"My endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least Romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith."
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chronicling an eclectic labyrinth of architectural + personal contemplation based in atlanta
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"Morally as well as physically, I’ve always had the sensation of an abyss, not merely the abyss of sleep, but that of action, dream, memory, desire, regret, remorse, beauty etc. I cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror. I feel though as If I am attacked by a frightful illness, which has never played such havoc with me as in this year - I mean my depression, my reveries, my discouragement, my indecision. Truly, I consider the person who succeeds in healing oneself of a vice as infinitely braver than a soldier or a man who defends his honor in a duel. But how to heal myself? How transform despair into hope, weakness into willpower? Is this illness imaginary or real? Has it become real after being imaginary?"
— Charles Baudelaire, Selected Letters, c. 1860 (via wavesofemotion)
"Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions."
— Albert Einstein, “On Imagination,” c. 1950
A Picturesque Restoration of the Pharos of Alexandria, Egypt, 1917 (via nypl)
Reblogged from noiseman
Francisco Goya,The Sabbath of Witches, 1797-8 (via allart)
‘This is one of eight paintings commissioned by the Duchess of Osuna for her country house at Alameda. The subject, similar to that of etching No. 60 of Los Caprichos, enabled Goya to combine his flair for fantasy with savage attacks on the Church’s abuses and exploitation of superstitions and fears, which were deeply rooted in the popular imagination.’
"In the immediate vicinity of the horses, there are figures overlapping with each other. The striking point is that, in cases like this, after carbon-dating, there are strong indications that some overlapping figures were drawn almost five thousand years apart. The sequence and duration of time is unimaginable for us today. We are locked in history, and they were not."
Reblogged from squidbeard
Iain Burke, Invasion of the Water Towers, c. 2008 (via squidbeard)
Luigi Canina, Postulated Reconstruction of the Mausoleum of Augustus from the Gli edifizi di Roma antica, 1851
"
At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry—the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?
Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
"All human will is directed toward a satisfactory shaping of man’s relationship to the world, within and beyond the individual. The plastic Kunstwollen regulates man’s relationship to the sensibly perceptible appearance of things. Art expresses the way man wants to see things shaped or colored, just as the poetic Kunstwollen expreses the way man wants to imagine them. Man is not only a passive, sensory recipient, but also a desiring, active being who wishes to interpret the world in such a way (varying from one people, region, or epoch to another) that it most clearly and obligingly meets his desires. The character of this will is contained in what we call the worldview (again in the broadest sense): in religion, philosophy, science, even statecraft and law."
— Alois Riegl, Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament), 1893
"Scale, in a way, is not the same thing as size. Scale is a quantity of somewhat abstract proportions. It bears a relationship, at one level, to the body, but it bears a bigger relationship to the imagination."
— Anish Kapoor, “On Scale” from How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?, 2010
"It’s very hard for me not to imagine that anyplace outside New York is full of ax murderers."
— Fran Lebowitz, “Interview about Philip Johnson,” c. 2005
Google Definitions: “Art”
“The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination”
