Judging by the likes and shares, the previous collection was a hit, so here’s more! Context: Found a group on Telegram called “Pun Painting,” which was very delightful. Spent an hour during vacation using a script to download the paintings and apply their custom titles from their channel.
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An interesting artist — Kal Gajoum (Canada, 1968). His works are amazing. Mostly cityscapes, but there are also a few still lifes. Judging by the number of works, Kal somehow manages to create these masterpieces almost like on a conveyor belt, yet you never feel like adding or removing anything from a single piece. For me, it’s the perfect balance of abstraction and realism. Enjoy 🙂
I discovered a hilariously wacky group on Telegram, “Rzhivopis.” I spent an hour on vacation using a script to download their paintings and overlay them with their custom titles from their channel. Then two more hours reviewing them all and picking out the best. Definitely subscribe, there are about 2000 paintings, I won’t post that many, but maybe next time there will be a second part of the funniest:)
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It’s interesting that even a little experience in drawing portraits makes one see patterns in other people’s faces that you wouldn’t think about otherwise. For example, you look at someone’s face, and some points on the face converge into an equilateral triangle. Or the shadow from the sun forms a notable pattern. Or some lines are strictly parallel or perpendicular. And at that moment, you feel like grabbing a pencil and trying to sketch it. At this point, it seems that achieving a likeness is a piece of cake.
Or you notice that a silvery dress is the darkest thing in the picture and probably needs to be depicted almost in black. With highlights, of course. This contradicts the notion that “a silvery dress is just a shiny white.”
Sometimes you look at someone’s face, reassured that the typical proportions are maintained, or, conversely, that they are not. There are also optical illusions. They are the most interesting. It’s when it seems that some point exactly divides a segment in half, but as soon as you measure, it turns out not to be the case.
It’s also interesting that our eyes deceive us about what lines are and what are not lines. Here, it would be more correct not to use the word line” but edge.”
What was the architect smoking?
Nadia with a Frida Kahlo purse encounters a painting by Frida Kahlo in which Frida Kahlo is holding a letter dedicated to Leon Trotsky, and an hour later, we see an exhibition at another museum dedicated to the assassination of Trotsky. Such a revolutionary Mexican vibe.
By the way, here he is Leon, not Lev. And not Trotsky, but Bronstein. But these are trifles.
There is something to tell here, although the story is, of course, very well-known. Probably everyone knows that Trotsky was hiding in Mexico, and that Kahlo was his lover (Diego Rivera did not mind). In 1939, Stalin through Beria ordered to eliminate Trotsky, and on the second attempt, the NKVD succeeded.
The murder was carried out by Ramon Mercader. He came to Trotsky under the pretext of showing him a manuscript of an article supposedly in need of editing. He carried an ice axe under his coat. This Ramon’s mother was also a Soviet intelligence agent, who actually recruited her son. Additionally, her lover was close to the organizer of the previous, unsuccessful attack, when a bunch of bullets were fired at the bed behind which Trotsky and his wife were hiding, and not a single shot hit. In general, they did their job as best they could. Well, after six months, the ice axe came.
The Mexican police preserved this ice axe as evidence after the murder, and later exhibited it in a museum. When the museum’s director retired in the 1960s, he received the axe as a gift. For 40 years his daughter kept it under her bed, not really understanding its value.
It took nearly four decades for historian and collector, an espionage specialist Kitten Melton, to locate the ice axe and understand why the assassin sent by Joseph Stalin, Ramon Mercader, used it specifically to kill Trotsky. Actually, this ice axe is exhibited in the museum.
So, this is how Ramon gained trust. Trotsky was brought to Ramon by Sylvia Ageloff, who was Ramon’s mistress, plus Trotsky was very much in contact with Ramon’s mother. Sylvia was the daughter of Samuel Ageloff and Anna Maslova — Russian emigrants, who spoke Russian at home. In general, in all this environment, it’s difficult to stay alert, but Trotsky managed to.
By the way, the first thought — of course, an ice axe in hot Mexico is something that doesn’t catch the eye at all. Anyway, where did the ice axe come from? It turned out that it was normal, as there were no refrigerators, and ice was brought down from the mountains, which “worked” almost all year round with proper thermal insulation.
Ramon’s mother fled to the USSR. Ramon served a maximum of 20 years and also fled to the USSR, where he received a medal. Ramon Ivanovich Mercader was posthumously honored with the title Hero of the Soviet Union for the assassination of Lev Trotsky. And he received the Order of Lenin. The award was made for his actions as an agent of the Soviet special services. Why he became Ivanovich is unclear, it seems his father was Pau. Ramon died in Havana in 1978 from cancer, buried in Moscow, at the Kuntsevo Cemetery, under the name “Ramon Ivanovich Lopez.” Havana extradited him.
Frida Kahlo’s painting almost got destroyed after the assassination of Trotsky, “out of anger,” but it was saved, and is now one of the exhibits at the museum of women in art in Washington, from which our yesterday began.
A couple of very notable photos in the comments
One of Yuki’s portraits. I hope he liked it
From the trip to Shepherdstown, WV. A small town an hour’s drive from home, founded over 260 years ago. Hardly any tourists, but the few small restaurants and shops compete against each other for the attention and interest of passing travelers.
From the street, there’s an open window at the Lost Dog Coffee cafe. Inside works a very colorful bartender and owner, Garth Emmery Janssen. The coffee shop’s Facebook tagline reads “Founded in 1995 by two crazy punk rockers. We are not normal. We do things correctly. it’s ❤️”
Oat milk latte, please. Dear sir, Garth answers me, that wouldn’t exactly be a latte then. But if you insist, of course. Okay, I say, make it the right way, it doesn’t matter to me. The coffee turned out delicious.
Next, there was an art studio, which I have already written about in previous posts, a handmade cosmetics store where the owner eagerly shares her chemical experiments on the quest for perfect creams and soaps, and where she sells prints drawn by her daughter, who, unfortunately, has grown up and no longer wants to draw.
A very homely atmosphere everywhere. And a nice little town. It lacked modernity, and yes, our regions are all like that, with dust from the past, modernity is somewhat cumbersome.
We arrived in Sheperdstown yesterday, where there is a studio of a local artist, Michael Davis. His works are very interesting. In the studio, an enormous painting hangs on the whole wall, which immediately brings a smile to those somewhat versed in art, as it’s a riff on Madam X, and the artist decided to add Y — clearly alluding to transgender identity. At first, I thought it was his wife he painted (she seemed to be in charge at the studio yesterday, but perhaps they just resemble the XY model, so I didn’t ask). The strap on Madam XY has fallen, just like in Sargent’s original version before he repainted it and relocated it to avoid complete moral outrage.
A very talented artist. I will definitely visit his classes. Initially, I said “as much as 50 minutes to ride”, but now I think about it and will say “only 50 minutes to ride”.
Michael Timothy Davis Fine Art
How interesting, the word “Miniature” turns out not to derive from minimus (Latin), meaning “smallest”, but from miniare, meaning “to color with cinnabar or red lead”.
The word is connected to the practice of book illustration in the Middle Ages. You have probably seen images of medieval manuscripts with dense black text and a large, decorated initial letter. In the earliest bound books, they were not so ornate—just a big letter, colored red to stand out. In Italy, the verb miniare referred to the stage of painting red initials, usually left until last, and the art of illustration itself was called miniatura.
Over time, these initial decorations became increasingly complex, evolving into fully developed scenes with little figures, animals, and buildings. But, of course, since the scenes had to fit into the corner of a page, they were very small. And therefore, because a miniature in a book was like a tiny painting, the meaning of the word expanded—it came to denote any small version of something larger.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 