Choose just one artwork that you would love to own & live with indefinitely.

I'm interested in the appeal of this print, tsar.
Not that I am disagreeing with you, please understand.

I've got the piece of artwork I love and intend to live with idefinitely.



I've got it beautifully framed in my library, against a rich red wall.
In front of it is a long table, which amongst other objects like a reading lamp and some a deocrative plate made out of stained glass, I've set up a miniature beach in a shallow transparent green glass bowl.

There's sand, shells, driftwood, sea stones. They wonderfully reflect what is going on in the picture.

Years ago, in my early twenties, I bought a cheap framed poster of it, having no idea it was really a painting. The poster got destroyed over time, and I searched and searched for another one. When I found it was done by an illustrator named Walter Crane, I knew I'd found my treasure.

I think I should just be quiet now & let anyone who whats to, talk.

I'm just really interested in what the rest of you have to say.

Go for it!

Thanks, chai.

It's my favorite Goya drawing. Quite melancholic and dark and the mixture of chaos and nature coming out of the shadows.

"The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" Such an iconic title.

Love the details like the one nonchalant cat who appears unconcerned. That the shadowed creatures are hard to distinguish until they come closer into the light.

Plus the image was used on one of my favorite books of all time, the hardcover book of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Haunted.

That was one of the "Capriccios" no?

My one work to live with would have to be Church's NIAGARA.

Los Caprichos? Si.

Is this the one Farmerman?
Niagara by Frederick Edwin Church, 1857

Izzat cool or what?
Heres another Church (since you posted Niagara when I forgot)

Heres the ten foot long "In the Heart of the Andes" also by Church

Monstrous in scale. Epic in subject.

http://www.winslow-homer.com/143198/Fox-Hunt-large.jpg

I think I could live with this one for a long time.
It's not so much the painting as what the painting speaks to.

Lovely! I'd love to know what you feel the painting speaks to.

Makes me think a bit of this poem:

The Thought-Fox
I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

Ted Hughes

That poem is breathtaking Bunny. Do you have any suggestion on any book of published poetry of his?

OK, I've thought about this.
Monet's love of beauty & the way he presents it in his paintings is quite irresistible to me.


Perhaps these will remain the most lasting images of love for domesticated nature we can respond to, with any real empathy?

In any case, I commend his efforts.

I like the poem.

The painting, in my eye, speaks to the often surprising uncertainty of life, the fox is doomed, by creatures seemingly lesser than he, and all because of something as seemingly innocuous as snow.
There is something indescribable about the light, a certain bleakness and reality, yet there is life, the ravens will survive, although they don't fit the hero image.

I am also a fan of Cormack McCarthy's writing, there is something about the realities of life you just can't pin down.

I'm not sure I did a very good job of describing that

Lovely!

I hadn't realised the fox was being hunted...I could see it looked anxious, but thought it was the ravens.

The blue is exquisite. I just want to sit on the bridge and dangle my feet into such lovely and welcoming waters.

I gotta say, that's an awesome painting.

The ravens are hunting him, the deep snow will wear him out and they will not let him rest.

Oh...

Now I wonder, how many people see that painting without realizing what is happening.
I suppose it may be a bit premature to say he is doomed, he could still escape, but he's in a bad spot for sure.