all my love

the only way out is through. but i want to be out already. i want to be basking on the top of the mountain with the sun shifting her warm fingers over my stomach. i want to breathe deeply without feeling my chest tighten. i want to say don't worry, i've got it and mean it. i want to have my life behind me, evergreen, full of laughter and music and dancing. strong and friendly. this thing i have right now - this haggard, unkempt sapling - i want it to be whole, already. i am sick of dragging my wet misery behind me, a bleating lamb, a worried sheep.

i know because i have spent the last 2 weeks trying to say out loud: “i deserve good things.” i only get to “i deserve g-” and then i break out into a cold sweat. who am i to deserve anything? there are people out there suffering. there are people out there who need good things to happen. i don’t deserve anything. i am just a person. a filament. if a good thing was supposed to happen to me, i hope it passes over and happens to someone more - deserving.

but just because you can endure the present does not mean it should be something so painful.

you deserve a tender tomorrow for the same reason you deserve water, food, or air. you deserve it for the effort of survival. you are surviving, aren’t you? doesn’t it take a toll from you, staying here?

goodness and kindness and tenderness should not be a commodity; to be doled out in quantities. you should not feel that life exists as supply-and-demand - your happiness does not come at the cost of someone else. it does not take from some gallon of global happiness. it does not promise that a stranger will have an equally-tragic reaction to tip the scales back into balance.

there is just you, deserving. you didn’t have to earn it. there is no calculation of time-enjoyed versus time-spent-suffering.

Wikipedia hosts it as a 2-kilobyte SVG

trying to capture a painting through photography is kind of a fools' errand. especially a huge painting like Who's Afraid Of Red, Yellow, and Blue. The things that make a painting like this impressive just do not photograph well. Furthermore, the things that made this particular painting impressive are impossible to see without seeing it in real life. (which, tragically, is no longer possible. fuck art vandals.)

let me give you an example with a more accessible painting. Let's look at Van Gogh's Wheat Field With Crows, one of his final paintings. It's widely considered to be a masterpiece.

Here's Wikipedia's png/svg image of it:

looks kinda flat, right? kinda meh? not particularly impressive? but look at this close-up image:

you see how the brushstrokes build on each other? how every stroke gives the painting more texture, almost like a wafer-thin sculpture?

now imagine the entire thing with a subtle glow, a shimmer that moves as you walk past the painting, capturing the light of a wheat field with scattering crows right before a storm. because of the way paint works, most paintings have a subtle shimmer to them. oil paintings have more of a shimmer, because they're varnished. acrylics, like Who's Afraid, have less, but it's still there. and that shimmer is impossible to photograph without making the image itself illegible. it just looks like glare.

and this is true of every painting. any photo you see of a painting is the flattest, deadest possible version of that painting. you can't see the way the artist pushed the paint to give it texture. you can't see the shimmer. you can't see the light reflected on the ground beneath. you can't move around and get a look at the different angles, or feel dwarfed by the immensity of a canvas that's two feet taller than you that just screams RED.

from what little I understand, the Who's Afraid paintings are mostly an exercise in technique. the entire point was getting the paint to have as smooth of a texture as possible.

which, uh, have you worked with acrylics? i have. let me tell you, acrylic paint wants to look like chicken scratch. getting it to look smooth is real fuckin' hard. painting over it? fucks with the texture. varnishing it? fucks with the texture bad, and makes it look oily and glowy in a way it wasn't supposed to. it takes that subtle sheen and makes it look slick.

what happened to this painting is the equivalent of someone putting 80s blue eyeshadow and bright red lipstick on the Mona Lisa. you can't get it off. you can't reverse it. the painting is destroyed, whether you like it or not.

the level of proud ignorance and anti-intellectualism you are showing here is, uh. it's on par with a made up guy saying "why are there so many different programming languages? can't you just write everything in assembly? that seems like it'd be easier." it's honestly kinda sickening.

here's a great video that elaborates further on the history of this particular painting and also why hatred for modern art and fascism are intimately entangled

I once had to unfriend someone I cared about because every time I posted something from Rothko, she would make snide comments, even after I dm’d her and asked her not to.

Her objection was that his stuff is “just boxes” and anyone can do that. But no, they can’t. The depth and complexity of how he painted immerses you in a field of color. Furthermore, each paining of his is an experiment in how that color makes you feel. For instance, this one i find calming:

While this one fills me with dread:

These paintings are big enough that if you stand two feet away, they fill your field of vision. The photographs don’t do them justice, but you get the point.

Alpine autumn sunrise - Adlerweg, Tirol, Austria, October 2022

elected fic of the year