#Georgian women artists

[abwwia]

Rusudan Khizanishvili JIUDITTA, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 130 X 100 CM, 2020 

[fyblackwomenart]

Alina Manukyan

[diemelusine]

The Ladies Waldegrave (1780) by Joshua Reynolds. National Galleries of Scotland.

[ed13d1]

I can't keep this up

painting by Tinatin Tskhadadze

[tamisdava2]

Painted by Natela Iankoshvili.

@ariel-seagull-wings @themousefromfantasyland

[thekatebridgerton]

Bridgerton Vampire x Reincarnator au love story but it's fated to be tragic.

Anthony who always tries to resist Kate, who dates women close to her during all her reincarnations to prove he's stronger than this. He leaves them all for Kate, in every single one of her lifetimes and in every single one of her lifetimes, he watches her die young. Always from an accident always from something he could have prevented.

Colin who always finds Penelope as a young girl, he swears he's not going to befriend the child this time, he swears he just wants to watch her grow up and live her life, but of course he runs to her rescue in her childhood and of course he becomes her friend again once she grows up, because there's a hole inside him his family can't fill, and the allure of Penelope's honest friendship is too much. So once again, he falls inlove, he sees her get older, while he remains the same. He sees her give up her best years for him, no children and grandchildren as she grows old, just her vampire lover. And during each of her reincarnations, Colin loves her until she dies of old age.

Then there's Eloise who always finds Phillip after something tragic has happened in his life, death of a loved one, loss of a limb, attempts at self harm. She keeps finding this tragically beautiful human only after he has suffered some sort of tragedy. She never wanted Phillip to see her as his light, she's a vampire! She's death itself. But in every one of his lives, Phillip reaches out to Eloise like a man who needs light and Eloise can't help but reach back. She loves him in every incarnation, she's seen him heal from tragedy, she's seen him grow, she's seen him find happiness with her. But in every life Philip dies in different kinds of accidents. And Eloise is left mourning... again.

Benedict is the only one who believes Sophie's reincarnations are a good thing. Despite the fact that like the lovers of his siblings, his Sophie's life is fated to end in mystery, Benedict actively searches for his lady in silver, over and over, in every decade, in every masquerade, the artist vampire, paints the face of his muse, gone from him too soon. The scullery maid, the dancer, the wwI nurse, the flapper. His Sophie is elusive in every lifetime, in fact Benedict usually only gets a few years together with her before she didsapears in secret and is later found dead ( always a victim of a crime, always a wrong time wrong place kind of death). But Benedict never loses hope and as soon as she dies this lifetime, he begins his search for the next.

Francesca, Hyacinth and Gregory have never met a Reincarnator.

The closest thing Francesca ever came to meeting people who came back a century later was her first two victims when she became a vampire, Michael and John. But the last time she saw them in the 19th century, Francesca was wise enough to run away and not engage or ask questions she didn't want the answer to. (Francesca knows that if Michael and John are really reincarnators, she's going to eventually drain them again. )

Hyacinth and Gregory don't understand what the fuss is about. At least not until the 21st century. Not until Gareth...or Lucy. People that Hyacinth and Gregory last saw in Georgian England, some hundred years ago. Lucy and Gareth have been reincarnated as two local students in the same high end creepy London boarding school that Greg and Hyacinth attend to keep up appearances.

What's worse, there's some new mysterious residents in town for the summer and this time... It looks like they remember.

