readingredhead | Entries tagged with art

Day one • a song
Day two • a picture
Day three • a book
Day four • a site
Day five • a youtube clip
Day six • a quote
Day seven • whatever tickles your fancy

Illustration of Jane and Mr. Rochester after the proposal scene in Volume II, Chapter VIII. Engraved by Fritz Eichenberg. Reproduced from the 1943 Random House edition of Jane Eyre.

For those of you who have seen the film Definitely Maybe, this edition of Jane Eyre is the one that April's father has inscribed to her before his death, the one which she is constantly looking for. But before it had a starring role in this movie (which I really like and think you should probably watch if you haven't), it had a starring role on my bookshelf. I found it for $2 at the Mission Viejo Library bookstore and was so surprised with my good luck that I almost couldn't believe it.

I love black-and-white engravings. And the engravings in this edition of Jane Eyre so appropriately reproduce the intensity, the emotion, and the gothic character of the novel. When I think of this scene in the book, I inevitably think back to this illustration. You can't see their faces, their backs are turned, but they shelter in each other, and the curves of their bodies are echoed in the curves of the trees. This image foreshadows what is to come just as well as Bronte's narrative does. And it's just so beautiful. I feel like all illustrations should be like this.

If you want to see more illustrations, you can check out this short article about the book, posted by someone else who owned it and loved it before watching Definitely Maybe.

From

rondaview: 10 random things, facts, goals, or habits about yourself.

1. When I'm sitting at a computer and not sure what to write, I have a habit of drumming my fingers on the keys (it's actually a rather soothing noise).

2. I like small spaces as long as they're not completely enclosed; for instance, if the world is too noisy I'll go sit under a desk or in a corner (especially in the middle of an aisle of books in a library or bookstore) and read or write there.

3. I do not have a personal goal greater than the ability to make a living as a writer. There are big world goals (curing cancer, ending poverty, etc.) that are more important to me, but on a personal scale, there is nothing that will ever make me feel so vindicated as knowing that I have turned my passion into a paying career.

4. I alphabetize my bookshelves by last name of author and have been doing so since the fourth grade. I have considerably more books (and shelves) now.

5. I don't particularly want to be an astronaut, nor do I think I'm fit to be one, but I've always wanted to go to the moon for the chance of looking down and seeing Earth from such an immensely different perspective.

6. Sometimes if I look at asphalt for too long it feels like the blackness of it washes out and the contrast with the sky becomes really interesting, especially on an overcast day.

7. I'm secrety afraid that I have no real life experience and therefore nothing to write about.

8. I have yet to feel absolutely comfortable (and not ridiculous) while dancing.

9. I absolutely love the anime art style and wish that I could draw like that. Really, I wish I could draw, period. But anime and manga art is just so intensely awesome for me.

10. The most attractive quality a person can have is enthusiastic ambition in whatever field they've chosen. I'm drawn to people who are trying to be the best, but not because they feel some need to beat others -- simply because they feel an inward drive to be the best kind of person they know how.

...and now I really have to do homework.

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A writer, without a doubt, but which one? All of my favorites paint the world with such different strokes, and yet each of them is "full worthy" (oh my god, I just quoted Chaucer out of context) of the praise that they get.

J. K. Rowling's the most popular of my favorite artists, and I feel like she's probably the most mainstream now, although she wasn't always. She was the genre-maker, the one who defined an entirely new school of art and pioneered her way through it. And she did it well.

Diane Duane I would say is probably an oil painter, with vivid details standing out so greatly in her work that there isn't a single word put to waste. Every time I read something she's written I learn more about myself.

Julie E. Czerneda works almost like a watercolor artist, but her medium is the human (or alien) heart in all its complexities -- her books are written directly from their subjects' blood and tears and hopes.

Jim Butcher's got the feel of a nitty-gritty sketch artist, who works in black and white but mostly in the grays, whose pictures are always a little fuzzy, but whose sharp pencils delineate in bold strokes the extent of life, love, courage, danger, and mortality.

And now I really have to write a paper about the importance of "degree" in Chaucer, specifically the Wyf of Bath's Prologue and Tale, but I needed to do something to keep me from thinking about that and this seemed like a good idea.

(What kind of artist am I? Jane Austen once called herself a minaturist, whose canvas was but a piece of ivory an inch across, and upon which she wrought with exquisite details her stories. What of Charlotte Bronte? Now I'm rambling/procrastinating, but there are worse things to ramble/procrastinate about.)

I opened up my internet because there was something important I desperately needed to do with it. However, as soon as the screen opened, I promptly forgot. I hate it when that happens. Hopefully I'll remember it eventually? I have this vague idea that it has to do with my chem lab, but I'm not sure.

