#but this is my pope

[forwhomtheteasteeps]

Very pretty!

grant us a Pope who doubts 🕊

[prokopetz]

About twenty years back, there was this weird transitional period after companies had figured out that harvesting their users' demographic information was a potential gold mine but before we lived in a hellish panopticon where any website operator could look up your IP address and know what you had for breakfast where some sites would try to get you to fill out, like, detailed demographic surveys before they'd let you access their stuff. Not just age, gender and geographic location, either – some of them would fish for employment status, marital status, brand preferences, even religious affiliation. A lot of folks I knew would just pick the first option in every dropdown, but my move was always to fill in the demographic information of the current Pope, at least as far as I was able to determine it (brand preference was always a tricky one). I like to think that, thanks to my efforts, their data sets are haunted to this day by a phantom pontiff.

[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[chiptrillino-art]

(ID in ALT text)

just some kuruk tests

[flustered-art]

Resurrecting this dead account to post pope fanart

[redactedshapes]

PARTY IN THE OLDEST HOUSE GUUUYYYYYS

There it is, eight months in the making.

Given the size of this file and the amount of details, I've included more close-ups and a download link to a 2k file over here:

big thanks to @wankernumberniiiiiiiiine, she's the reason this painting exists 🥰

[automatic-midnight]

He had known what it was to desire, and to be desired, both by women and by men

[raiisakitsune]

kiara buried the love of her life in a foreign land, she won’t ever be able to visit him whenever she wants. pope and jb buried their brother and best friend. cleo lost yet another person important to her, and sarah lost the brother she never had in that desert. yeah we’re done here.

[nightcrawlersimpblog]

[chuunardo]

The twinkification of Jax

Did anyone think of this yet or was it just me lmao

[cuntlips42]

jj maybank is the type of freak to see you got new nails for the first time in a while and immediately crawl into your lap with no context.

“what the hell are you doing jj?? it’s too hot for this.” whining and grasping at his broad shoulders, trying to push his upper body off of your incredibly sticky legs.

“hey- your nails are sharp as hell, baby. need that shit on m’ head. like right now.”

“jesus- what are you, a dog??” acting all not interested and irritated, desperately trying to smuggle your amused grin before ultimately giving in and starting to scratch at his scalp and behind his ears like he’s your own personal little puppy ❤️❤️

he immediately starts kicking his leg out and barking and woofing like an actual dog, making you (reluctantly) break out into giggles.

pope in the corner pulling a disgusted, scrunched up face, muttering about how he’s ‘feral’ and ‘needs to be put down’.

[lostinthewoodsomewhere]

So, Firebreak huh?

[katabay]

ONCE UPON A TIME, THERE WAS A KNIGHT...

the visual inspiration for this was a combination of Frederic William Burton's Meeting on the Turret Stairs and also Bernardo Cavallino's The vision of St. Dominic receiving the Rosary from the Virgin

this was supposed to be just a one off illustration to get the thoughts out of my system, but then I started thinking about medieval politics and warfare and plagues and a castle and home as both a place of refuge, a prison, and a tomb, so perhaps they will end up as ex voto characters as well.

you may say, hey! that rosary looks like it has too many beads! it's a fifteen decade rosary, probably. dominicans are really into marian devotions. it works out.

also. spiral style stair cases. oh boy. it was that unexpectedly more difficult than I originally thought it would be to draw. the more I think about it, the less I understand them, even though I had a million photos of the stairs in front of me while I was drawing it.

⭐ I have a tip jar (ko-fi)!

⭐ and other places I’m at! bsky / pixiv / pillowfort /cohost / cara.app

[flustered-art]

Little doodles from convos in the conclave zine discord. Second one inspired by this part in the book:

[lunamothghost]

but I can string enough to show my face in the light again

[luvstarss]

Life as a family with JJ maybank

Warnings:None!