Alice Maravilhas

23.2.13

Egon Schiele's Self Portraits

pulling cheek, 1910

with Black Vase and Spread Fingers, 1911

with Chinese lantern fruits 1912

in oranger Jacke, 1913

with Red Shirt, 1914

as Saint Sebastian 1914

The Pathological Body

Raised Red Hand 1910

artistas

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Claude Monet

Matisse by Brassai

Jean Cocteau- Modigliani, Picasso et André Salmon à la Rotonde, Paris, août 1916

Marcel Duchamp y Man Ray. Paris, 1968

Andreas Feininger, Nude model posing for a large group of art students of the Farnsworth Art School

working at easels outdoors on a gentle hillside. Cape Cod, MA, US. July 1946

2.2.13

30.1.13

A Pale Blue Dot

NASA photo showing Earth as a pale blue dot at the left edge of the bright rings.

Saturn eclipsing the Sun as seen by the Cassini space explorer.
Earth is the tiny blue dot just outside of the bright inner rings.
Click on the photo to enlarge it enough to see planet Earth.

Carl Sagan had this to say about another NASA photograph similar to this one:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

from :: A Mindful Heart