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.

Vigeland's Beautiful Freaks

 Alright. The beautiful, insane statues present at Frogner Park, Oslo. Let's discuss them.

Made by Gustav Vigeland, the park contains just over 200 figures. Large, naked people just hanging out.

This is the sort of thing one might imagine an alien race discovering in the far future. The centrepiece is a pillar of bodies, twisted and lumped together in a scene reminiscent of the last moments of Shin Godzilla (2016). And that shit looks awesome. But it's not all, not by a long shot, because surrounding this, we see a mass of people in different configurations. What I love most about it is perhaps the active poses many of them take. Most are in couples, and they're doing stuff with each other - holding each other, playing with each other, climbing on each other, etc. Some of these poses are downright acrobatic!

I love this expression of not just humanity and the body, but of life and living, and ultimately, our interactions with each other. There's something lovely about the slightly chunky look of these people, and there's a great sense of realism through a certain amount of variation - we see the folds of old men and the exuberance of children play out in various scenes.

And there's something about the particular look of the genitals here that looks so real and great. Round, cute scrotums everywhere. How nice.

They also are, in some cases, pretty funny. A man carries a woman on his back in the most peculiar way, while she tucks her knees up to her chest, feet and bum in the air. Another man struggles with four babies, who appear to be glued onto his limbs. What's going on here?

This is life, baby. This is what it's all about. 

Another Blogging Manifesto ✨

 Okay ladies, it's September. What does that mean? Girl, it means it's time to enter the AUTUMNAL ZONE in one's mind. Right now I'm in Norway, I've seen the Oslo Fjord with my own eyes, and it has indeed been raining. So I'm filled with the great spirit of the Caspian Gulls, and thus I am committed to the most Autumnal girl slay thing of all: blogging. You know it.

The blogstress herself.

At a lake in New Jersey, 14th August 2025.

I've said this before, I know, but one needs to hear the call of the blog a few times before one is able to really FEEL the blog in one's heart. And I am here, now, feeling the beating heart of my blog, pulse stronger than ever. So I have a vague plan, a small exercise for myself - I will blog as a matter of duty. The details will remain murky to you, dear reader, because I am now a woman of mystery and intrigue. I will not reveal my veins to you, but you will know that they are there.

Anyway, I'm sitting on an extremely soft bed as I write this. There are three apples in a bowl staring at me. I probably won't bother eating any of them, because their sister, the fourth, didn't taste that good. Sorry, apples. I have judged.

I think I do a lot of things at this point with the metrics in mind. Obviously, posting in any place reminds you constantly of that, but it's become my job to be aware of it. And there's a disconnect to that sort of thing in some online spaces - sure, Blogger has analytics and VIEWS, but like, who cares? Engagement is distant here, like a phantom at the bottom of the lake that I can't make out. I know it's there, but it's inconsequential because, let's be real, no one is here. Blogger is a ghost town, and I am always anticipating an announcement that Google is shutting it down. They took Google Hangouts from me, so why not this too?

But that is precisely its strength. I'm alone in a very real way here. I know there's someone looking, but honestly if you're reading this you could be one of maybe a hundred people. So then, you too can consider yourself special, and perhaps cultured, for reading my blog. Wow.

Another thing is that I have always prioritised images here to an extent. Well, no more. This is the place of paragraphs. I'm going to shed pretences of professionality, and treat this thing like a wire directly to the brain. Let's go. It's a beautiful day.

I Painted Three Beautiful Dogs

 Here are some dog paintings I made for some family members last Christmas. The first is Sandy, a dog who is a little bit evil when it comes to barking. She just really wants to bark at all the mysterious things that might be lurking outside. And I do understand that, but girl, I need you to turn the volume down. I literally have a headache. There's no excuse. I know she's reading this.

The second is this painting of Millie and Moussa, two respectful dogs who possess all the unquestioning solitude of the ten-thousand-year-old spirit of a buddhist monk who haunts the temple in which you may find a special, high-stat bow to equip. They are serene, generally, but they are also little weirdos when activated fully. They reminded me of the unblinking, long silence of my first Furby (it had to be returned to the shop, because it didn't work right, but I had already formed a serious bond with the Furby within twenty minutes, so it was a devastating occasion for me).

Anyway, please just look at them. Gaze into their eyes. These are real dogs. Their essence has been transmuted to the page. You may hear a bark as you look.