Art Blog Of J.

I have had Nini for ten years; we found her abandoned on my college campus as a kitten a week after Valentine's Day, and she has been my closest companion ever since. She loves me more than anything else in the world (including food!) and had already survived having her eye removed due to a melanoma last December.

On July 13, I took her in to the ER vet due to a poor appetite and what felt like a bit of abdominal swelling. Two vet visits and 36 hours later, her prognosis is that her liver is filled with small, round tumors. I am fighting to keep her alive until I can take her to the specialist 2 hours away next week, and I am running out of my savings.

If you can donate a little bit of money (or even fanart of my dear sweet baby - no A I please) I would sincerely appreciate it. Today has been a blur of panic attacks and waiting for follow up info from the vet, and I don't know how long she has left.

ko-fi link

hello! i am a service worker and i do actually understand going out to eat occasionally right now for special occasions or because you are on the brink of losing your mind! but here is the thing: please respect the service workers when you go as much as you can. here are some ways to do it:

*wear your masks when they come near you, meaning pop them on even if they are just asking how your meal is.

* i like to leave my hand sanitizer bottle on the table both because i am using it often and because i want the service workers to know i am for ease of mind.

* i always do this, but right now it’s more important. if you are at a place where you take your own dishes to the trash, do it! it’s not the time to be lazy. workers have to touch your dirty dishes. if you are not at a self serve place, please stack them appropriately for easy carry! this means larger plates all together on the bottom, then smaller, then smallest. a neat little pile. collect your trash and set it on top of your dishes for easy removal and tossing. believe me, this makes a huge difference! instead of touching multiple dishes to stack them ourselves or to dig out trash, we only have to touch one.

* tip. listen, right now, i am tipping even at fast food drive thrus. it’s a respect thing.

* speaking of drive thrus, wear your mask in them. it’s 10 seconds of your time versus the life of them and their loved ones.

YOU GUYS HOLY SHIT OMGHEJEHEUSIBWHWIDKDHDYSIWOSK

So sometime ago I commissioned one of my absolute best friends and one of my favourite traditional artists @jesibeans to do a lil piece of Misery bc reasons mind your business.

Anyway it was stuck in mail hell for a month bc US -> Canada is a shitshow rn BUT SHE'S HERE AND SHE'S BEAUTIFUL IM SCREAMING. She was packaged so well and Im terrified to take her out of the plastic without a frame ready to go lol.

Pleeease please please check out Jes' other work and consider supporting her in anyway you can. She's a bean and deserves so much more love 💞 These photos are shit and cant capture all the beautiful metallics and shiny boiz in these water colours 😭😭😭😭

Check Jes' Ko-fi here!

Check Jes' IG here!

paypal.me/terpsichorean

venmo.com/terpsikhore

RESOURCES ON WAYS TO HELP THE BLACK LIVES MATTER MOVEMENT

includes educational materials on black history, structural racism, effective allyship, and ways to donate without any money

the atrocities and injustices black americans have faced for centuries by the very nation their ancestors built has gone on for far too long. it has been proven time and time again america is indifferent to the flagrant abuse and murder of african-americans by the system society told us growing up is meant to protect the people. its abundantly clear that is a lie.

as i am writing this on june 6th 2020, 12 days after the death of george floyd, all 50 states and over 580 american cities have held protests against racism and police brutality. the whole country is crying out towards their injustice and america is long overdue for deep societal change. but that is not all.

in addition to the u.s. 19 other countries so far have joined and held protests against the systemic racism and police brutality perpetuated by their own governments. from argentina to australia, canada to brazil, mexico to japan, this list goes on. this is NOT an american only issue. police brutality is worldwide. globalized colorism and racism is prevalent and real. to quote andré 3000, “across cultures darker people suffer the most, why?”

i am speaking as an asian-american. and im also saying this as a nonblack person. george floyd was murdered directly by derek chauvin but 3 other officers aided in his murder, including an asian-american man named tou thao. he stood by doing nothing to help while a white man murdered a black person. a horrific representation of the culmination of antiblackness in asian-american communities. its not just white people. we are complicit to such racism as well. we must start with ourselves. to terminate structural racism we must eradicate it at the root so it may never reach such a scale ever again. in america, and many other countries, every nonblack person is complicit in the oppression of black people. we must work to undo the anti-blackness ingrained in us and our own people. we have to hold them accountable for anti-black racism before it grows and one our own is complicit to another racist murder of a black person. no matter how much it makes us uncomfortable and no matter who you might upset.

