Skull & Serpent

 When I visit museums, I'm always excited to see groups of people sketching the artefacts. I always really want to join them, and then destroy them by doing the best and most crazed drawing. This is a competition, I think, and I could win. But usually, I'm with someone who needs to go fast (understandable - life is short, and our legs hurt quickly), and I probably don't have a big, beautiful, chunky sketchbook on hand either.

Fortunately, we are blessed with online catalogues of museum pieces that are both fascinating to look at, and enticing to draw.

One such wonder is the V&A's collections, in which I found an intriguing ivory figure of a child stepping on a skull and a snake. A tiny little goth.

Here he is.

The website speculates that this is "probably" a depiction of the Christ child - overcoming death (skull) and sin (snake). Other details are similarly murky. It was made in "France or possibly the Netherlands" somewhere in the estimated forty years between 1780 and 1820. This little boy is an enigma, and I really like him. 

He was the clear first choice for a sketch, and I love his serene little face, sort-of statesman-like, and the cartoonish, medieval look of that weird snake. Cute.

The Games I Played in September

 Ok, it's the last day of September. Let's do a gaming audit.

Mr Bean and my own character, 'Simple Dog', just got married in Tomodachi Life.

 
Recently, I watched a video by HamsterButtocks (powerful username), in which she 'replaced doomscrolling' with playing games on her 3DS. It's a pretty long video, and in it, she details a week of spending all of her downtime gaming.

Something about this video really struck me, and so I was inspired to carve out some time to spend playing games every day, and in particular to do it on my 3DS - partly to enjoy an end-of-the-month summary of my activities in the wonderful, holy Activity Log.

I also played Birth by Sleep pretty extensively on my PS Vita, however, so we'll start with that.

The dwarves are about to encounter a spiky-haired twelve-year-old.

Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep is a strange game. You play it three times, as three different characters whose stories intersect. I can't comment on that too much yet, as I've only just finished the first playthrough as Dull Guy Terra, but I generally enjoy the gimmicky, inventive ideas like this that the series is so fond of. I liked the drops in Dream Drop Distance, after all. And after playing the first few minutes of the Ventus playthrough, where he meets the dwarves from Snow White and has to chase them down and attack them (they deserve this), I believe that I am also a fan of this gameplay mode.

Here are the gorgeous Terra playthrough stats:

Fascinating.

Now, let's move on to the 3DS. 

There were three games that I spent most of my time on here. Tetris (classic good stuff), Hyrule Warriors Legends (seems... ok), and The Smurfs.

Almost seven hours of gaming... she's crazy!

 
Yes, I spent three hours and twenty-one minutes playing the 3DS Smurfs game from 2015, and it was, in fact, my favourite one.

 
It's a simple game where you re-build the Smurfs' village via a series of mini games, and I got pretty into it. Those mini games were compelling despite their extreme simplicity, and when I rolled credits I was pretty satisfied. It's literally fun. You don't get it. You're not brave enough to get it.

The killer has arrived.

 
Hyrule Warriors Legends felt a bit dull, mostly on account of the extremely lengthy missions, but not helped by the game causing a major crash on my 3DS. I've heard that Hyrule Warriors is better on other systems, so that might be the best plan for any future forays into this one, but I am curious: what can I feed these pet fairies? I need to know.

#MyFairy

 
Finally, I did try 'Puppies World 3D' on the 3DS, where you can adopt a cute toy poodle, but truly all I did was name this poodle 'Gromp' and then close the game. So the Puppies World remains, as of now, a relative mystery to me.

Withering

 A few days ago I went to the Marmottan museum and saw, nestled in a hollow slightly away from all of the Monets, this little room of sunflowers by Françoise Pétrovitch. Titled Soleil, they appear to show a cycle of decay, or rather, the unorganised stages of a sunflower on its way to death, and I like how bright and alive the perfect, wide, healthy ones are - almost a marvel among the crunched and drooping flowers.

Me and them.

Sunflowers have taken on a great symbolism in my family lately. They were a particular favourite of my grandma (she used a sunflower photo as her avatar on WhatsApp, so if you texted her you would be texting the sunflower), and so every so often one of us will send a picture of some sunflower or other, with the understanding: we're thinking of Norma.