[marzipanandminutiae]

The thing a lot of people miss when they attempt to talk about some sort of “tuberculosis chic“ trend in the 19th century (an idea I take issue with primarily because I feel it’s kind of backwards – beauty standards that ALREADY EXISTED led to the romanticization of tuberculosis; TB did not create new beauty standards) is that… It applied to men, too

That is to say, especially during the Romantic era of literature in the 1830s – 50s, many men also went for the pale, languid, artistic affect

(Also a lot of male cultural commentators condemned women who tried to adopt this look, Announcing that being hearty and rosy was much more attractive. Obviously, men have always been in the habit of giving with one hand while taking away with another as far as women’s fashion, and this is the same generation that gave us both denouncements of corsets as a cause of cancer AND tightlacing porn in magazines. So I’m not saying that was a universal sentiment, but it’s a factor very few people bring up when trying to make a case for intentionally consumptive appearances)

(honestly, the few descriptions I’ve actually found in period Sources of folks intentionally trying to look pallid and sickly seem to almost be describing a sort of Proto-Goth. Someone who reads too many Romantic novels or too much Byron, and attempts– to the disdain of the author, usually –to emulate those tragic heroes or heroines)

(I read one 1882 source that basically said “some girls when I was young tried so hard to look like they had tuberculosis that they actually got tuberculosis! Check and mate, Romantic novels!“ which is definitely how illnesses work; good job Augustine Challamel)

Which is to say: talk about the Georgian/Victorian ladies who (as Hot Topic did once say) dug scrawny pale guys, and the guys who dug being pale and scrawny, you cowards

[jadwiga-abremovic]

Vladimir Mayakovsky defending his friend, Sergei Eisenstein, from censorship over nonsense. From an account by Waclaw Solski.

Sergei Eisenstein is now widely considered one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. The Battleship Potemkin, the film that this scuffle was about, is now considered one of the best films of all time. Sergei Eisenstein was also queer. It's hard to put an exact modern label on the sexuality of someone who lived one hundred years ago, but I think "gay ace" is a good fit.

He had no interest in women. He had very little interest in sex. He got in trouble a few times for returning to the Soviet Union from western Europe with hand drawn homoerotic scenes from drag bars in his luggage.

Vladimir Mayakovsky was truly "The Poet of The Revolution." His commitment to the Bolshevik cause is not in doubt. His relationship with the state after the Revolution was complicated and full of struggles with censorship. After shooting himself in 1930, his poems have been used to sell everything from toothpaste to gulags. You're as likely to see old posters with his words promoting the benefits of exercise as you are modern ones justifying Russian actions in Ukraine.

Mayakovsky had a Ukranian mother. He survived solitary confinement in prison as a child. He was only educated to the fifth grade. He spoke Georgian better than Russian. He was not monogamous and never married. He shared the love of his life(Lilya Brik) with her husband( Osip Brik) , whom he also had an eccentric sort of love for. Eisenstein wasn't even the only queer artist he stood up for.

You needed a friend with good Bolshevik credentials to find a place to live as an artist in those days. He aided poet Sophia Parnok, AKA The Russian Sappho, in escaping the first Soviet Ukranian Famine by supplying her with a reference. The authorities at the time really hated her for her lesbian poetry and eccentric personality, but a reference like Mayakovsky was solid gold.

The bourgeoisie loves dressing its actions up in revolutionary costumes and then retrofitting historical figures into perfect puppets.

Don't believe them. It's not revolutionary to glorify the Czars and bully the Gays.

Be a Mayakovsky, not a Vatnik.

[resplendentoutfit]

The outrageous, extravagant, often humorous, and sometimes beautiful outfits worn by the subjects of old portraits.

I'm usually meticulous about artist, title, date, and location, except this image appeared in my files with none of that information. In trying to locate something about it, I discovered some interesting information about 17th century men and their big hair.

Once again, the clap inspires a fashion trend! I wrote a bit about the codpiece and its connection to syphilis in this post. Well, lo and behold, men's wigs were not just purely a random whim of fashion. Apparently, untreated clap causes one's hair to fall out. Solution – the wig, or peruke, as it was called. Royalty could not suffer baldness for fear of ridicule. And so, what the king wore, the kingdom copied. That is, if they were of a stratum that allowed such luxuries. Since perukes were full and curly, it can be surmised that one need not be bald, necessarily but inherited the wrong type of hair. Of course, there were also gentlemen who received the gene for what is now called male pattern baldness. In contrast, Elizabethan era (16th century) women shaved their hairline in step with the look of the Queen, who was losing her hair naturally. Go figure.

