#e*creations

[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.

[shivunin]

Because I have just seen this specific thing for the second time, I would like to say:

If I reblog your art, I do not expect you to reblog (or share!) my fic in return

If I comment on your fic, I do not expect you to comment on (or read!) mine in return

My enjoyment of anyone's work does not come with strings or expectations

My friendship is not a bill that you will have to pay later

That's it!

[jakeperalta]

@pscentral event 30: friendship

Anne Shirley Cuthbert & Diana Barry in Anne with an E (2017-2019)

[movie-gifs]

WALL-E 2008 | dir. Andrew Stanton

[wassup-its-e]

Not a word.

[sigh. . . why am i their fanartist]

[doriansbutt]

This life is amazing

When you greet it with open arms

[thewildmother]

CATARINA DE LURTON Deus Salve o Rei (83)

[usercreate]

LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO Released August 27, 2017

[crossedwiress]

rather waste my time with you

[yeonjune]

(231125) yeonjun and soobin glued at the hip! | transl.

[dreamingeyes]

compilation of ayanokoji images i have made

[donelywell]

Does Eggman exist in your roadtrip AU?

I was thinking maybe no at first. Almost everyone is so short, so how would they be able to destroy badniks? Plus, I kinda want it to be a chill and relaxing au.

But then I was wondering how Shadow would exist if it wasn't with the help of Gerald and Maria. They're vital to his story and conception.

I realized last night that I can do whatever I want with this au, it's literally just an excuse for me to be self indulgent and make everything how I want it with the only glue being 'because I want it'. So if I can have humans exist but not have Eggman trying to take over the world- that'd be great! (Listen, this au is all self indulgent nonsense, but having some sort of reason for things being the way they are would be nice, plus I'm an overthinker and a lore lover so I was eventually gonna cover this entire au with lore.)

And it hit me- Mr. Tinker. Ivo Robotnik isn't a mad evil genius trying to take over the world in the RoadTrip AU, he's just a humble tinkerer that has a habit of making robots sentient. I've yet to draw this and I still gotta further explore the idea of the Robotnik family, but yeah! Eggman is just Mr. Tinker in this au (just without the whole amnesia thing)

Thank you for the question!

[jakeperalta]

@giftober 2024 | day 4: slow motion ➛ anne with an e s03 e08 "great and sudden change"

[autailome]

tolkien being catholic an orphan and also having most of his friends dead by age 25 is really the perfect blend of trauma to make a great author 👍

[nerdyhistoryenjoyer]

[wassup-its-e]

they're a couple of besties, they're cabin mates

[they're gay]