Inspired by both Kate Hawley’s “Cell Dress” for Elizabeth in Frankenstein and THE most perfect endpaper which @kaasknot used when binding an AU of mine a couple years ago. Digital recreation of said endpaper below the cut.
Why does everyone think fiction is just fantasy wish fulfillment now and not like an exploration of themes and ideas
People will be like “this movie is evil and gross because it depicts a predatory relationship” and then you watch the movie in question and it’s about how preying on young women is bad and impacts their lives negatively
“Why would they do this instead of just making everyone in the movie nice and normal and good” so we would have this conversation….
Perfectionism is not something to aspire to. It’s a disease that kills creativity. When you’re afraid of starting something for fear of its potential, theoretical inadequacy, the concern isn’t for bad art existing. The concern is what you’re making means about you. You wanna be the person that’s good at art. You want to be a genius. ‘Cause you’re so fucking special. Essentially, you care more about your pride than you care about the art. When your fear of creating something stupid or bad prevents you from creating at all you are not serving anyone but your own feelings. Because everyone makes stupid and bad things. That’s how you make good things.
Was at the art museum earlier and i have a new favourite painting
Is this not the cutest??? Its called ”Me and Brita” and this guy in 1895 was like ”i love this kid so much imma do a painting of us having fun so the world will always know how much i loved her and what a good time we had”
the painting in the background is looking at them like “my word what a cool pair”
More specifically that is Carl Larsson with one of his 8 children.
He came from a extremely poor and abusive background but worked his way into fine society, where he fell in love with fellow artist Karin Bergöö, and his works shifted to painting his home life.
Painting titled “My Loved Ones”
[in reference to his career] “the most immediate and lasting part of my life’s work. these pictures are of course a very genuine expression of my personality, of my deepest feelings, of all my limitless love for my wife and children.”
OMFG I used to work at Carl’s house which in now a museum in Falun, Sweden, and now his art is on my dash!
I could tell so many stories about this family, but to sum it up they lived the definition of what we would call a cottagecore life where both Carl and Karin worked as artists in their dream house that they designed and built together. It really was an artist’s home built with pure love, and also a big contrast to what a typical Swedish home looked like at the time. The late 1800s trend was to have a dark home with gothic vibes and brown and dark red colours. The Larsson’s home though is bright and colourful with big windows and homemade textiles sewn by Karin.
I also wanted to tell a bit about Brita, the cute little girl on her father’s shoulders in the painting in the original post. She was the fifth child of seven and felt sometimes like she didn’t get enough attention from her dad as a middle child in a big family. To get more time with her dad she would ask him to paint only her as often as possible since then she could talk to him without any of her siblings annoying them. This is how she became the most painted of all the children with hundreds of portraits made with her as the model. She was 89 years old when she died in 1982 and loved to talk about her childhood and those many, many painting sessions with dad.
This is one of my favourite paintings of Carl Larsson, A Viking Raid in Dalarna. Here we have all the children in a boat during a cool summer’s eve (from left, Pontus, Brita, Lisbeth, Ulf, Kersti, Esbjörn, Suzanne).
I reblogged this post too quickly before checking the notes and seeing this fantastic addition. I love how Brita came up with a solution to her problem – wanting some undivided attention from her father – in a way that worked for both of them.
Art historians have debated what they call a “mysterious expression” on the girl in Manet’s “Bar at the Folies-Bergere” (1882) but I’m pretty sure it’s just Customer Service Face
I do consider “let people enjoy things” to be a sort of thought terminating cliche at this point. while there are of course exceptions it seems to most often be employed as a knee jerk response to any critical or dissenting opinions no matter how impersonal, which isn’t so much taking a stance for the freedom of individual taste as expressing a profound discomfort with criticism being expressed at all.
this isn’t, of course, about instances where someone is a complete tool and actively harasses people for their differing tastes; this is about the cries of “let people enjoy things” being tacked onto any articulation of criticism no matter how nebulous.
the wording is genuinely so interesting. “let people enjoy things,” as if the naysayer somehow possesses the ability to ruin another’s fun just by speaking criticism into the world that the enjoyer might, possibly, see and be tainted by.
the statement “let people enjoy things” begs the question “who is being stopped?,” the answer to which would seemingly be “people so deeply insecure in their enjoyment that the mere existence of disagreement ruins their fun.” to which I would then say that maybe the naysayer isn’t the one who isn’t letting them enjoy things.