Never mind, I just remembered. Yay! (In case you're curious, I was going to look up a Star Wars: A New Hope movie poster.)

Of course, I should have been spending the last two hours studying for the hardest chemistry test of the year. Instead, I have spent them re-reading a Phantom of the Opera fanfic and creating a new userpic. Oh, and having a conversation with Rachna about college sweatshirts.

Current Music: "Amy's Song" ~ Switchfoot

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together,
Headpiece filled with straw...

This was the first of the Hollow Men sketches. I was sitting and watching X-Files on TV and looking at a blank page when I drew the central figure -- the "Hollow Man" of the image. Then I thought of the quote and decided he needed a "direct eye," and when there was room I decided the poetry was necessary to explain the image. I don't like the scan of this very much -- it's pretty high res, but that means that it looks funky if you shrink the image too much.

I dunno, something about the figure's gesture really does strike me as empty. It's movement, sure -- but where to, and where from, and why does it matter to the viewer? Under the scrutiny of such a clear gaze, the figure is frozen, a mere shadow.

This, Lauren, was probably as a direct result of your eye picture. I wanted to try the shading out, so I did it. But then I thought about what it means to have an eye in black and white -- the irony of this great capturer of color being pictured in monochrome. Hence the quote: "The eyes are not here. There are no eyes here." For how can it be an eye if it can't see? It's a hollow eye, providing the user with only a shadow of sight.

The quote for this is, "Here, the eyes are sunlight on a broken column." This takes a bit of explaining, but when Tony and I were studying Hollow Men (and everything else) for IB orals, we came across a site which mentioned that a broken column is a common grave marker in the case of a premature death (http://www.aduni.org/~heather/occs/honors/Poem.htm). I thought this was so much more fitting than Dr. Chris's interpretation of the crumbling churches, because hollowness isn't just about religion -- it's about the inherent will and passion to live, or lack thereof.

The death of a child dying young is mourned because they have not yet had the time to live. The death of the Hollow Men should be mourned for different reasons -- because they had all the time they could have wanted, but they made nothing of it but their own personal Hell, the "desert kingdom" here on Earth.

And that's all the ones I feel like scanning, though I've got one more...but I think I'm going to color it in, just to see what it looks like that way. I'd be afraid of ruining it, but it's not good enough to begin with for me to worry about that.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Current Mood: artistic

Don't have too much to do...that's a first. Really, I have plenty of things to do, but they're not all going to get done.

I think my favorite thing I did today was work on a project in Art. We're supposed to draw a superhero or action figure or something, so I asked if I could draw a character from one of the books I'm writing. So I drew Holly, from Azuria, my great unfinished&unplanned novel. Her story's being changed around as I draw her, because of how capable (or rather incapable) I am of drawing things well, but it's a good exercise in character creation.

I've got a lot of chemistry stuff, which I should be doing right now. I'm not...this is possibly a bad thing? I need to finish up the homework and then read the chapter as a review for the test. I think I'm going to do that now...yeah. And print my history paper, and that's really all I have to do for tomorrow. Wow. That's a feeling I could get used to. Maybe I'll actually get the chance to (gasp) write? Or read?

On an unrelated note, I like Derek Walcott. I did not used to like him, but now I think I do (handsiness aside).

"Kneel to your load, then balance your staggering feet
and walk up that coal ladder as they do in time,
one bare foot after the next in ancestral rhyme.

Because Rhyme remains the parentheses of palms
shielding a candle's tongue, it is the langauge's
desire to enclose the loved world in its arms;

or heft a coal-basket; only by its stages
like those groaning women will you achieve that height
whose wooden planks in couplets lift your pages

higher than those hills of infernal anthracite.
There, like ants or angels, they see their native town,
unknown, raw, insignificant. They walk, you write;

keep to that narrow causeway without looking down,
climbing in their footsteps, that slow, ancestral beat
of those used to climing roads; your own work owes them

because the couplet of those multiplying feet
made your first rhymes. Look, they climb, and no one knows them;
they take their copper pittances, and your duty

from the time you watched them from your grandmother's house
as a child wounded by their power and beauty
is the chance you now have, to give those feet a voice."

-- from Omeros, Chapter XII

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: sounds outside my window

Stephanie. I was thinking of you and your parkbench today, and I had an urge to draw something (which is unusual--I'm only an artist with words). But I tried, and I don't think it's too bad. However, I don't want to try coloring it in yet and messing it up. Nevertheless, here it is.

( A park bench's view of the world. )

Current Mood: artistic
Current Location: PC desk
Current Music: "King of the World" ~ Songs for a New World

Just a short entry to let all my friends know that yes, I'm still alive.

