#Skin: A Natural History

[qjqzxjq]

Evening Mood (William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1882)

In an article for Spatial Vision, Baingio Pinna praises Bouguereau's technical skill, writing:

The female sensuality is mainly due to the realistic representation of the young woman and to the enveloping transparent veil moving slowly all around her body and, at a more primary phenomenal level, also to the sinusoid wavy lines that seem to dance synergistically and harmonically through their good continuation.

[whalesbone]

breeding season indigo bunting. he is blue :)

[answrs]

you never realize just how tiny platypus are until you see them in person!

(male study skin and articulated skeleton at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History)

the museum's closed off for a full reno right now, but there was an event this past Monday I went to with all the different departments having tables to show off what they do. ended up having a really nice time and talks with the staff! also learned they're 3d scanning their primate skull collection and putting them online, they had this super old gorilla that was massive they were showing the equipment off on. :o

[moonfirebrides]

Jamaican Girl, ca. 1956-60

Dod Procter RA (1891 - 1972)

RA Collection: Art

Procter travelled widely, and had already visited Asia, Africa and North America before she began regularly visiting Jamaica during the 1950s. She painted many portraits of Jamaican children during her stays, including this portrait which the RA purchased after it was shown in the 1960 Summer Exhibition. Procter painted Jamaican Girl in the late 1950s, at a time of increased tensions surrounding the growing black presence in Britain and increasing momentum towards Jamaican independence. None of this, however, is registered in the pensive face of Jamaican Girl.

[ufonaut]

Jade’s normal skin color is green, and Obsidian’s natural skin color is solid black, but they can make themselves look like normal people. [...] Recalling the section of the Earth-2 Green Lantern’s original oath, that reads, “the dark things shall fear the light,” Thomas comments that Jade is “the light, and Obsidian is the dark thing, in a sense.”

Original character descriptions for Jennie & Todd from the Roy Thomas interview in Amazing Heroes (1981) #36.

[darlingdeadadornment]

Preserved green tree python mask in vintage frame🖤

25% off with code CLEARANCE25

www.DarlingDeadAdornment.com

[sharkneto]

My coworker: I left a [redacted dead animal head] out to thaw if you want to finish it up today

Me: Hell yeah, I will do that Immediately!

Me: Hurts my fingers because I did not fully appreciate that he said *to thaw* and I thought I could at least skin it while it was still mostly frozen, but turns out it was Still Very Cold! Ouch! Had to go shove my fingies in front of a heater for a little bit to warm them back up to non-painful levels.

You win this time [redacted skull], I'll finish getting you out later today.

[empty-blog-for-lurking]

All my Lances have some flavor of gender fuckery/non binary going on with them however it's only sr!Lance who has sat down, thought about it hard and realized that "hmmm actually? To be completely honest? I kinda like being not a boy. It's nice, this is nice😊" Rest of them are too far gone for the Realization™, too deep in the shithole they have dug themselves in

[bagheerita]

DS9's "Second Skin" once again shaming the Stargate Atlantis writing team by doing an episode they wrote but over 10 years earlier and 50 times better. I went on a rant about "Sunday" vs "Lessons" a couple years ago, but watching "Second Skin" is like seeing what "Michael" could have been if written by people who understood drama instead of only being acted by people who did. There are definitely differences, like we start out having a relationship with Kira which we don't with Lt Kenmore, but with the whole fake identity plot having the person's actual parent there makes it sooooooo much more emotional. (This is what I wanted from "Michael"!! Not just handing him a stock photo that literally looks like it came with the frame and telling him "These are your parents." But an actual emotional connection, any tie for him to cling to to believe your bullshit and not just Teyla being quietly agreeable like whoring her out is the only way you can sell your lies. Because, here in DS9 as well, the lies are so obviously bullshit.) But making it a double blind also, where you lied to the parent as well to make sure you manipulated that honest emotional connection into existing, fantastic, exquisite, Stargate wishes. And in the end the point of the episode is different, as Lt Kenmore is the focus of his episode and Kira is really just the excuse to expose the Legate by having him try to protect his "daughter," but (and as much as I love "Michael") the emotional content here is so much deeper and sweeter. Maybe SGA writers are allergic to honest emotions, or maybe the writers were trying to hedge their bets with not portraying their main cast as being as evil as the Obsidian Order... though if you're going to go with the war crimes go whole hog with the war crimes come on.

