No! Yes! I know!
I have been gone for a week, but it was not because this was the holiday week. It is because of Circumstances.
Things are not exactly bad for me, but they are very much not the same as when I started this blog. I cannot manage a drawing every night any longer, at least not up to any kind of standard. Pitiful? Yes! True? Also yes! Nonetheless, in the words of Steve Dallas, a man has got to know his limitations.
But what I do know is that I no longer want to make this a yearlong project; I want to keep on with it, world without end. I mean to draw once a week, to reblog once an impulse, and to keep on keeping on, and keep watching the skies.
Baltimore slave, Martha Ann “Patty” Atavis, holding Alice Lee Whitridge, the daughter of Dr. John Whitridge of Baltimore.
circa 1845-1860
This is … I don’t … this picture. So much and so wrong and so very real.
Aliaa Magda Elmahdy
A twenty-year-old feminist has uploaded nude pictures of herself to her blog, as a protest and a statement of autonomy and sexuality. This would be unremarkable if it were not that this young lady is an Egyptian, living in Egypt, and now faces five years in jail for it. (Link to CNN.com article, no nudity visible)
In a Western context, I am at best ambivalent about the value of posing nude as a feminist statement. The nude female body is considered a commodity, valuable or useless, and it is not easy for the woman who poses to assert her full humanity to the Western viewer. (Observe, in the CNN article’s comments, the American gentleman who dismisses her with “a disgusting rack and cottage cheese thighs.”)
Here, though, as a citizen of a Muslim country, Elmahdy has truly risked everything in order to do this and to say: I do not belong to a man, I am under no man’s protection. The hope and defiance in her eyes means more than anything she has below the shoulders.
(I still don’t think it’s a very good likeness, though, but I’d be here all night if I had to fix it.)
Oh, not again, so uninspired lately
This was supposed to be a stylized impression of an ancient Celtic bronze figure of a horse, but what it turned out to be was a stylized impression of sucking at art at 11:30 p.m.
Dress
1900-1901
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
There’s no context for this dress except that I believe I would have looked absolutely perfect in it. I would have done well in late-19th-century clothing, I think.
Misc. doodles XXVIII
According to narrative convention, when someone propagates a number of abstract staring-eye-based doodles, that someone is about to snap. I just realized that, so I hasten to assure you that I’m feeling very well tonight, and this is just the sort of thing I absently do.
You know what I enjoy about this guy? His cartoons are tiny masterpieces. Did any circumstance demand that he produce this punchline against a perfect backdrop for an early-19th-century Anglo-American town? No! And yet, there it is. I appreciate this kind of quality.
(Source: tragedyseries)
Anonymous asked: I found your drawing of Mrs Ruxton distasteful. I also have a strong interest in crime, however I think to take it to the extent where you draw a woman's corpse is incredibly distasteful and worrying to be honest. Its a morbid fascination, almost enjoyment. You seem to forget that these people have families and histories; the whole reason I am anonymous is because Buck and Isabella were my grandparents and its a "secret" in our family. Please think about that, especially before you judge Buck.
A message that I received in regards to this entry (graphic, NSFW).
