— ObsessZine

Dekho magar pyar se [Look but with love](indian phrase)

google image search journey

So, I realize I have not posted on this blog in several, several, months… hello, resolution. I mostly get annoyed with WordPress bugs and getting spam emails every day that originated from my blog is pretty annoying/discouraging.

However that did not stop my sister from including me in her collaboration of a group of bloggers posting about their top five discoveries of 2011. Sounds fun! Here I go.

1. Coconut as dairy

I recently acquired a roommate who is severely lactose intolerant. She can’t even have chocolate! (unless it’s like 85% cacao). I also have gotten a lot more into baking in the past year, and love sharing anything I make. Even if I reaaally don’t want to share, I have to do it. And I am glad my roommate shares my love of coconuts! Because did you know there is coconut sugar, coconut flour, coconut whipped cream, coconut oil… and these things also make stuff gluten-free, if you’re into that. Lots of my friends are, so even if I don’t care, I do like to share. I have so far only made a coconut-based pumpkin chocolate loaf (which my roomie loved), but i want to make these coconutcoconutcoconut chocolate muffins (but with even more coconut).

2. Juan Luna

Odalisque

I have a widget on my google homepage that shows a different artwork on refresh. If I am intrigued, I tend to click and check it out, and then add a collection on Pinterest . It’s been actually very interesting to me to find out just what I like. I tend to like portraits of women with passive expressions, oranges blues and greens, and some sort of drama or story. Then I start to notice different artists that keep catching my eye, like Juan Luna, one of the first recognized Phillipine artists. I love how he portrays his own culture so intimately, and then other cultures as an observer.

3. Fluid Layouts

Gonna get a little nerdy here now… I am a website designer, and recently created my first 100% fluid layout ecommerce website. This means that when a person resizes their browser window, or you view the website on different sized monitors, you see as much information as possible. Here is an example on the website I created. along with a healthy dose of jquery, which i’ve gotten pretty decent at, i think it’s pretty sleek! I am so lucky to have a job that gives me total creative freedom with this stuff.

4. My limits

To get a little abstract here, something I’ve discovered this past year is that I can not necessarily both have and eat cake. Well, not ALL the cake. I’ll do what I can.

5. Makeup

while i haven’t actually DONE much with my makeup (mostly because i need to set some money aside to afford the good stuff), I have gotten more interested in makeup because of Pinterest .. and my dad emailed me this youtube channel of a talented makeup stylist (a hint?). You may find a totally different me this year.

It is really difficult to look back in the entire year and encapsulate the discoveries into one post! I feel like this may actually be the top 5 discoveries of the past 6 months! The others:

• the wolf of insignificance
• lee lee bredenberg
• the new life of justin mariner daley
• mish-mash moi

I love these! What beauty! The one above is one of her “Coffee and Cigarettes” series, which is my favorite.

Cendrillon - rust

Centrillon - rust on paper

Mutation

Coffee and Cigarettes

Coffee and Cigarettes

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dead birds. For about a month they have been dropping out of the sky all around the world.

There are dozens of theories as to why this is happening. But many seem to side for the “it’s no big deal” thinking. Perhaps they are afraid to think of the worst, because they see no hope.

I am sure Jane Howarth did not have this in mind when she works with her art, but I can’t help be reminded of it. Sugarcoating. The way that she plays with the “seductive and repulsive”, as she puts it, reminds me of sugarcoating the truth.

Jeremiah 12:4 “How long should the land keep withering away, and the very vegetation of all the field dry up? Because of the badness of those dwelling in it the beasts and the flying creatures have been swept away. For they have said: “He does not see our future.” “

When collecting together paintings of The Birth of Venus, I stumbled upon the work of Odilon Redon. Wandering through the online gallery, it felt like I was looking at fragments and snatches straight from the mind of Redon. Not like I was looking at images that came out of his head (which is, in fact, what I was doing), but that I was actually inside, in the black of his mind, and when his thoughts happened upon this or the other, the images appeared.

My suspicions were confirmed, reading through his work analysis, “Redon’s work represents an exploration of his internal feelings and psyche. He himself wanted to ‘place the visible at the service of the invisible’; thus, although his work seems filled with strange beings and grotesque dichotomies, his aim was to represent pictorially the ghosts of his own mind.” … fantastic.

The Death of Ophelia

“My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.” -Redon

Buddah In His Youth

“I have often, as an exercise and as a sustenance, painted before an object down to the smallest accidents of its visual appearance; but the day left me sad and with an unsatiated thirst. The next day I let the other source run, that of imagination, through the recollection of the forms and I was then reassured and appeased.” -Redon

Leda And The Swan

“These drawings defied classification; unheeding, for the most part, of the limitations of painting, they ushered in a very special type of the fantastic, one born of sickness and delirium.” -Huysmans

Ophelia

“Sometimes the subjects seemed to have been taken from the nightmarish dreams of science, and hark back to prehistoric times; monstrous flora bloomed on the rocks; everywhere, in among the erratic blocks and glacial mud…” -Huysmans

Pandora

I love this image, of Pandora… You can really see her simple curiosity as she opens the box, but the world was so perfect. Little did she know.

He has 6 depictions of the Birth of Venus that I saw… The first one I saw is still the one that sticks with me though, especially when you compare them to the many other paintings that have been done of her throughout centuries. He really has a different take on these. But it makes me wonder why he was so focused on her. I see the Venus merely as an old myth, but was she something more to him? Did he have his own Venus? Or was he just trying to get it right? Was he trying to expel her from his mind?