Author: penwithlit

Fierce Appetites: Lessons from my year of untamed thinking is a collection of personal essays by Irish medieval historian Elizabeth Boyle. Sub-(sub-)titled Loving, Losing and Living to Excess in My Present and in the Writings of the Past, the book was published in 2022 by Penguin, and (appropriately enough) I’ve read it during Cathy‘s Reading Ireland month ’23

Part memoir and part deep-dive into medieval Irish poetry, it meditates on the interconnectedness of time and place, and describes a year in Boyle’s life, the pandemic year of 2020, which opens with her father’s death in January.

“My brother poured seventeen sachets of sugar into his black coffee. I muttered to him, ‘If dad dies while you’re adding all these fucking sugars I will never speak to you again.’

We walked back to the ward. Dad had died…”

There are 12 chapters, broken down by month, containing personal meditations…

“…Watkins has described the process by which Bonnard mediated and transposed these observations of the landscape back in his studio: “Paintings begun in the memory of a visual experience encapsulated in a drawing were transformed through color into a rich, immensely varied surface made up of a tapestry of brushstrokes, glazes, scumbles, impasto, and highlights of pentimenti” (op. cit., p. 171).”In 1940, Bonnard reported to Vuillard, “I am very much interested in landscape, and my strolls are full of considerations in this regard. I am about to understand this land and no longer try to find what isn’t there, since it conceals tremendous beauties. To establish the different conceptions to which nature gives birth from this perspective…

“We don’t want to become what we are. We want to become a concept, a fantasy, what we should be like. Sometimes we have what people always call the ideal, what I call the curse, to be perfect, and then nothing we do gives us satisfaction.” -Fritz Perls

Idealism is the progenitor of shame.

On the one hand, it helps us cultivate a better world; but, on the other, it forms the foundation of a myriad of emotional maladies. Perfectionism is tied to the beliefs that one is inherently bad and unlovable, but it holds the promise of abundant affection if she can rid herself of her impurities. This love is as divine as she can be (and, sometimes, thinks she is), but it resides only in the fantasy of her daydreams. So, she lives in a juxtaposed state, in which she craves perfection but suffers immensely when recognizing her…

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Odilon Redon at wikiwand

Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho, ‘Decorative panels’, in Odilon Redon
and Andries Bonger: 36 works from the Van Gogh Museum collection,
Amsterdam 2022, FREE PDF HERE

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Tag: Odilon Redon At Sunnyside

Odilon Redon at Van Gogh Museum

Odilon Redon at Musée d’Orsay

Odilon Redon at Christie’s

Odilon Redon at Sotheby’s

Odilon Redon at wikimedia

Happy Sunday! 🙂

~Sunnyside

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Fernando Cueto Amorsolo at wikiwand

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Fernando Cueto Amorsolo at Christie’s

Fernando Cueto Amorsolo at Sotheby’s

Fernando Cueto Amorsolo at Bonhams

Thanks for Visiting 🙂

~Sunnyside