My Inspiration for September 2021

This month my favourite things were the amazing, vibrant paintings of horses by the German Expressionist painter Franz Marc, then the delightful illustrations for the Wind in the Willows by Arthur Rackham, Constantin Guy’s watercolours of fancy Parisians and ladies in crinolines, illustrations by Sarah Kay and Hollie Hobby, covers of the Art Nouveau magazine Jugend, and illustrations by Theophile Steinlen. Violin and cello music to colour the crisp autumn air. I am really excited for the colours and richness of autumn this year! As always in late summer and early autumn, there was a bit of nostalgia and trips down memory lanes before I sail my boat into the groovy orange, mauve and crimson waters of October so I rewatched some of my old favourite films such as “Love Witch” (2016) and listened to some of my old favourites such as Bryan Ferry’s 2HB. It’s nice to revisit old favourites but one must be cautious not to sink into the sweetness of memories and miss out on the present and its possibilities.

“That old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air … Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year’s mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.”

(Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose)

“I have taken to celebrating the anniversaries of my sensations, the anniversary of something that was delightful at one time, of something that actually never occurred. I am reduced to celebrating anniversaries because I no longer have anything with which to replace even those silly, flimsy dreams. For dreams… have to be renewed too.”
(Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s White Nights)

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Viktor Semenovich Vilner, Embankment, Scenes from Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”, 1971

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Picture by Nishe (Magdalena Lutek)

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Picture found on: mireia arpa on Instagram.

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My Inspiration for August 2021

The best book I read this August was Takanobu Ishikawa’s “Romaji Diary” and I have already written a book review about it here. There were passages and thoughts that I found extremely relatable and other parts of the book felt more like dipping my finger into the sea of reverie… My other inspirations are, as you can see from the pictures, many lovely late 1960s and early 1970s fashion pictures, portrayals of circus and the sea in art, the Stone Roses, red colour, I really crave red these days, in art and other places, Pre-Raphaelite art as the gateway to the season that awakens the soul; autumn…

“And I feel so lonely and vulnerable and strange…”

(Anne Sexton, from A Self-Portrait In Letters)

“My poor friend could not understand the deep yearning and pain in life. Feeling unbearably lonely, I returned to my room. Ultimately it’s impossible for a man to make another man understand him fully. In the final analysis, camaraderie between one man and another is merely superficial. Realizing that the friend who I had thought understood me as thoroughly as I had him was unable, ultimately, to understand the anguish and pain at the bottom of my heart made me feel unbearably dreary. We are each separate, each alone! This thought left me indescribably sad.”
(Takuboku Ishikawa, Romaji Diary)

John French – Jean Shrimpton for Mary Quant (London 1964)

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Mike Berkofsky – Jane Birkin Wearing a Dress by Laura Ashley (19 Magazine 1970)

Picture by Olha Sheludiakova, found here.

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Picture by Marina Marić, found here.

Alexis Waldeck – Donna Mitchell (Status & Diplomat 1967)

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Barry Lategan – Maudie James and Louise Despointes (Vogue UK 1971)

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Ford Abbey and Gardens (by Annie Spratt)

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Found in the Internet Archive by AnitaNH

Dresses from Foale and Tuffin (Woman’s Journal 1971)

Dresses by Colin Glascoe (Woman’s Journal 1971)

By Laura Makabresku.

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Stuart Brown – Models Wearing Pourelle Ensembles (19 Magazine 1969)

My Inspiration for July 2021

These sunny July days I very much enjoyed listening to my old favourite songs by Pearl Jam but also discovered some stuff by Chris Cornell, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains; especially the hauntingly beautiful live version of “Love, Hate, Love”. I am mildly obsessed with cactuses, both in paintings and in desert scenery, prairie dresses, 1970s Sarah Kay illustrations, vibrant, childlike, colorful paintings by Fauvists, Gauguin’s Tahiti-phase paintings, flower paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe… I got my hands on quite a few fascinating books this month (finally!), amongst them are the recently published and thought-provoking book “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” by Abigal Shrier, Uncommon by Owen Hatherley; a book about the band Pulp, their aesthetic, lyrics and place as perpetual outsiders on the music scene, As I crossed a Bridge of Dreams; a wonderful novel written by a court lady in the 11th century Japan, The Bilingual Lover by Juan Marsé; both comical and sad at the same time, The Way to Paradise by Mario Vargas Llosa; a novel which explores the lives of Paul Gauguin and his grandmother Flora Tristan; they both had in common the urge for freedom, and they both tried to break the chains of civilisations, each in their own way. I am also more than half-way through Erich Fromm’s “Escape from Freedom” which is very interesting and especially so in the age we are living in, here are two quotes I enjoyed:

“We are proud that we are not subject to any external authority, that we are free to express our thoughts and feelings, and we take it for granted that this freedom almost automatically guarantees our individuality. The right to express our thoughts, however, means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own; freedom from external authority is a lasting gain only if the inner psychological conditions are such that we are able to establish our own individuality.”