And it is, it cannot be denied, a good flower. The ultimate big, juicy, tall one, and such a reminder of childhood (growing a sunflower is still, I think, a common kids' first gardening project). We named it after the sun itself! What a thing!

The healthy sunflower.

The sick ladies.

 What I love about these paintings most is that intense purple disc of florets that brings an almost otherworldy richness to the flower. It's like something you'd see when crossing into an afterlife. I think it's the technique that really brings it this quality, almost pearlescent in that stark difference made by pooling water left to sit on the paper. This beautiful pooling is present in lots of Pétrovitch's other work, and it adds such a big, ethereal texture to every piece it touches.

Other work from Pétrovitch's website.

 

Love that.

 

 Seeing the sunflowers together, I'm struck by the aesthetic gorgeousness of the emblems of vibrant, peak, bouyant life, and the markers of death alike. Some of these fuckers look mouldy. The colour leaches from them, leaving a sallow ghost. And she's gorgeous too, in her decrepitude.

Look at that nasty one. Mmm.

Of course, life and death is hardly a unique theme, and I even feel dull describing it here, but nevertheless the crunch of it, that transient drooping, remains touching. The texture of it all. The ugly mess. It's all clumped together into a perfect, grainy collection.

I love that these are on paper. I love the torn edges. Live forever, sunflowers. Die forever too.

Brown Paper Scrapbook Bonanza

 Today's exciting blog post is simply a bunch of pages from my journal. This one is a square format scrapbook with brown paper, and I love working on the darker base colour. It really makes whites pop. It's also the chunkiest journal I have, so there's something deliciously childlike about opening it up, scribbling on that lovely thick and grainy texture. Hell yes. A good mix of stuff here, it lends itself so nicely to mixed media.

Plus, my friend Jen gave me some stickers of her face at her birthday party a few years ago, so I had to make them their own page. A beautiful memory. Thank you Jen.

Let's Get Old

 Ageing is, as you know, a singular obsession that we foolish living beings cannot for the life of us seem to put down. Every TikTok featuring a woman over thirty invariably has a trickle of shocked bystanders commenting on how "good" she looks "for her age" or how chopped and insane she is for thinking she still looks twenty-nine, because sixteen-year-olds are online in hideous droves and lack the foresight to know that they, too, will become this woman.

Norma, 70 years old in 2010.

Women post about letting their grey hair grow out because they're tired of bothering with root correction, and a baying mob of twenty-somethings rapidly transforming into donkeys Pinocchio-style are clattering together in the comments saying "YOU LOOK OLD YOU LOOK TOO OLD LIKE THAT". It is one of our many curses, and despite my own enviable fortitude (well...), I cannot entirely avoid the effects of the wizard's spell.

I look at my face and I see little lines and spots and so on, and I know that I am no ethereal, ghostly spectre of youth, but a normal ageing woman. Now, I've long been into neutrality. There is no moral significance attached to the way my body looks, and there is no real negative to looking my age. Still, it's impossible to exit society, so the sheer commitment the population has to caring about this does creep into me. A little parasite.

Enjoying a Guinness.

But since my grandma died this May, I sometimes think of her when this topic comes up. She was eighty-five, and frequently responded to photos of herself with a kind of horror. Ewww, she would be thinking. That's an old ass woman. And as much as it is always a shock when a person reveals the exuberant, sexy photos of their grandparent at nineteen years of age, I'm struck by just how much I think fondly of her ELDERLY face and look at photos of her OLD now that she's gone. She still had a crazed laugh and sparkling, knowing eyes, and a penchant for warm, autumnal colours. Plum purple, warm pink, dark, rich red.

Texture is not the enemy of smooth, old is not the enemy of young. 

Me, just born, not excited about it.

But this is all easy for me to say. I looked at a picture of myself from ten years ago and I found that, strangely, it looked remarkably similar to the me of today. While I know that there have been some changes in my appearance, it really is relatively subtle. So perhaps this is a cop-out and I'll soon be shuddering in fear and loathing. But on the other hand, perhaps I'll be beautiful and normal and old all at the same time, forever.

Me, 2015.

Me, 2025.

Almost everything seems to be coloured by Norma's death for me, in some way or another. Life feels changed. She would tell me, occasionally, that I was beautiful. Maybe I'll believe her.

Norma (centre, aged 11 or 12) and family, 1951.