27-year old Indonesian artist Elfan Diary draws a new portrait using art markers, Sakura Pigma Micron pen and Faber-Castell colored pencils.
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Kummakivi means "strange rock." It's an extremely rare natural phenomenon in Valtola Savoni, Finland. One enormous rock balanced on another, in the middle of the forest? Yeah, "strange".
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A Garden Among the Flames
by Ibn 'Arabi
O Marvel,
a garden among the flames!
My heart can take on
any form:
a meadow for gazelles,
a cloister for monks,
For the idols, sacred ground,
Ka'ba for the circling pilgrim,
the tables of the Torah,
the scrolls of the Qur'án.
I profess the religion of love;
wherever its caravan turns along the way,
that is the belief,
the faith I keep.
Ibn ʿArabī was an Arab Andalusian Sufi mystic and philosopher. From Poem 11 of the Tarjuman al-Ashwaq, translation by Michael A. Sells.
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Artist Chris Maynard:
"I enjoy highlighting aspects of a feather’s form, pattern or color. If I am successful, I hope to convey some intimate sense of the bird that grew the feathers."
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I do love a single subject photo series. Here is a series of shot of the amazing Matterhorn.
The photographer, Nenad Saljic:
"When I was young, I had long fantasized about climbing the Matterhorn but I never really had the chance. I have been mountaineering and caving since I was twelve. I was reading all classic books about alpinism and my first great climbs were in my imagination."
"The Matterhorn is one of the most famous Alpine peaks and one of the most dangerous mountains in the world. It was the last great Alpine peak to be climbed and, its first ascent in 1865, which was fatal for four men, marked the end of the golden age of alpinism. Its north face, which is on my all photographs, was not climbed until 1931.
"A Portrait of the Matterhorn is a kind of memento to all climbers who dared to go there and for those who never returned."
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Outstanding, moving, beautiful and stylish silhouettes from Gabriel Wickbold’s photos titled Sexxfashion.
See also NSFW - Calligraphy on Girls
Not your ordinary surf footage, this storm produced break off of Holland, MI this fall is pretty astounding.
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Surfing has such a place in our national imagination, and rightly so, if you ask me. It is addictive and simple. It is relaxing and exciting. It is showy and low-key.
With that in mind, we've asked our surfer-cum-writer friend, Ashton Goggans to pick 5 things to get anyone aspiring to a wet life.
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Philip Jodidio, a writer on the subject of architecture who has garnered a lot of attention has authored Tree Houses: Fairy Tale Castles in the Air.
Once just the stuff of childhood and movie sets, there have been recently a number of lauded attempts to build homes in the trees. Love this.
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Well done levitation photos are amazing. Like these from Kylie Woon
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Photos of Astana, which was unveiled as Kazakhstan's new capital in 1998.
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Using just a simple mirror and clever camera placement, conceptual dance theatre company A House Unbuilt has created this: Fidget and Flail.
From Victoria Bradford on HUB:
"I've been making these small dance films for about a year and a half, and much of it started with me "running around in my living room," as one curator put it. Lately, however, my energies have been invested in more involved, devised choreographies with a full company of dancers, so when I turned to my latest living room of a studio, I found myself fidgeting to the point of flailing in an attempt to find a dance. And yet, by imposing a frame which restricted my own view of the body, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of dismemberment and a disjointing of the body. From this, my newfound body cultivated a dance in cycles of flailing collapse and fidgeting recovery."
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"Every dive is an adventure. Guaranteed. Scuba diving can be practiced by people of almost all ages, shapes and fitness levels. Scuba diving can be easily practiced in thousands of locations around the world. For some, diving and travel go hand in hand. I dive mostly in South Florida and the Caribbean where the water is warm and calm. You don’t need to buy pricier equipment like a BCD, air tanks and regulator because they are all easily rented."
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Fever 103°
By Sylvia Plath
Pure? What does it mean?
The tongues of hell
Are dull, dull as the triple
Tongues of dull, fat Cerberus
Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable
Of licking clean
The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.
The tinder cries.
The indelible smell
Of a snuffed candle!
Love, love, the low smokes roll
From me like Isadora’s scarves, I’m in a fright
One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel,
Such yellow sullen smokes
Make their own element. They will not rise,
But trundle round the globe
Choking the aged and the meek,
The weak
Hothouse bred baby in its crib,
The ghastly orchid
Hanging its hanging garden in the air,
Devilish leopard!
Radiation turned it white
And killed it in an hour.
Greasing the bodies of adulterers
Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.
The sin. The sin.
Darling, all night
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss.
Three days. Three nights.
Lemon water, chicken
Water, water make me retch.
I am too pure for you or anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern—
My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.
Does not my heat astound you! And my light!
All by myself I am a huge camellia
Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.
I think I am going up,
I think I may rise—
The beads of hot metal fly, and I love, I
Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses,
By kisses, by cherubim,
By whatever these pink things mean!
Not you, nor him
Nor him, nor him
(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats)—
To Paradise.
So much is made of Plath's suicide, of the mythology of adultery and fragility. Her poems though outshine all that dross.
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Built in 2009 and designed by artist Daniel Tobin with Matthew Tobin and Jamie Perrow, the Kaust Beacon is part of KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) in Saudi Arabia. The tower rises 60 meters out of the Red Sea at the entry of the harbour and is made of amorphous hexagonal sections.
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Perth, Australia-born artist James Tapscott makes these stunning, eery outdoor installations using light.
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I do love animal photos taken like portraits.
Photographer Cally Whitham wants to “reaquaint [people] with the ‘value’ we once placed on our poultry and livestock in our rural beginnings.”
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photo by flickr/tcd123usa
Letter to a Poet
A mockingbird leans
from the walnut, bellies,
riffling white, accomplishes
his perch upon the eaves.
I witnessed this act of grace
in blind California
in the January sun
where families bicycle on Saturday
and the mother with high cheekbones
and coffee-colored iridescent
hair curses her child
in the language of Pushkin–
John, I am dull from
thinking of your pain,
this mimic world
which make us stupid
with the totem griefs
we hope will give us
power to look at trees,
at stones, one brute to another
like poems on a page.
What can I say, my friend?
There are tricks of animal grace,
poems in the mind
we survive on. It isn’t much.
You are 4,000 miles away &
this world did not invite us.
Hass has always been perhaps the poet I reach to first. This poem, in fact, was one I had my students in the Taiwanese Girls High School memorize. A year after that class finished I returned and a lot of the students ran up to me and recited it back to me.
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Sergey Bobkov a 55 year old Russian artist uses ceder sticks and slices them for the material of these animal sculptures.