[thesterlingstudies]

Sundays With Sterling Podcast Episode 3 - The History and Science Behind Dead Sea Salts -_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_- Today's episode was dedicated to the location, history, science, composition, benefits, scientific research, and even some usages of Dead Sea Salt with some light storytelling. Infographic: Created by @The.Sterling.Jr of @TheSterlingStudies Dead Sea Salts: @Cure.Natural.Skin.Care Available on @Anchor and @Spotify -_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_- #SWS #Sunday #Sterling #Cure #Natural #Skin #Care #Skincare #smallbusiness #explorepage #deadsea #deadseasalts #deadseacosmetics #minerals #deadseaproducts #cosmetics #history #science -_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_- #podcast #podcasting #podcastersofinstagram #podcastlife #podcaster #anchorfm #spotify #entrepreneur #motivation #podcastcommunity (at Hollywood, Florida) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cp-iS4JJGXp/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[paulpingminho]

[theodore-sallis]

“Terror Stalks the Everglades!” Astonishing Tales (Vol. 1/1970), #12.

Writers: Roy Thomas and Len Wein; Pencilers: John Buscema, Neal Adams, and John Romita; Inker: Dan Adkins; Letterers: Jon Costa and Sam Rosen

[seilon]

Kpop dude was 2015 :) I know this bc I was the person who jokingly asked for the same gif but backwards

okay I knew it was 2014 or 15 cause it was around ace era for sure and I know this because that gif is engrained in my fucking Skull so I remember the makeup and outfit and all that so good but also. good god that’s still 7 years

also. casually mentioning ur a Legend what a power move

[gender-trash]

I would be very interested in hearing the museum design rant

by popular demand: Guy That Took One (1) Museum Studies Class Focused On Science Museums Rants About Art Museums. thank u for coming please have a seat

so. background. the concept of the "science museum" grew out of 1) the wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities), also known as "hey check out all this weird cool shit i have", and 2) academic collections of natural history specimens (usually taxidermied) -- pre-photography these were super important for biological research (see also). early science museums usually grew out of university collections or bequests of some guy's Weird Shit Collection or both, and were focused on utility to researchers rather than educational value to the layperson (picture a room just, full of taxidermy birds with little labels on them and not a lot of curation outside that). eventually i guess they figured they could make more on admission by aiming for a mass audience? or maybe it was the cultural influence of all the world's fairs and shit (many of which also caused science museums to exist), which were aimed at a mass audience. or maybe it was because the research function became much more divorced from the museum function over time. i dunno. ANYWAY, science and technology museums nowadays have basically zero research function; the exhibits are designed more or less solely for educating the layperson (and very frequently the layperson is assumed to be a child, which does honestly irritate me, as an adult who likes to go to science museums). the collections are still there in case someone does need some DNA from one of the preserved bird skins, but items from the collections that are exhibited typically exist in service of the exhibit's conceptual message, rather than the other way around.

meanwhile at art museums they kind of haven't moved on from the "here is my pile of weird shit" paradigm, except it's "here is my pile of Fine Art". as far as i can tell, the thing that curators (and donors!) care about above all is The Collection. what artists are represented in The Collection? rich fucks derive personal prestige from donating their shit to The Collection. in big art museums usually something like 3-5% of the collection is ever on exhibit -- and sometimes they rotate stuff from the vault in and out, but let's be real, only a fraction of an art museum's square footage is temporary exhibits. they're not going to take the scream off display when it's like the only reason anyone who's not a giant nerd ever visits the norwegian national museum of art. most of the stuff in the vault just sits in the vault forever. like -- art museum curators, my dudes, do you think the general public gives a SINGLE FUCK what's in The Collection that isn't on display? no!! but i guarantee you it will never occur, ever, to an art museum curator that they could print-to-scale high-res images of artworks that are NOT in The Collection in order to contextualize the art in an exhibit, because items that are not in The Collection functionally do not exist to them. (and of course there's the deaccessioning discourse -- tumblr collectively has some level of awareness that repatriation is A Whole Kettle of Worms but even just garden-variety selling off parts of The Collection is a huge hairy fucking deal. check out deaccessioning and its discontents; it's a banger read if you're into This Kind Of Thing.)

with the contents of The Collection foregrounded like this, what you wind up with is art museum exhibits where the exhibit's message is kind of downstream of what shit you've got in the collection. often the message is just "here is some art from [century] [location]", or, if someone felt like doing a little exhibit design one fine morning, "here is some art from [century] [location] which is interesting for [reason]". the displays are SOOOOO bad by science museum standards -- if you're lucky you get a little explanatory placard in tiny font relating the art to an art movement or to its historical context or to the artist's career. if you're unlucky you get artist name, date, and medium. fucker most of the people who visit your museum know Jack Shit about art history why are you doing them dirty like this

(if you don't get it you're just not Cultured enough. fuck you, we're the art museum!)

