Dali House

Well I don’t want to start any blasphemous rumours
But I think that God’s got a sick sense of humour
And when I die
I expect to find Him laughing. – Depeche Mode

As above: the Reflection Nebula in the Pleiades, as seen by Hubble.
So below: March of the alien invaders across the northern Queensland outback in Australia, a satellite image from Google Earth.

A blind hand reaches out in search of the pillow from which to gain the sleep of eternity. In a moment another Protestant blade will cross another Catholic neck. The nine-day Queen of England will be a mere lady again.

Paul Delaroche was gregariously maudlin in his choice of subject matter. Born in 1797, the son of a wealthy Paris art dealer who named him Hippolyte (the “Paul” came later, likely with relief), he learned from Antoine-Jean Gros how to make fat paintings. Géricault and Delacroix became his pals as he doled out partisan depictions of history’s piquant moments from a studio in the rue Mazarine.

Delaroche, in a portrait painted the year after he died, looking for all the world like that sneaky Kevin Spacey. See the rest.

We were just over at Van Gogh’s house in Arles the other day, and here we are again, having a good old nosy poke around.

This is what he sees.
It’s the middle of October 1888, and Vincent Van Gogh has just polished off five large canvases in one week. He writes to his brother Theo in Paris, complaining that he’s beat and, besides, the autumn winds are blinding him and coating the trees with white dust.
He stays inside and paints a picture of his room, “a new idea … this time it’s just simply my bedroom, only here colour is to do everything … “to be suggestive here of rest or of sleep in general. In a word, to look at the picture ought to rest the brain rather than the imagination.” See the rest.

This is a lithograph I made back in 1973 while attemtping to become An Actual Artist at Toronto’s York University.
I sometimes try to remember all the stuff we did during my year and a half there – the lithos, the etchings, the Fine Pencilling, the cutting big blocks of styrofoam into sculptures using a really, really hot wire – but I keep coming back to the blasted painting class where I was told I was using the wrong colours. See the rest.

Still hanging around, maestro?
Click the pic to see it much larger.

Continued from here.

Three years later Dalí was back on the cross. He must have enjoyed his earlier crucifixion.
This time the nuclear motif was more pronounced (just as it was in the real world).

Returning from New York, Dalí was disembarking from the steamship America in Le Harve on March 27, 1953, when a mob of reporters in search of slow-news-day pablum asked him, “What’s up?” He didn’t let them down.
He was about to paint a sensation, he said, an exploding Christ, nuclear and hypercubic, the first picture ever painted with a classical technique and an academic formula but actually composed of cubic elements.
“Why would you want to depict Christ exploding?” a newshound wondered aloud.
“I don’t know yet. See the rest.