we cannot look away. we must immediately fight for change. a few convictions will not be enough. “reforming” the police will not be enough. a few new laws will not be enough. not until every black person brutalized and murdered by the hands of police get justice, and not until we ensure that this will never ever happen again. this problem is deep, and we all must work intra and interpersonally to solve it. and if you’re not speaking out, if you’re choosing to be quiet, you are part of the problem.

when we look at history often we’re appalled and shake our heads at the atrocities committed by society. why did people do that? why did people allow that? why did it go on for so long? it’s because people stayed silent and didn’t do anything to stop it. in oppression, there is no neutrality. if you stand by and say you don’t pick a side you are picking the side of the oppressor, because you’re allowing oppression to happen. in the era of slavery, would you say you would have advocated for abolition? or would you have turned a blind eye and let it go on? now look at the reality of our world today and ask yourself what side of history you’re going to be on, right here, right now. because this is a global movement. and history is in the making.

The best thing you can do is construct fill-in-the-blanks for letters for people to contact their representatives. Many people want to contact their legislators, but do not know how to make their voice heard in letter form. 

You can help.

Research who the leaders in your area are and what their contact info is.

Form a letter that is coherent, explicit in its demands and does not include emotional language, name-calling or swearing. (these are often tossed in the garbage and considered harassment)

While people are inclined to whip out their phones and film when they see something alarming happening, those videos are not always recorded in a way that can be used as evidence in a legal proceeding or to support advocacy tactics.

ATLANTA

LOUISVILLE

HOUSTON

BROOKLYN

BODY&SHADOW 002: DRAGONFLY

Xueyu’s steps were brisk on the sliver-stone salvaged hallways leading him away from Jiling’s private chamber. He made quick work of the angled corridors, followed all their twisting and turning around sacred spaces until he hit the day in full. The large man stood in the   main doorway of the mountain’s deeper recesses for a fleeting moment, watching the lazy rustling of the world beyond—its simple tuning so grand, its motions so slow that they were imperceptibly fast. A paradox, a puzzle: perfect.

The inner walls of Luanshi Sect’s mountain compound twisted some yards ahead of him, composed of stretches of dense rebar hammered into a more acceptable shape, metal bones of a fallen structure picked from her wreckage and reused to fit the purposes of a society built atop the echoes of former folly. Lungs full of the morning’s dewy air, he started down the broad stairs and down the path toward his training yard, turning just before the exit yawning before him. Xueyu dipped into a shadow-lined path between two smaller structures made of hand-mashed mud and steel. He emerged on the other side to his favorite sound—the complaints of one of his pupils being punished by the superior skill of a boy he considered his best.

“Blue paint highlighting the blueprint of his not-quite-dead veins, golden hair and lashes rendered snow white.” - heraldry, arachnida, A03

I’m so damn glad I chose to do vamp Laurent for the 2019 Reverse bang, after seeing the amazing amazing beautiful things @jesibeans is doing with it for their fic over on A03. The prologue is up, please go read it, it bring this right to life 🙏 (link in comments)

(Story notes from the author - TW: Pretty blatant discussions of paedophilia/child sexual abuse, grief, death, dying; - things that exist in Capri but may not be what you’re up for right now)

Kyrie (eleison) 2020, 10x20-ish mixed media on masonite Media, in no specific order: Watercolor, acrylic, acryla gouache, gold and silver leaf, gold mica flake, lace

Done for @capri-bigbang2k19 

According to the date on my phone, I finished the sketch in late August. I finished not too long ago, making this my first painting of 2020. How fitting, given this piece includes a lot of firsts: mounting a piece on masonite with matte medium as an adhesive; using squeeze bottles and blunt needles to do fine lining/piping (I need to go thinner,) and making shell gold for the purpose of being liquid gold paint (a technique adapted from how Russian icon painters make shell gold, which is both time-consuming and kind of fun.) I also used matte medium as more adhesive for the lacing after looking into how collage and assemblage artists make their pieces stick without fear of glue breaking or yellowing.

I’d visit this intermittently along with working on bees for my local town - it became a form of therapy in which I was allowed to “get real fucking weird,” as some professionals say.

The dried grass, camellias, roses, sweet peas and baby’s breath are a reference to my writing contribution to the Captive Prince Big Bang, which needs to be worked on oops, but I got until Saturday.

Laurent’s Heart