Magic Molecules

via

Apparition

Nicholas Kalmakoff

Two Drawings by Albert Birkle

Three by Steinberg

© Saul Steinberg Foundation

via

Christ Church Picture Gallery

A few weeks ago my beloved and I visited Oxford’s Christ Church Picture Gallery, she for the very first time and I for the first time in many years. The bunker-like building houses one of the finest small collections of Old Master paintings and drawings in the country. For me the gem of the collection is van Dyck’s A Soldier on Horseback. This is little more than a sketch snipped from an unfinished larger work yet motion, form, light and texture are all evoked with beautiful economy. A true virtuoso of the brush, van Dyck here foreshadows centuries of painterly preoccupation. Delacroix or Degas could have done no better.

Europa’s Kiss

EUROPA’S kiss is sweet though it reach only to the lips, though it but lightly touch the mouth. But she touches not with the edge of the lips ; with her mouth cleaving close she drains the soul from the finger-tips.

–Rufinus, from the Greek Anthology, book V, 14

Found Drawing

Dream Lover

SHE who sets the town on fire, Sthenelais, the high-priced whore, whose breath smells of gold for those who desire her, lay by me naked in my dream all night long until the sweet dawn, giving herself to me for nothing. No longer shall I implore the cruel beauty, nor mourn for myself, now I have Sleep to grant me what he granted.

–Anonymous epigram from the Greek Anthology, book V, 2

Richard Müller Drawings

mostly via Weimar

Hypnose

Sascha Schneider, 1904