Luna Day Mood.

Tiamat – Carry Your Cross And I’ll Carry Mine.

Blame my cloven hooves – If I sink what does it prove
I’ll always be your prey
Blame my crooked cross – Say I’m your bitter loss
The winds of hell are blowing your way

“Carry your cross and I’ll carry mine
Dig your own hole and you’ll be fine
Build your own tower until heavens devour
Your very last hour”

Blame it on Hell’s fire – And on my desires
The skies are crying blood
Give me all your lies – And blame the lord of flies
The face of evil is the face of GOD.

Why the daily music? Because the start of music signals the beginning of my working day, and it’s nice to share.

The Art of Whipped Cream.

Selected character studies, oil on board, dimesions variable. All images courtesy the artist and Paul Kassman Gallery. (Click for full size!)

In a performance at the Metropolitan Opera and a parallel gallery exhibit, artist Mark Ryden imbibes his sugary design aesthetic through costume and fashion prints. In his latest venture, the Portland-based artist creates classic, painterly pastel works with a childlike fantasy.

The art show, The Art of Whipped Cream, opening in May at Paul Kasmin Gallery in NYC, features the final realizations of each costume from the opera, Whipped Cream, a graceful choreographed feat by Alexei Ratmanksy. His illustrations encompass the bedtime dreams of prima ballerinas, pink, and lots of candy and pastries. Ryden’s merry band of misfits includes a smiling half-dragon, half-muppet creature, and tiny humans masquerading as multilayered cakes. The two-dimensional drawings at Paul Kasmin are rendered in oil on board and graphite on paper.

[…]

Mark Ryden’s solo art exhibit, The Art of Whipped Cream, shows  at Paul Kassman, May 20–July 21, 2017. Find more information about the show, here.  Purchase tickets for the ballet, Whipped Cream, taking place at the Metropolitan Opera House, here.

You can read and see much more at The Creators Project.

The Whipped Cream Curtain Call:

Flight Pattern.

A ballet about the plight of refugees, commissioned for the Royal Opera House, has been showered with five star reviews and described with words like potent and sombre. It’s the work of the Canadian Crystal Pite who has built a reputation as one of the most respected choreographers of her generation – and who is the first woman to have created a new work for the Royal Ballet in almost two decades. It’s titled ‘Flight Pattern’ and Kirsty Wark went to speak to her about using dance to engage in a difficult harrowing subject.

Beautiful and so very poignant. I wish I could see this in person.

Looking for Knives.

Morissa Maltz.

Morissa Maltz.

Visiting Hot Springs, Arkansas is like walking into the past. A city stuck in time, it’s known as much for its history and naturally heated springs buildings as its mix of 1800s architecture and Art Deco—structures that are slowly crumbling yet still magical. One of the city’s iconic buildings, the gigantic and once abandoned Majestic Hotel, was recently demolished. A week before its dismantling, however, artist and filmmaker Morissa Maltz shot a video inside the hotel. Equal parts documentary, performance art piece, and music video for Dyan’s “Looking for Knives,” it is the final document of a space that held huge amounts of history.

In “Looking for Knives,” Maltz’s camera drifts through the hotels innards. Though The Majestic suffered a fire in 2014, the video focuses instead on paint peeling off walls and floors turning into dirt. Inspired by female artists like Pipilotti Rist, Francesca Woodman, and Maya Deren, for whom the body expresses emotion inside a space, Maltz also performs in the video, moving through the hotel’s crumbling corridors and interacting with its surfaces.

A lovely, haunting video and song. You can read and see more at The Creators Project.