“Freedom is not less endangered if attacked in the name of anti-Fascism than in that of outright Fascism. This truth has been so forcefully formulated by John Dewey that I express the thought in his words: “The serious threat to our democracy,” he says, “is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states. It is the existence within our own personal attitudes and within our own institutions of conditions which have given a victory to external authority, discipline, uniformity and dependence upon The Leader in foreign countries. The battlefield is also accordingly here—within ourselves and our institutions.”

“The days are long and weigh on me. I am suffocating.”
(Albert Camus, from a letter featured in “A Life Worth Living”, c. 1940)

Sasha Kichigina photographed by Ina Lekiewicz for For Love & Lemons Spring 2020

Instagram: elise.buch

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Model Ingrid Boulting photographed at Lacock Abbey, “Summer at Source”, by Norman Parkinson for Vogue UK, July 1970

Red Avadat, Red Munia or strawberry finch, picture found here.

Moret-sur-Loing, France (by J.P. Renais)

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A Cactus Garden in California⁣, c. 1902⁣, Source: Beinecke Digital Collections⁣

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Dan Kozan, from Creative Black Book: Photography (1985)

Cuba, picture found here.

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Miss Moda 2020 in Elle Mexico December 2019 by Dennis Tejero

Towers with Faces at the Bayon Temple, Angkor wat complex, Cambodia. Picture found here.

Red and White Campion Meadow & Wild Campion Meadow
by Alan MacKenzie

My Inspiration for June 2021

This June my imagination took me to the beautiful lush gardens of Italy such as the Garden of Ninfa where I imagine the distant sound of Faun’s flute and the nymphs splashing water and laughing while the breeze carries a delicate yet sweet floral scent that lulls the senses into an everlasting dream… Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale’s watercolour “Youth and the Lady” seems like a scene from such a dreamy garden. Since I was reading Charlotte Gordon’s amazing biography on Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, I also travelled in my mind to the beautiful places in Italy that Percy and Mary Shelley lived in, such as Naples with the Mount Vesuvius and Pisa. I also enjoyed paintings by Greuze and photographs by Francesca Woodman.

“All cruelty springs from weakness.”

(Seneca)

“Empathy without boundaries is self-destruction.”

(Silvy Khoucasian)

“Future joys are like tropical shores; like a fragrant breeze, they extend their innate softness to the immense inland world of past experience, and we are lulled by this intoxication into forgetting the unseen horizons beyond.”
(Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary)

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, Youth and the Lady, 1905

 

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Francesca Woodman, Polka Dots, November 1976

Max Kozloff, Francesca Woodman, 1981

Carol Kane photographed by Jean Pagliuso, 1975

By @labohemejulia

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Garden of Ninfa, province of Latina, Italy.

By cadreg@tt on Flickr

Francesca Woodman, Woman with Large Plate, Roma (1978)

My Inspiration for May 2021

This May I was in the mood for the Pre-Raphaelite art (when am I not in the mood for that?…), but especially the drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti which I feel that I love even more than his paintings. I have also been enjoying the art of Foujita and Miroslav Kraljević, as you have seen from the posts I have written on the topic. I was also reading a book “The Game of Life and How to Play It” by Florence Shinn and here is a very wise quote from it:

“Nothing stands between man and his highest ideals and every desire of his heart, but doubt and fear. When man can “wish without worrying,” every desire will be instantly fulfilled. (…) fear must be erased from the consciousness. It is man’s only enemy – fear of lack, fear of failure, fear of sickness, fear of loss and a feeling of insecurity on some plane. Jesus Christ said: “Why are ye fearful, oh ye of little faith?” (Mat. 8:26) So we can see we must substitute faith for fear, for fear is only inverted faith; it is faith in evil instead of good.”

“Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;

I am also call’d No-more, Too-late, Farewell”

(Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The House of Life)

Ca’ d’Oro, photographed by David Hamilton, Venice, 1989.

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Jane Asher in 1964

Brigitte Bardot, Le Stroboscope, Paris, 1956 – Ph. Willy Rizzo

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Sarajevo, picture found here.

