Notices by Tarnport (tarnport@mastodon.green)

@maxleibman *also access to my cam, speaker, and files.

David. Lavoisier portrait, 1788.

I never get tired of this one. There is so much history packed into this one rectangle. In the last year before the Revolution the elite tried urgently to scrub off their pretentions. Fashion changed in a whirlwind and we know from infrared that this portrait was repainted to dress them way down as modest, loving Enlightenment scientists instead of freewheeling wealthy aristocratic fops. The man was beheaded anyway. It's such a last gasp. #Painting

Today in the garden 2

Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi. The Annunciation with St Margaret and St Ansanus, 1333.

The most unwelcomed news - I'm surprised this doesn't get more play as a meme.

#Painting

Sometimes it's discouraging that so many great images don't have Alt-Text, but then you can turn it around and consider what a high percentage do have Alt-Text, and how many users choose to re-toot only screenreader-friendly documented photos and no others. Just like how often you see Camel-Case preferred in hashtags for similar reasons. It's a lot, a glass more than half full most days, and we're determined. Bravos, all. #AltText #CamelCase

Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo. The Fourth Estate, 1901.

One of the more famous and powerful images of striking labor ever painted.

#painting

Bonnard. Landscape in the South (Le Cannet), 1943.

It has seemed to me all this complicated week that one mark of human maturity is the ability to hold complexities - sometimes overwhelming, uncomfortable, contradictory, impossible to fathom - and to still be okay. I hope I'll be able to do it better soon. At least for now I can see the need, allowing the world to be just as diverse and chaotic as it is. We want things to be nicer, orderly, more pleasant, but there's only one world.

#painting

Gleanings (1)

Gleanings (2)

Gleanings (3)

Gleanings (4)

That first light.

My childhood was shadowed in fear and dysfunction. It was not a good time, but Easter somehow escaped unscathed. I remember anticipation, a natural benediction of sunrise and equinox, rising early to welcome a hot new start of day. I remember hiding colored eggs over and over again in lush grasses until they turned blue and fell to pieces. The butterfly Jesus freed from his cocoon was not forgotten but only one more joy among the flowers and chocolates and pastel colors.

Here interviewing very old people about hiding under floors and stealing rowboats and ration cards during WW2, while it's happening all over again, before they've even died.

You would think it would hurt their feelings or cause PTSD. But I'm inspired by their frankness and clarity. They know exactly what this is.

In 2017 I was with a gay couple at a swanky US event with lots of dignitaries. A speaker quoted JFK, what could be more banal? Everyone in the room was part of a club. We were having fun, were supposed to feel connected, that's what the event was for. One man went to the bathroom and came back. He said you won't believe what I heard in there: They were openly plotting the overthrow of the USA, and they specifically resented the JFK quote. We didn't know what to think, but looking back I see it.

Posts attempting to relitigate the 2016 (!) election in order to sow division now between former Sanders and Clinton supporters, from either side, in either direction, get instantly blocked, no discussion.

To spew that rancor now serves one interest, and it's not mine. 10 years is enough for any well-meaning righteous anger. At this point it's pure Republican propaganda.

Victor Vasarely. ~1978.

We're all frustrated with AI as it has been thrust so unusefully upon us by big tech. But I do wonder if one thing it might accomplish is to analyze atavistic attractions which we alone cannot fully see. For example most artworks ultimately in some way imitate nature, in particular flowers. They follow a radial or target layout, etc. and even when that design varies, it can be traced back. What do we do with math? Why, make more flowers, of course.

#painting

As we root out suspicious technology and surveillance appliances and invasive apps and the farcical oligarchal news sources and a long list of boycotts from our lives....

we are increasingly reduced to sitting by the fire in silence, reading a paper book while timing the strawberry jam with a spring-loaded egg timer that goes "ding" with an actual bell when it's finished.

Which is not what I thought 2025 would be like, but kind of great.

Jan Steen. Beware of Luxury, 1663.

This hilarious morality lesson in frugality contains more complicated symbols than we can readily read today. If you are interested in deciphering each element, here's a quick analysis by a real Dutchman:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zJlu2Q4kSg

#painting

Julio Le Parc. Modulation 764, 1986.

What is it about Argentina? Like Aizenberg, Le Parc seizes my imagination like a black canvas absorbs light! It is all the legacy of the West sieved through suffering, yet finding joys. As I said earlier in the week, this political revolutionary artist is 97 years old and has much to teach us. (This is not even the picture in his Modulation series which I set out to post today, but I get so excited inside his oeuvre that it's hard to decide.)

#painting

Do y'all remember what I said last week about no longer being fully candid with my American friends inside the country and just trying to take care of their mental state a little bit, because they're so evidently strung out and stressed? People in early-middle age have intense family responsibilities in both directions, old & young, nascent health issues of their own, and the peak of their work careers to juggle all at once. They did not need a Handmaid's Tale revolution on top of it. 1/2