I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me earlier that I could, in fact, conquer the ridiculously yellow pages of my sketchbook with things like this. I wish The Yellow Book was still around. I should publish my own.
I am working on something I have wanted to make for a very long time - book plates. The first set is dedicated to Venus in Furs. Other ideas for sets that I had - 18th century, erotic, classical (Greco-Roman), possibly portraits of my favorite authors. Thoughts, especially from my passionate book lover followers?
Eugene Onegin.
“Им овладело беспокойство,
Охота к перемене мест
(Весьма мучительное свойство,
Немногих добровольный крест).
Оставил он свое селенье,
Лесов и нив уединенье,
Где окровавленная тень
Ему являлась каждый день,
И начал странствия без цели,
Доступный чувству одному;
И путешествия ему,
Как всё на свете, надоели;
Он возвратился и попал,
Как Чацкий, с корабля на бал.”
I hate coming back to a drawing after the fervor of making it has passed, and realizing just how awful it really is. Oh well, it’s already up here. Hopefully I’ll have something better tomorrow. Urgh.
I woke up today to a thunderstorm of apocalyptic proportions. It has not stopped since our fabulous boozing with the visiting relative and rock star, and it’s absolutely gorgeous. So I have spent the entire day in-doors, working on the costume and props for a new act we are debuting this Sunday, and finishing up this drawing. Even though I started it on Friday when I was home sick, it seems to suit the mood created by this downpour.
I am a little obsessed with that red right now. And big hats. Always big hats.
I’m going to sit in an ice bath and pretend it’s winter. Ugh.
Sketches done after a spring visit to the opera, Tchaikovsky’s “Queen of Spades.” Pushkin’s writing and Tchaikovsky’s music - match made in heaven.
“A virtuous wife complains of her husband’s lethargy, until finally [he] confesses that a recently deceased male friend has been returning from the grave to ‘suck from my veins the streaming life,/ And drain the fountain of my heart.’”
Stumbled upon a brilliant literary theory book in my wanderings, The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature by James B. Twitchell. It made the English literature scholar in me sing. Somehow when I read Romantic Gothic lit. theory and listen to Italian Baroque opera, quasi-Elizabethan vampires covered in Christian iconography come out. Oh dear.
![“A virtuous wife complains of her husband’s lethargy, until finally [he] confesses that a recently deceased male friend has been returning from the grave to ‘suck from my veins the streaming life,/ And drain the fountain of my heart.’”
Stumbled upon a brilliant literary theory book in my wanderings, The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature by James B. Twitchell. It made the English literature scholar in me sing. Somehow when I read Romantic Gothic lit. theory and listen to Italian Baroque opera, quasi-Elizabethan vampires covered in Christian iconography come out. Oh dear.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lltl9flGid1qkycczo1_500.jpg)