Venice and Florence were both amazing, though in retrospect I think I liked Venice better this time. It's a bigger city and has more cool shops and restaurants. We did all the tourist things, like feeding pidgeons in San Marco's square, but we also walked a lot. One day we kinda walked in circles, but that was okay -- we weren't short on time.

I shared a hotel room with my cousin Flavia. It wasn't very big but our window opened up over a canal and you could hear people going by in gondolas. We took a ride on a gondola one day as well.

Venice is also really well known for Carnivale, its version of Mardi Gras. So even though Carnivale is in February, there are stores that sell costumes and elaborate masks all year round. Corinne, Carissa, Flavia, and I each bought a mask. Now we really have to have a masquerade party this Halloween, because I want an excuse to wear mine! Deanna, you would have died -- there was this one amazing costume shop that was full of old opera costumes and I wanted to buy the whole store. Amazing velvet capes, gorgeous dresses...a costumer's heaven, but hell also since everything was expensive and impossible for us to bring back home. It was wonderfully terrible.

Um...I think that's about it for Venice. Florence was cool, too; we saw a lot of art, and I mean a lot: in four days we went to three museums. It was awesome seeing all the Renaissance art because I remembered everything from AP Euro. Most amazing of the art I saw would have to be Michelangelo's David. It was truly gigantic, and enormous, and every other word you could think of.

Florence is also known for its leather, and so we bought a lot of leather things. I have two new leather-bound journals...one of which looks like the twin to Azuria, I kid you not. When I get home I'm going to make it into a sort of Azuria scrapbook. (And some people are probably reading this and going, "What the heck is Azuria?")

But I've been taking lots of time on this, and I originally came over to Flavia's house to go in the pool. The rest of my tale will have to remain untold, or at least shortened, seeing as it's 4:15 PM here and I want to get to bed early tonight so I can wake up early and drive into Rome to get a copy of the sixth Harry Potter book in English...

Current Mood: exhausted
Current Music: Moulin Rouge

Well, folks, it's certainly been a week!

I flew into London with my family, and we got here on Sunday. We're staying in a small flat in the Kensington area, for anyone who cares. We didn't do much Sunday, just walked around.

Monday we went to the British Museum -- I got to see the Rosetta Stone! It was really cool, but you couldn't really take pictures since it was behind glass and any picture you took would include your reflection in the glass. But still, I saw it. Then we went to the National Gallery, another museum but for art this time. I saw at least three paintings that Koger had taught us in AP Euro: Madonna of the Rocks, by Da Vinci; The Arnolfini Wedding, by Van Eyck; and The Tribute Money, by Titian. It was pretty neat.

Tuesday we went back to the National Gallery a bit, and we went and shopped at Harrod's. It wasn't really as neat as everyone made it out to be -- I was kinda bored with it all. Way too expensive for me to buy anything. One pound is worth two dollars, so the prices here are almost twice the size of those back home, if you do the calculations.

Wednesday was possibly one of the greatest days of my life. It was our show day, so to speak -- we saw Guys & Dolls and Phantom of the Opera, on the same day! Both shows were amazing beyond belief -- you really had to be there. I know some of my friends will be there someday. Ewan McGregor made a surprisingly good Sky Masterson in Guys & Dolls. We went back after the show, and actually got his autograph! Even I was excited, and I'm not the fangirl type. Phantom was amazing, too -- the principal characters were all really great, and the effects were phenomenal! I know that's a day I won't soon forget.

Didn't do much Thursday, shopped for used books on Charing Cross Road and went back to the British Museum for a bit.

Today we went up to King's Cross, where I learned that there is no real, tangible barrier between platforms nine and ten which one might hope to disappear through. Then we walked a long way and had tea in a tea house near Kensington Palace. All in all, we've done a lot of stuff. I've left out a bunch, probably, because I'm writing so quick. I would send out e-mails to everyone but I don't have time. We fly to Italy tomorrow, so when I have time and my own computer there I'll try to send out individual e-mails to you all.

I've already decided that I will be coming back to London, it is just too amazing and there are so many things I still haven't seen. But I have to go now, because dad and I have to go buy some food for dinner. Write more later.

Current Mood: sad that I have to leave
Current Music: Marry the Man ~ Guys & Dolls

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in Life's name and for Life's sake

a work in progress

Seven Day Meme - Day 2

(no subject)

Writer's Block: Love This Artist

Grrr...

She burned like a fire despite these rains...

Eyes, for Lauren (and for myself)

Headache, but otherwise okay.

Meditations...

I live!

London calling...

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March 2013

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