Darkness Visible

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) - Olive Trees in the Sun, 1889


'I became insane. With long intervals of horrible sanity.'

Edgar Allan Poe

The Genius Of Infirmity

Max Klinger (1857-1920) - Plague, 1898


'I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worthwhile.'

George Bernard Shaw

Lux Aeterna

Robert Longo (b. 1953) - Untitled (Hot Sun), 2006


'When you possess light within, you see it externally.'

Anaïs Nin

The Contours Of Cognition

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) - The Singer Yvette Guilbert, 1894


'Drawing is putting a line around an idea.'

Henri Matisse

Love's Antidote Is You

Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) - Untitled #305, 1994


'Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.'

Sigmund Freud

At The Crossroads Of Art And Philosophy

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) - A Walk at Dusk, c. 1830-35


'We have art in order not to die of truth.'

Friedrich Nietzsche

'The philosopher creates, he doesn't reflect.'

Gilles Deleuze

'Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral and subject to chance. '

Arthur Schopenhauer

Madness Became Him

Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)


'Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.'

Voltaire

'It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.'

Herman Melville

'Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.'

Salvador Dalí

The Bitterness Of Sweet Memories

Édouard Manet (1832-1883) - The Lemon, 1880


'There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy.'

Dante Alighieri

Everybody Knows The Square Of Zero

Jenny Holzer (b. 1950) - The Survival Series: The Conversation Always Turns To Living Long Enough To Have Fun, 1983-5


'I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words bother me.'

Winnie the Pooh

The Gift Of Banishment

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarotti Simoni (1475-1564) - The Fall and The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, 1509-10


'The only paradise is paradise lost.'

Marcel Proust

Industrial Light Sans Magic

Dan Flavin (1933-1996) - greens crossing greens (to Piet Mondrian who lacked green), 1966


'I like my use of light to be openly situational in the sense that there is no invitation to meditate, to contemplate.'

'My icons do not raise up the blessed saviour in elaborate cathedrals. They are constructed concentrations celebrating barren rooms. They bring a limited light.'

'One might not think of light as matter of fact, but I do. And it is, as I said, as plain and open and direct an art as you will ever find.'

Dan Flavin

A Freudian Photo Finish

Man Ray (1890-1976) - La Marquise Casati, 1922


'The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.'

Walter Benjamin

I See Red

Henri Matisse (1869-1954) - The Red Studio, 1911


'Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.'

Oscar Wilde

The Icy Maze

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) - Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue, 1921


'Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.'

Theodor Adorno

The Enigma Of Everyday Objects

Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin (1699-1779) - Pipes and Drinking Pitcher, 1737


'The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.'

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Four Fanciful Seasons (April Special)

Giuseppe Arcimboldo - Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring, 1573

The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems' thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.

Shakespeare - A Midsummer Night's Dream

I Come To Bury History, Not To Paint It

André Bauchant (1873-1958) - Cleopatra's Barge, 1939


'History is the science of what never happens twice.'

Paul Valéry

Two Deaths And Only One Life

Piero do Cosimo (1462-1521) - The Death of Procris, c. 1500


'If I was strange, and strange were my figures,
Such strangeness is a source both of grace and art;
And whoever adds strangeness here and there to his style,
Gives life, force and spirit to his paintings.'

(Piero di Cosimo's epitaph.)

I Shot Frida Kahlo

Yasumasa Morimura (b. 1951) - An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Collar of Thorns), 2001

"Transcendental guarantees of truth are dead; in the agonal struggle of language games there is no commensurability; there are no criteria of truth transcending local discourses, but only the endless struggle of local narratives vying with one another for legitimation."

From Situating the Self by Selya Benhabib

The Brotherhood Of Men And Cabbages

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-93) - Vertumnus, c. 1590-1


'[Arcimboldo] imposes a system of substitution (an apple comes to stand for a cheek, as in a coded message...), and, in the same way, a system of transposition (the whole figure is somehow drawn back toward the detail). However, and this is Arcimboldo's peculiarity, what is remarkable about the composite heads is that the picture hesitates between coding and decoding: even when we have displaced the screen of substitution and of transposition in order to perceive the head composed as an effect, our eyes retain the tracery of the first meanings which have served to produce this effect.'

From 'Arcimboldo or Magician and Rhétoriqueur' (in The Responsibility of Forms) by Roland Barthes