I cannot say that I am sad because January is over, I mean, it isn’t the most exciting month, but it did leave me a gift of some delightful violin music and a wonderful book “The Claiming of the Sleeping Beauty” by Anne Rice which I enjoyed immensely! It’s an erotic novel and most reviews I read were rather negative, but I found it a great read; I liked that it’s a classic and well-known fairy tale but with a twist. My aesthetic this month was partly very dreamy, princessy and snowy, and partly inspired by Marianne Stokes’s wonderful portraits of Slovak and Hungarian girls. Nature is still asleep but I am ardently awaiting it to awake once more, I can hardly contain my excitement when I imagine the meadows and gardens now covered with snow will be green and alive with the laughter of the primroses…
“I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.”
(Oscar Wilde, De Profundis)
Chateau de Crazannes, France (by Mathias Doisne)
Picture found here.
Picture found here.
By: Victoria Chmel | victoriachmel
Drawing found here.
Pic by Stefany Alves
Picture found here.
Byron's Muse 
Your extensive moodboard and reading of erotica return me to The Handmaiden, a Korean film. I highly suggest it as a double feature with Lust, Caution, an Ang Lee film. They share both a Japanese colonial element and plenty of eroticism.
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Thank you for the suggestions!
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Your post just might inspire me to complete the Beauty Trilogy. After finishing The Claiming I read a little more than halfway through the second volume, Beauty’s Punishment, and then inexplicably laid it aside. It’s reading that has to be done in a particular frame of mind…an elusive mood.
That is an extraordinary bed. Life is not complete until at least one night (or day) is spent ensconced in that intimate space, removed from the quotidian cares of life, . “…and she saw the gleam of the carved posts of the bed, and the drapery fallen about her in rich colors”.
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I don’t know where you find them, but I love these images.
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Some lovely photos, drawings and paintings. The French towers and chateaux remind me of Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast” movie.
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