i think i've talked about this before on this blog but the best-exhibited art exhibit i've ever been to was actually at the boston museum of science, in this traveling leonardo da vinci exhibit where they'd done a bunch of historical reconstructions of inventions out of his notebooks, and that was the main Thing, but also they had a whole little exhibit devoted to the mona lisa. obviously they didn't even have the real fucking mona lisa, but they went into a lot of detail on like -- here's some X-ray and UV photos of it, and here's how art experts interpret them. here's a (photo of a) contemporary study of the finished painting, which we've cleaned the yellowed varnish off of, so you can see what the colors looked like before the varnish yellowed. here's why we can't clean the varnish off the actual painting (da vinci used multiple varnish layers and thinned paints to translucency with varnish to create the illusion of depth, which means we now can't remove the yellowed varnish without stripping paint).

even if you don't go into that level of depth about every painting (and how could you? there absolutely wouldn't be space), you could at least talk a little about, like, pigment availability -- pigment availability is an INCREDIBLY useful lens for looking at historical paintings and, unbelievably, never once have i seen an art museum exhibit discuss it (and i've been to a lot of art museums). you know how medieval european religious paintings often have funky skin tones? THEY HADN'T INVENTED CADMIUM PIGMENTS YET. for red pigments you had like... red ochre (a muted earth-based pigment, like all ochres and umbers), vermilion (ESPENSIVE), alizarin crimson (aka madder -- this is one of my favorite reds, but it's cool-toned and NOT good for mixing most skintones), carmine/cochineal (ALSO ESPENSIVE, and purple-ish so you wouldn't want to use it for skintones anyway), red lead/minium (cheaper than vermilion), indian red/various other iron oxide reds, and apparently fucking realgar? sure. whatever. what the hell was i talking about.

oh yeah -- anyway, i'd kill for an art exhibit that's just, like, one or two oil paintings from each century for six centuries, with sample palettes of the pigments they used. but no! if an art museum curator has to put in any level of effort beyond writing up a little placard and maybe a room-level text block, they'll literally keel over and die. dude, every piece of art was made in a material context for a social purpose! it's completely deranged to divorce it from its material context and only mention the social purpose insofar as it matters to art history the field. for god's sake half the time the placard doesn't even tell you if the thing was a commission or not. there's a lot to be said about edo period woodblock prints and mass culture driven by the growing merchant class! the met has a fuckton of edo period prints; they could get a hell of an exhibit out of that!

or, tying back to an earlier thread -- the detroit institute of arts has got a solid like eight picasso paintings. when i went, they were kind of just... hanging out in a room. fuck it, let's make this an exhibit! picasso's an artist who pretty famously had Periods, right? why don't you group the paintings by period, and if you've only got one or two (or even zero!) from a particular period, pad it out with some decent life-size prints so i can compare them and get a better sense for the overarching similarities? and then arrange them all in a timeline, with little summaries of what each Period was ~about~? that'd teach me a hell of a lot more about picasso -- but you'd have to admit you don't have Every Cool Painting Ever in The Collection, which is illegalé.

also thinking about the mit museum temporary exhibit i saw briefly (sorry, i was only there for like 10 minutes because i arrived early for a meeting and didn't get a chance to go through it super thoroughly) of a bunch of ship technical drawings from the Hart nautical collection. if you handed this shit to an art museum curator they'd just stick it on the wall and tell you to stand around and look at it until you Understood. so anyway the mit museum had this enormous room-sized diorama of various hull shapes and how they sat in the water and their benefits and drawbacks, placed below the relevant technical drawings.

tbh i think the main problem is that art museum people and science museum people are completely different sets of people, trained in completely different curatorial traditions. it would not occur to an art museum curator to do anything like this because they're probably from the ~art world~ -- maybe they have experience working at an art gallery, or working as an art buyer for a rich collector, neither of which is in any way pedagogical. nobody thinks an exhibit of historical clothing should work like a clothing store but it's fine when it's art, i guess?

also the experience of going to an art museum is pretty user-hostile, i have to say. there's never enough benches, and if you want a backrest, fuck you. fuck you if going up stairs is painful; use our shitty elevator in the corner that we begrudgingly have for wheelchair accessibility, if you can find it. fuck you if you can't see very well, and need to be closer to the art. fuck you if you need to hydrate or eat food regularly; go to our stupid little overpriced cafeteria, and fuck you if we don't actually sell any food you can eat. (obviously you don't want someone accidentally spilling a smoothie on the art, but there's no reason you couldn't provide little Safe For Eating Rooms where people could just duck in and monch a protein bar, except that then you couldn't sell them a $30 salad at the cafe.) fuck you if you're overwhelmed by noise in echoing rooms with hard surfaces and a lot of people in them. fuck you if you are TOO SHORT and so our overhead illumination generates BRIGHT REFLECTIONS ON THE SHINY VARNISH. we're the art museum! we don't give a shit!!!

[emmakisiel]

[darlingdeadadornment]

Honduran milksnake skin and bone amulet

www.DarlingDeadAdornment.com

www.instagram.com/StrangeInSugarhouse