I feel like we really lost something when we started looking at writing as a reader-centric product meant to appeal to the desires of a specific audience rather than a writer-centric approach of someone writes whatever particular thing particular compels them/whatever weird thing the demons in their head want to talk about, and people out there who are also compelled, and/or relate, find that writing. A lot of discussions of writing really center around what readers want rather than a writer’s exploration. Sometimes as a reader I don’t know what I want. I click on a fic or pick up a book I’m not sure about but that looks interesting, and I love it. Reading what I expect to get is it’s own joy, but we always need to expand our horizons and not get mad at creators for not always writing what we want/expect.
I am aware I have died on this hill before but people who really strenuously argue that fanfic isn’t “real writing” drive me insane. what do you meeeaaaaannn. besides the fact that any attempt to define “real art” vs “fake art” is inherently reactionary, it just doesn’t make any sense. it’s Writing. people Write it. what the fuck are you talking about.
“it’s totally self-indulgent with no standards for quality and criticism is borderline not allowed”
are you like. aware of the concept of hobbies? if someone regularly posted pictures of their hobbyist knitting projects on their blog, it would be considered rude to drop in with “criticism.” that’s still a real art form.
“most of it is really bad”
I cannot stress enough how much perceived quality is not a valid metric for determining what is and isn’t art
“it’s just porn”
I’m going to kill you
“it’s full of unchecked misogyny, racism, queerphobia, etc”
I have some really bad news about every artistic medium ever
“you didn’t put in the work of making your own world/characters, you just copied someone else’s”
tv shows with writers’ rooms. ghost writers. franchises where different works are written by different people. adaptations and retellings. sorry guys I guess none of these are real writing anymore.
There is an endemic problem in spinoff novels or cross-media properties like comics, where you’ll get a very talented author recruited whose work is generally excellent, and everyone’s excited, but then it turns out they don’t know how to write fanfiction.
And the result is that the spinoff is really bad. Because the author completely fails to capture the vocal cadence or behavior or motivations of someone else’s characters, the narrative tone of the series…they try too hard to the point of making in-universe references feel stilted and unnatural, or do WAY too much exposition about things that shouldn’t need to be explained at this level of barrier-of-entry.
The ability to be a chameleon, to figure out and match the “feel” of characters and a world you didn’t create, is a learned skill.
(Also there are absolutely people who drop in with unsolicited criticism on someone’s hobby knitting or quilting or whatever, and they’re dicks.)
Consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist that might disrupt the viewing of the art; the biography of the audience member that might shape the viewing of the art. This occurs in every case.
comics as an art form make me insane. they’re so difficult to do well. there’s so many different ways to make sequential art work and most of them are deeply unintuitive. onomatopoeia that feels completely ridiculous to put down often reads seamlessly. panels on a page become a fractally nested image composition challenge that’s only possible to lose because if you do a good job no one will notice. you have to direct the readers’ eyes on a specific path across the page but also account for the fact that they won’t follow it. comic time isn’t linear. if the order of events isn’t crystal clear the story becomes incomprehensible. sometimes you need to do this on purpose. all this for a medium almost universally considered less effective than animation and less respectable than plain text. even its own name doesn’t take it seriously
making art sites that don’t allow NSFW is useless to me. not even to get my rocks off, i mean at this point not allowing NSFW ends up being a nightmare of random queers getting banned because the guidelines are too ill-defined and art that presents the human body, especially femme and trans, will just get obliterated for no reason despite not being sexual.
come here and make art :) except the gross art. we don’t want the gross art
Exactly. This is why I’m very dubious about Cara even though I finally made an account there to snag my username.
I get that allowing nsfw art makes things trickier for the people running the show, and they’re overwhelmed by its current growth, but it’s an ART site. So much artis considered nsfw by a lot of people, so who gets to decide what nipples are allowed and if this kiss is okay but that one is just ‘lewd’ or 'pornographic?’
Disallowing nsfw art is antithetical to some of the main points of art itself, like self-expression, exploring the full range of human experiences, appreciating the aesthetic beauty of the human form—and yeah, titillation and getting your rocks off, too.
I remember the artists who started Cara from way back in my freelancing days, and I have nothing bad to say about them, but the site’s policies about nsfw art feel like yet another symptom of purity culture (in the US, at least - idk if it’s this bad in other places).
