Monday, February 18, 2013

the liquefaction of her clothes

Slightly obnoxious but perhaps wonderful:

I have been spending all evening looking for black and white photographs to render in charcoal with my students. I started out searching for "black and white photography still life" and kept finding images of beautiful women among all the pepper and pottery pictures.

Hmph! A portrait of a beautiful woman is not a still life! Let's restrict it to "vegetables" and "fruit"! More beautiful women! They are not even holding "vegetables" and "fruit!"

"Gourds!" Okay, that was obvious. Don't do "jugs."
"Coffee cups!" Sigh.
"Animals!" Check.
"Trees!" Check.
"Architectural elements?" ...........check.
"Natural!" No makeup, I get that.
"Nature!" Still sexy ladies, and.... Jon Voigt?
"LEAVES!!!!" Try again.


 So what gives? It's likely that the culprits are just indiscriminate taggers, who make the internet as exasperating a "place" as a library where a bunch of monkeys have learned the rudiments of shelving. But although I was annoyed at searching for one thing and finding another, a bit of charm shone through the frustration. There are simply a lot of pictures of people, especially women, because they are so magnificent. Sometimes the weird tags are slapped on there to generate more hits, but I wonder if sometimes a fistful of seemingly unrelated words is an attempt to capture and share the shimmering, burbling beauty of a moment with another human being. "Coffee cups," not so much, but you never know. I suppose coffee is involved in lots of my burbling moments.

I did end up finding lots of promising pictures, and it's good to know that our admiration for the human form is so irrepressible that eyes and chins and elbows and napes and earlobes and breasts and shoulders show up, even when you explicitly asked for eggplants.


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