My Inspiration for April 2021

The most important thing of Beauty that I have delighted in this April was Linda Lappin’s freshly published novel “Loving Modigliani: The Afterlife of Jeanne Hébuterne”, you can read more about it in my book review, but I will just say here that it really captivated my imagination and filled my mind with beautiful imagery. It’s really a haunting, beautiful and poignant book. Naturally, descriptions of Jeanne’s clothes made me take a look at the 1910s fashion, especially the Oriental inspired designs by Paul Poirot, then also Diego Rivera’s painting with flowers, Amy Winehouse and Paul Weller singing covers, Talk Talk and The Libertines. I reread Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and found something new and beautiful in it, which I hadn’t seen before. Another thing I must recommend is the video/article (or rather transcript) by the Academy of Ideas called “The Manufacturing of Mass Psychosis – Can sanity return to the insane world?“; very interesting and thought-provoking, it quotes Joost Meerloo’s book “The Rape of the Mind”:

“Totalitarianism is man’s escape from the fearful realities of life into the virtual womb of the leaders. The individual’s actions are directed from this womb – from the inner sanctum…man need no longer assume responsibility for his own life. The order and logic of the prenatal world reign. There is peace and silence, the peace of utter submission.“

“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.”

(Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)

Open meadows, picture found here.

April 1968. ‘Flirtations come naturally in this romantic new-look that’s date-positive and party-bound.’ Picture found here.

 

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Glowing barrel cacti, Mojave National Preserve, California by Scott Gibson via Flickr https://flic.kr/p/beeUcH

Laura Julie by David Cohen de Lara for ELLE France June 2017, pic found here.

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Picture by elise.buch on instagram.

Picture by elise.buch on instagram.

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Angkor Wat temple, Angkor, Cambodia, picture found here.

Penelope Tree photographed by David Bailey for Vogue, 1969

Gunilla Lindbland for Vogue, April 1971

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Regitze Christensen by Boo George for Numéro August 2017. Picture found here.

Austin Lite, Watercolor and Ink on Cotton Paper, 2019, 9″x 12″

 

Frank Lepold, Impromptu, 2015

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My Inspiration for March 2021

My biggest inspiration this month (and discovery) was Santoka Taneda; a Japanese haiku writer who led a fascinating life and wrote Zen poetry, and also my old favourite Vincent van Gogh: his art, his letters, and Irving Stone’s novel “Lust for Life”. As I am writing this, bright yellow daffodils are smiling to me from their vase and from my window I see the clouds, the skies, the treetops, I hear the birdsong; they all call me to join them and I shall. Enjoy the beautiful pictures!

“There were so many things we feared. And we shouldn’t have. We should have lived.”

(Ivo Andrić)

“Today my path was wonderful. I wanted to shout out to the mountains, the sea, and the sky. The sound of the waves, the birds, the pure water–I’m grateful for everything. The sun shone brightly and the number of pilgrims increases daily. The memorials, the bridges, the shrines, and the cliffs were so beautiful. My rice was like food from heaven.”

(from Santoka Taneda’s diary)

Beautiful watercolour by  李淡淡 .

Picture by i.Anton ☂.

Quote from “Sputnik Sweetheart”, by Haruki Murakami

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Lucia Heffernan – Field Wishes, 2020

My Inspiration for January 2021

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)

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By: Victoria Chmel | victoriachmel

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Pic by Stefany Alves

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My Inspiration for December 2020

This December my aesthetic was Greuze’s delicate and wistful girls, fairy tales, castles covered in snow, winter forests, skeletons and maidens, Polanski’s film Fearless Vampire Killers with the gorgeous Sharon Tate, 1990s fashion by Lolita Lempicka, white lace dresses and frosty red roses, troubadours and damsels, swans and sad brides, The Smiths, delicate watercolours by Susanna Duncombe (1725-1812), birches and wedding veils. I watched a wonderful and poignant Polish film “Brzezina” (The Birch Wood, 1970) which touched me deeply and I will surely watch it again. I also Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (finally, because I love the film!) and Bret Easton Ellis’ wonderful book of essays called “White” (2019); it was refreshing to read some common sense.

“Love life more than the meaning of it.”

(Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov)

“My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking to suit other people! My manner of thinking stems straight from my considered reflections; it holds with my existence, with the way I am made. It is not in my power to alter it; and if were, I’d not do so.”

(Marquis de Sade (in a letter to his wife; 1783)

“We are all engaged in the task of peeling off the false selves , the programmed selves, the selves created by our families, our culture, our religion.”

(Anais Nin, In Favour of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays)

“Silver Birch” (c.2005) photograph by Adam Brock, via flickr.com

Brzezina (1970)

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Château de la Bretesche by Night by Loïc Lagarde

Instagram: opheliesz

Inspiration: Castles, White Gowns, Roses and Snow

Cardinal in snow by Molly Dean.

Rose by Rein Nomm.

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Neuschwanstein Castle, Germany by 📸 Joonas Linkola

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Frosty days...🦉 | niiloi

Lake Bled island in Slovenia