Syphilis was running rampant through Europe and so was a sex trade. In London, the theaters in Covent offered gentlemen not only stage entertainment but also a shag, if they were so inclined. Which they were – frequently and in large numbers. The sex workers were dubbed The Nuns of Covent and entire booklets were available at the theater venue (during intermission or after the show) with reviews of the ladies' work and other information.

Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies’, an annual directory of prostitutes working in London published from 1757 to 1795, was a Georgian bestseller. A small guide book, it was printed and published each year at Christmas and sold for two shillings and sixpence.

Sources:

Covent GardensMemories

Historic UK

Wikipedia

[abwwia]

Esma Oniani (1938 – 1999)

Esma Oniani (20 July 1938 – 31 January 1999) was a Georgian poet, essayist, and painter. via Wikipedia / ესმა ონიანი #PalianSHOW

[fyblackwomenart]

Maka Jgarkava

[rockislandadultreads]

January NoveList Challenge: Read a 2023 Debut

A Good House for Children by Kate Collins

Once upon a time Orla was: a woman, a painter, a lover. Now she is a mother and a wife, and when her husband Nick suggests that their city apartment has grown too small for their lives, she agrees, in part because she does agree, and in part because she is too tired to think about what she really does want. She agrees again when Nick announces with pride that he has found an antiquated Georgian house on the Dorset cliffs - a good house for children, he says, tons of space and gorgeous grounds.

But as the family settles into the mansion - Nick absent all week, commuting to the city for work - Orla finds herself unsettled. She hears voices when no one is around; doors open and close on their own; and her son Sam, who has not spoken in six months, seems to have made an imaginary friend whose motives Orla does not trust.

Four decades earlier, Lydia moves into the same house as a live-in nanny to a grieving family. Lydia, too, becomes aware of intangible presences in the large house, and she, like Orla four decades later, becomes increasingly fearful for the safety of the children in her care. But no one in either woman’s life believes the stories that seem fanciful, the stuff of magic and mayhem, sprung from the imaginations of hysterical women who spend too much time in the company of children.

Are both families careening towards tragedy? Are Orla and Lydia seeing things that aren’t there? What secrets is the house hiding?

The Art of Scandal by Regina Black

On the night of her husband Matt’s fortieth birthday, Rachel Abbott receives a sexy, explicit text from her husband that she quickly realizes was meant for another woman. Divorce is inevitable, and Rachel is determined not to leave her thirteen-year marriage empty handed. Meanwhile, Matt, a rising star mayor with his eye on the White House, can’t afford a messy split in the middle of his reelection campaign. They strike a deal: Rachel gets one million dollars and their lavish house in the wealthy DC suburb of Oasis Springs, as long as she keeps playing the ideal Black trophy wife until the election.

Then Rachel meets Nathan Vasquez, a very handsome, very lost twenty-six-year-old artist, and their connection makes Rachel forget about being the perfect politician’s wife. As Rachel reawakens Nathan’s long-dormant artistic aspirations, their attraction becomes impossible to resist. But secrets are hard to keep in a town like Oasis Springs, and Nathan has a few of his own. With the risk of scandal looming and their hearts on the line, they’ll have to decide whether the possibility of losing everything is worth taking a chance on love.

The Curse of Penryth Hall by Jess Armstrong

After the Great War, American heiress Ruby Vaughn made a life for herself running a rare bookstore alongside her octogenarian employer and house mate in Exeter. She’s always avoided dwelling on the past, even before the war, but it always has a way of finding her. When Ruby is forced to deliver a box of books to a folk healer living deep in the Cornish countryside, she is brought back to the one place she swore she’d never return. A more sensible soul would have delivered the package and left without rehashing old wounds. But no one has ever accused Ruby of being sensible. Thus begins her visit to Penryth Hall.

