bathroom fittings and bathsheba ... seeing one led to a curiosity about the other ...

these were in the top of a cabinet in the V&A and i stood on tiptoe with arms aloft to photograph them ...

on the way home i began to wonder about the tale of  bathsheba ... and all the silly pictures her story provoked

the story itself ... i read a few chapters from a modern translation but lost interest, or rather lost patience ... on the face of it, its the usual tribal propaganda you get in most ancient myths

... to be continued ...

i was shocked ... then delighted ... to encounter this picture in the national portrait gallery

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L2aUSSfO38

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TyzAAwJnIw

http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/eggleston/exhibition.php

spain ... nearly thirty years ago .. the british were setting a bad example.

we've only got four lire, there's no way you're gonna charge us a florin to enter this poxy disco ...

if only my knee were'n't so stiff, i could give myself a heartfelt kick ... i used to dismiss dufy's work as careless ... of course it suddenly becomes obvious that he aspired to be "CAREFREE", innit ... a day later, i discover that in my ignorance i have conflated the paintings of the brothers raoul dufy and jean dufy, so i'm weeding out some of jean's pictures and devoting this to raoul ...

once, in early october, maybe 1992 or 1993, at dusk, i found a gitano family washing a carpet they'd rescued from the village dump .. four stout women spread the huge old rug across the shallow tank and patiently trod every inch until the last grain of dust was washed away to the nearby river

later ... its called a LAVOIR ... obviously !

there's even an encyclopaedic website ...

https://www.lavoirs.org/

blithely ignoring the elephant in the room ... "my" lovely new physician took me in at a glance and blurted out "you're morbidly obese ! let me weigh you and take your blood pressure ?"

dora maar was a first class creative photographer ... and spectacularly picturesque ... i can't work out yet if her self portrait came before these picasso portraits of her

portraits of dora maar by picasso, two of many, most were famously unflattering

cf

self-portrait by dora maar

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Double Portrait with Hatc. 1936-37
Gelatin silver print, montage, from negatives with handwork
29.7 x 23.8 cm
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of David Raymond 2008.172
© 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP

In Double Portrait with Hat(1936-37), Dora Maar radically altered and reconfigured photographic materials to generate an image. In her quietly gripping self-portrait, Maar cut and scraped directly into two negatives to create a heavy and forbidding halo above a torn and divided self. Works such as these… explore the formal definition and limits of photographic ‘content’ and anticipate the experiments of non-narrative filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas of the 1960s and 1970s. (Text by Julie Nero)

text and photograph downloaded via ARTBLART

dora maar was a professional photographer and worked as assistant to man ray ... she also took a lot of photographs of friends and artists ...  it must have been a great occasion when the original negative of her picture of the ukrainian model assia granatouroff was first hung out to dry in 1934

i think this last picture may have come from the same studio ....

in about 1965, when i asked my lady maths teacher ( miss chance ) why a minus times a minus makes a plus, she replied that i probably wouldn't understand the explanation and that i'd have to take her word for it

still vexed about her reply fifty years later, i asked the internet the same question ... it turns out it really wasn't that complicated

http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.negxneg.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLm5lRxt1rE

thomas moran

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Moran