cathedral, Disney's artists went and spent days inside the real one, climbing through the passageways and towers of Notre-Dame with a historian, so that a cartoon would get the stones right.
That was for The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1996. The team made more than one trip to Paris, and the film was the first made at Disney's new animation studio in the city, a collaboration between American artists and Parisian ones led by the brothers Paul and Gaëtan Brizzi.
This is the thread that runs through Disney's Paris: the city keeps pulling the studio back. The Aristocats, in 1970, is a valentine to an older Paris of grand apartments and rooftop cats, though the animators packed the skyline so tightly that Notre-Dame ends up standing almost next to the Eiffel Tower.
It will never cease to amaze me: every single frame of the old Disney movies was put down by a human hand. Today everything chases realism, and somehow, the more real it looks, the less alive it feels…
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The blue-footed booby (Sula nebouxii) is a marine bird native to subtropical and tropical regions of the eastern Pacific Ocean.
It is easily recognizable by its distinctive bright blue feet, coming from carotenoid pigments from its diet of fresh fish.
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Frances Seward, abstract landscape photographer based in New Mexico #WomensArt