A foreboding fortress, Penryth Hall is home to Ruby’s once dearest friend, Tamsyn, and her husband, Sir Edward Chenowyth. It’s an unsettling place, and after a more unsettling evening, Ruby is eager to depart. But her plans change when Penryth’s bells ring for the first time in thirty years. Edward is dead; he met a gruesome end in the orchard, and with his death brings whispers of a returned curse. It also brings Ruan Kivell, the person whose books brought her to Cornwall, the one the locals call a Pellar, the man they believe can break the curse. Ruby doesn’t believe in curses - or Pellars - but this is Cornwall and to these villagers the curse is anything but lore, and they believe it will soon claim its next victim: Tamsyn.

To protect her friend, Ruby must work alongside the Pellar to find out what really happened in the orchard that night.

The Writing Retreat by Julia Bartz

Five attendees are selected for a month-long writing retreat at the remote estate of Roza Vallo, the controversial high priestess of feminist horror. Alex, a struggling writer, is thrilled.

Upon arrival, they discover they must complete an entire novel from scratch, and the best one will receive a seven-figure publishing deal. Alex’s long-extinguished dream now seems within reach.

But then the women begin to die.

Trapped, terrified yet still desperately writing, it is clear there is more than a publishing deal at stake at Blackbriar Estate. Alex must confront her own demons – and finish her novel – to save herself.

[princelythirsts]

Are you still answering the f/o crossover thing? 👉👈 if so

F/o is Lucille Sharpe from crimson peak, S/I is Ianthe (undisclosed last name)

Relationship dynamic: rocky start, as Ianthe was a high society friend of Ediths from America. Things improve(? Kinda of) when they travel to England on their way to visit family in Europe, and offer to hire workers to repair Allerdale hall. They end up getting snowed in and things turn out differently than the movie lol

Occupation: s/I is a painter from a wealthy family (that's actually a crossover with another self ship universe lol) and Lucille is unemployed because women weren't expected to work in the same way

In short, s/I also has a dark secret related to their families wealth, so when they discover Lucille and Thomas's murder thing, they kind just shrug. The incest was weird, but again. Family secrets, I guess.

(Also Edith and Thomas are happy and in love in my ship-verse. With the company of S/I, she learns that she isn't 'losing' Thomas to her and while they don't exactly get her explicit blessing, she's more comfortable accepting Edith as family)

From @vampyrolesbos

YEA I’m still taking these! I just take a long time to answer them bc I tend to overthink them 😅 I haven’t seen the film in a while

I love this turn of events, and I’m sure Edith and Thomas are glad for it too. Lucille especially for getting someone sweet who looks past some of her… past choices.

This is a fun one to put in the Harlots verse due to all the juicy relationships - I think there was a lot more pressure for upper class women to marry in the Georgian era, so people might find it odd that Lucille would stay single and have an artist in her employ after a fateful winter.

Then again, their family is pretty isolated, so people might not hear about it, or care enough to gossip. I can see Ianthe taking wealthy clients for portraits.

I think most likely I could see their paths crossing if Phemie and Charles wanted a portrait and ended up spending some time with the artist and their … very generous patron. Who they live with and want to spend the rest of their life with.

There’s also the option of them all meeting on a fancy holiday to France or something.

Phemie would leap for the chance to connect with them - he is a noble too, it’s only natural they’d get along!

… There’s also the very delicious parallel between Phemie and Lucille as people who claim nobility (or even are nobility) but have to pretend to not be broke as hell. Phemie copes by getting a rich boyfriend, at least. I don’t know if it would ever be revealed - ie their double lives when it comes to wealth / reputation - but Lucille might not take kindly to Phemie’s advice to just get a sugar daddy, of course.

