distracted boyfriend

English Rococo painter and portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds is perhaps best remembered for his commission depicting celebrated theatre manager, playwright and Shakespearian company actor David Garrick. Reynolds’ Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy from 1761 and displayed at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire is an allegory of the Renaissance romancing of Hercules’ uncomfortable choice between pleasure over virtue and seems quite memetic indeed. How would you caption these characters? Do let us know.

master negotiator

saltern

For his upcoming coffee table edition of Habitat, Augsburger crop-dusting photographer and graphic designer Tom Hegen, we learn via My Modern Met, has scoured the Earth capturing one of humanity’s oldest forms of environmental interventions—harvesting salts and other minerals through evaporation. The intermediate and legacy effects of these pools and ponds yield vibrant and brilliant abstractions from a privileged perspective—hosting high concentrations of different halophilic algae and bacteria at various stages that looks like a Mondrian composition, and hopefully stirs the observer to consider our intrusions and mediations in a different manner as well.   Be sure to visit the links above more explosively colourful landscaped gradients.

spidey-sense

For hundreds of years people have observed the phenomena of ballooning or kiting behaviour by small spiders that allow them to launch themselves and glide for hundreds of kilometres over land and sea, suspended aloft on gossamer leads.
Even the German term for “Indian summer,” Altweiber-sommer, references the season when the winds fill with errant webs, but for nearly as long as people have noticed this mode of transport, we learn via Dave Log, something has also struck naturalists as aerodynamically incomplete about the explanation that they were just haplessly bobbing along. Researchers, experimenting on past suppositions, are discovering that spiders are not only harnessing the wind but also electrostatic forces to take to the skies, steering their course by sensing and negotiating the Earth’s inchoate magnetic field and the discharge of lightning. 

main street, usa

Our gratitude once again to Nag on the Lake for acquainting us with the enigmatic and extensive catalogue of historic, nostalgic photography of Barry L Gfeller.
A seemingly solitary person who lived and died in his childhood home was surprisingly well-travelled and his survivors were shocked to find among his legacy over fifty thousand snap-shots documenting over two decades of road-trips across the United States and Canada, fossilising impressions of Main Streets that in many cases no longer exist. Caretakers are actively searching out a permanent home that could host all the pictures and make them available to the public and to researchers. The current host website is pretty sophisticated, nonetheless, and features interactive maps where one can trace Gfeller’s travels and perhaps find a vintage scene of one’s own town. Be sure to visit the links above to learn more.

purse-spective or beyond the valley of secret treasures

Via the splendiferous Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links (a quite nice tradition) we encounter street artist Thrashbird who has turned an abandoned cement factory on the Oregon-Idaho border—all the limestone has been quarried away and now with the bust following the boom, the place is a veritable ghost town—into a giant and expressive canvas to make a statement on exploitation and industrial decay. Huge concrete blocks—perhaps test or sample structures worked up for potential clients—were strewn along the former factory grounds and Thrashbird envisioned them transfixed as monumental handbags—the luxury sort that attracts counterfeits.  Visit the links above to learn more.

it happens again and again, like the sunrise

A series of entries from marginal illustrations of a 1922 collection of southwestern Native American folktales prompted us to dig a bit deeper to discover an interesting anthology of Pueblo parables and myths gathered for a young girl with an insatiable appetite for a good story, sort of a Scheherazade character.  
Taytay’s Tales (being the grandfather who most often is the one to impart this oral tradition down to the next generation) feature dozens of Hopi and Pueblo stories retold with analysis by ethnographer Elizabeth Willis De Huff (in a fairly enlightened way for the time) and illustrated with the help of two young Hopi natives, Fred Kabotie (whose Indian name is the title) and Otis Polelonema. All the stories and pictures are available to peruse at the link above.