Specimens

Luke and I were looking at Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights and discovered, much to our amusement, music written upon the posterior of one of the many tortured denizens of the rightmost panel of the painting which is intended to represent Hell. I decided to transcribe it into modern notation, assuming the second line of the staff is C, as is common for chants of this era.

Old Master Paintings Animated

As someone who has (allegedly) taken LSD in the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and…

Serpent D’Océan - Saint-Brevin-les-Pins, France

Stuck in a perpetual state of decay on the French shore at Saint-Brevin-les-Pins, the massive metal sculpture entitled, Serpent D’Océan is a terrifying vision with an environmental message. 

The skeletal serpent was unveiled in 2012 as part of the Estuaire art exhibition which invites international artists to create large-scale works using the environment surrounding the Loire River between Nantes to Saint-Nazaire. The work was created by Chinese-French artist Huang Yong Ping, who used the rough iconography of China’s mythological dragons to design the over 400 foot long art monster. The beast is posed in slithering movement despite being nothing more than bones, giving the dull metal frame an unsettlingly life-like quality.

Given its location on the shore, the Serpent D’Océan can be seen as a strangely living creature rising from the ocean waters or a purposefully preserved skeleton held above the shallow waves depending on the level of the tide upon a given visit. But despite the changing tides, fantasy, art, and horror have rarely been so steadfastly intertwined.

St Nicholas punching Arius, the mosaic.

/ping @kootenayrev