I typically have Phemie as a Connection since Charles is Social, sure, but less so, and very sheltered. I think Phemie and Ianthe would both be used to mixing with people across class lines in a way that Charles and Lucille wouldn’t. (Courtesans 🤝 Artists)

I am intrigued about the dark secret with Ianthe’s wealth, I’d like to see how it could factor in here!

Charles isn’t exactly hiding where his wealth is from, but if they’re meeting in another country where he’s not well known (and is currently trying to change for the better), he might not advertise exactly what his business is.

So they’re all very posh rich people with dark secrets who appreciate art! I’m not sure what 1700s tourism was like in Europe but they could go to operas and art galleries together, maybe share some gossip on the way

Tell me about your selfship and I’ll tell you what it would be like if our ships interacted in a crossover / AU!

[livsunit2]

Victorian Era

Aesthetic Movement

In the mid-victorian era 1870-1880 a group of talented artists, poets, writers and some actors were known as the Aesthetes.

The Aesthetics views on the dress was influenced by artists such as Dante Gabrielle Rossetti and William Morris and their circle. Artists like these had began to take interest in fashion as an improvement area of study and design. They preferred flowing form and fabric over the traditional Victorian corseted silhouette, they took inspiration from classical, medieval and Renaissance periods. They then began to design dresses which were initially intended to be worn as costumes for sitters whilst paintings, this gradually filtered through to more women.

Karin Mckechnie-Lid. (2021). In The Works - Tea Gowns Part 2. [Online]. lilyabsinthe.com. Last Updated: 31 August 2021. Available at: https://lilyabsinthe.com/tag/aesthetic-dress/ [Accessed 2 January 2023].

Admim. (2022). The Aesthetics Fashion History. [Online]. fashion-era.com. Last Updated: 24 January 2023. Available at: https://fashion-era.com/aesthetics.htm [Accessed 2 January 2023].

The Aesthetic fashion was a looser cut and was unstructured with movement, the garments had larger sleeves coming from the style of medieval or Renaissance garments. Many elements also came from Greek, Roman Gothic, Georgian, Far East, Middle East and Japanese styles.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Rossetti was the original founds of Pre-Raphaelites Brotherhood who lead a colourful life and created beautiful art. His paintings were intensely spiritual pictures one of his wife who died in 1862, the bird in the painting is a messenger of death carrying a poppy, twin figures are Dante and love in the background, Beatrix has her eyes closed and her face looking upwards as if she is in a trance, a sundial marking 9 o���clock the hour of her death, the poppy is also a symbol of death.

Beata Beatrix 1864-70

(Tate Gallery London)

Elton Luz. (2023). Beata Beatrix. [Online]. www.wikiart.org. Last Updated: 29 April 2022. Available at: https://www.wikiart.org/en/dante-gabriel-rossetti/beata-beatrix-1880 [Accessed 2 January 2023].

Monna Vanna 1866

This is one of Rossettis portrait of Alexa Wilding a model he found on the streets, Rossetti considered this one of his finest works and he never surpassed it .

[insipid-drivel]

But what does no-fault divorce have to do with women's parental rights?

Absolutely EVERYTHING. The recognition of a woman or AFAB person's parental rights is one of the key legal precedents that lays the groundwork for women and AFAB people to even be legally considered people.

Before there was such a thing as no-fault divorce, women and their children were classified by law as the human property of their husbands. If a husband were to divorce his wife, or if a wife were to find a miraculous amount of evidence that allowed her to petition for divorce on her own behalf, such as being able to prove one's husband is functionally impotent and therefore incapable of fulfilling the wife's conjugal rights, which were pretty much her only rights.

When a divorce was approved before the era of no-fault divorce, a woman wasn't actually considered "free" to do as she chose unless she was entirely without male relatives. If a divorced woman still had a living brother, father, or even a male cousin, she was required by law to return to her designated male guardian's home and basically live off of whatever money he was willing to spare for her upkeep and comfort.

As for the kids? They were the legal property of their biological father, no matter how far away he moved, how abusive or neglectful he was, or how wealthy he was. Without no-fault divorce, women had absolutely 0 legal claim to fight for custody for their own children. The logic for this was that a man's children were the only legal inheritors of his property and assets after he died, and so children belonged to their male family as human safety deposit boxes for their father's generational wealth and goods.

Female children, upon reaching adulthood, would then be pressured to marry and produce the heirs for another man's family line, or otherwise were considered financial and social parasites on their blood relatives that were forced to support them due to their inability to hold rights to property, unless that property was part of a Widow's Jointure pre-arranged for her if her husband died - not divorced her. Before no-fault divorce existed, the only way for a woman or AFAB person to survive after divorce without relying upon their male blood relatives was by entering the Church and becoming Nuns, or taking up in brothels as prostitutes if they didn't have the wit to make alcohol or the mobility to cage-fight (yes, there was an industry of female martial artists in the West for a very long time, especially in the Georgian Era).

Without no-fault divorce, there is very, very little from a legal standpoint that separates women and AFAB people from being re-categorized as chattel; human property. Our rights to fight for custody of our children are one of the most powerful and emblematic legal symbols of our personhoods based on the wording of many, many laws today.

PLEASE. VOTE.

No fault divorce allows women to escape abusive husbands. Making this unlawful tells you EVERYTHING you need to know about Republicans.

[domi-scu]

Work and a bit of fun

Tuesday was very much a work-heavy day.

I woke up to rain and storm. Actual thunder and lightning storm which is my favourite and I don’t get nearly enough of those in Southampton. So while it meant it wasn’t very hot, I enjoyed every damn minute of it. It also made the day much less annoying as I didn’t have to worry about ‘missing out’ on doing anything fun and could focus on getting through some emails.

I did set up my little office in the garden under a roof and with a steady supply of Armenian coffee, I watched the rain. I even had to grab a jumper how much it cooled down but it made for a nice cosy setup which I am certainly not complaining about. I have to say, I ended up being a lot more productive than I expected. I also tried the hotel meatballs with tomato sauce before leaving for today’s events.

I cannot begin to tell you how much difference a good night of sleep made. I was able to hold a conversation today which I’m sure was appreciated by everyone who spoke to me unlike yesterday when I was just a zombie.

We have learned a bit more about the man who owns the area where today’s (and yesterday’s) events took place. The bit where we are, is a small artsy bit with the most incredible buildings and art. While the other side of the area is apparently where the richest of the richest have their properties. The man who owns it is currently petitioning to officially make it into a separate city just outside of Yerevan. Absolutely insane, but in a good way.

As I’m sitting outside before the start of the first panel, I think I was adopted by a little black dog. He brought his bone really close to me which I thought was adorable. I soon found out the reason though- there were two more dogs walking past and I think he was worried they’d steal his bone, so he used me as a human shield as they walked past. Omg, my heart- can I take him home??

The music management panel was great with some really interesting questions but I could not take my attention away from the interpreter. I’ve never seen one in action and as someone who often has to translate between my family and Alex, it was impressive to see a professional who is actually good at it and doesn’t have to search for the right word every damn sentence. I wish I could do that.

Once again, we moved over to the warehouse/ venue/ bar- first for a DJ set and then for a Georgian artist called Tamada. It was a mix of listening to the music and popping out to talk to people. I had some amazing conversations with women who are doing some really great work around here in music management/ label area about copyright issues. One of them is moderating the panel I’m attending later in the week so I’m now looking forward to it even more. The conversation also made me want to do more for the industry in Slovakia, so I really need to kick it up a notch and figure out how to go about it.

Tamada’s set was so much fun and so busy. Once again, absolutely not the kind of music I usually listen to but I had so much fun. I still had a relatively early night though as tomorrow is a tourist day and that’s a good enough reason to wake up early.

All in all, I went to bed thinking that if PRS send me to these kinds of things at least once a year, they certainly don't need to worry about me quitting.