#sparhawk-?

[random-brushstrokes]

Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones - Shop Girls (ca. 1912)

[coochiequeens]

Finally I'm able share some good news

Wild festivals, exquisite fruit-bowls and unusually realistic renderings of motherhood and female friendship – not to mention a glimpse of Lady Hamilton as an enthusiastic follower of Bacchus – will go on show in Madrid on Tuesday as one of the country’s most famous galleries seeks to spike the patriarchal canon of art history with a new, and avowedly feminist, exhibition.

The show at the Thyssen-Bornemisza – called simply Maestras (Women Masters) – uses almost 100 paintings, lithographs and sculptures to show how female artists from the late 16th to the early 20th centuries won recognition in their own lifetimes, only to find their works forgotten, erased or consigned to dusty storerooms.

Organised into eight chronological sections that reflect artistic and social changes, Maestras also explores how female artists, gallerists and patrons worked together to create and celebrate art while living and working in the grip and gaze of sexist, and often misogynistic, societies.

Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones, The Shoe Shop, 1911. Photograph: Elyse Allen/© Art Resource, New York Scala, Florence

Seventeenth-century works by Artemisia Gentileschi, Fede Galizia and Elisabetta Sirani give way to still lifes of fruit and flowers before the exhibition moves to portraits – including Élisabeth Louise Vigeé Le Brun’s Lady Hamilton as a Bacchante – and then to Orientalism, depictions of working women, images of maternity, sisterhood and, finally, to images of female emancipation.

Among the show’s early exhibits is one of Gentileschi’s anguished studies of Susanna and the Elders, while the later pieces include Mary Cassatt’s bleary-eyed Breakfast in Bed and Maruja Mallo’s playful Fair pictures.

“This exhibition speaks positively of that other half of art history,” said the exhibition’s curator, the art historian and critic Rocío de la Villa.

“For a long time, the feminist history of art has been beset by all the handicaps and obstacles that had been put in the path of female creators. For example, they couldn’t access the same artistic training that their male colleagues could. They generally lived in an extremely patriarchal system that denied them their rights and in which their signatures had no legal value.”

There were, however, “certain moments and certain places” in which conditions were more favourable to female artists, and the show aims to offer “a series of windows through which we can see a mutual understanding and a camaraderie between artists, gallery owners and patrons”.

It also reminds visitors that some talented women caught the eye of European royal courts, and that some had husbands who helped them in the studio – or even looked after their children – because they knew that their wives’ gifts far exceeded their own.

Mary Cassatt, Breakfast in Bed, 1897. Photograph: The Huntington Library, Art Museum

Guillermo Solana, the artistic director of the Thyssen-Bornemisza, said Maestras was another example of the museum’s continuing commitment to feminism, education and addressing the prejudices of the past.

“I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t do any mansplaining today but I can’t help it when it comes to explaining what I’ve learned from the process of doing this exhibition, because I’ve learned a lot,” he told journalists on Monday morning.

“The first thing I learned from this exhibition – and which I think the public will also learn – was so many new names; so many fantastic artists I’d had no idea about and had never heard of. Of course, we knew about Artemisia Gentileschi and Frida Kahlo or Paula Modersohn-Becker, but how many important artists have got away – or been taken from us?”

Frida Kahlo, Portrait of Lucha María, A Girl from Tehuacán, 1942. Photograph: akg-images/© Rafael Doniz @ 2023 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, México, D.F./VEGAP

De la Villa agreed. “The public is going to ask, ‘How can it be that we didn’t know about these female artists?’” she said.

“How is it that their works were in storerooms until recently? Maestras is a feminist exhibition that seeks to emphatically correct the prejudices that have come about as a result of the patriarchy – prejudices that have meant that works by female artists have remained in museum storerooms during the 20th century.”

She said the male-dominated artistic system had always sought to defend itself by denigrating female artists. Equally damaging, she added, was how historians had played down the achievements of women until their voices were silenced and their creations overlooked and then hidden from view.

“When women are hidden, or robbed of their past, they are robbed of their identity,” said De la Villa. “The power of culture is very important. It just can’t be separated from the social conditions we enjoy, or which we suffer.”

 Maestras is at the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum from 31 October to 4 February 2024

[womansfilm]

The Bostonians (1984) dir. James Ivory The Carnation (detail), Thomas Wilmer Dewing, 1893 Two Girls on a Lawn (detail), John Singer Sargent, ca. 1889 The Porch (detail), Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones, 1907 Sand Dunes (detail), Laura Coombs Hill, 1890s

[jt1674]

[eatingbreadandhoney]

The Market by Elizabeth Sparhawk Jones 1909

[imathers]

“The tools I used before no longer work,” he says. “I’m trying to use my voice, but I don’t want to hear my voice, so I needed to find another voice.” He stops, wondering if he is making sense. “It felt like I was stabbing into the unknown, trying to figure things out. I started the machines, messed with them until something resonant happened, and then I started singing. And, sometimes, something would come out that I could not stop and I could not mess with.”

[incorrect-elenium]

Aphreal voice over: This is Sparhawk. *cuts to a close up of Sparhawk’s face* He likes his personal space. And this is Kalten. *pans out to show Kalten hanging on to Sparhawk like a Koala to a tree* He also likes Sparhawk’s personal space.

[radiophd]

alan sparhawk -- get still

[spilladabalia]

Low - Africa (Toto cover)

[voskhozhdeniye]

Alan Sparhawk - I Made This Beat

[oldsardens]

Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones - Shoe Store

[dustedmagazine]

Elkhorn — The Red Valley (VHF)

Photo by Sam Erickson

The two guitarists of Elkhorn meet up again for a bout of mesmeric drone, the sound this time more electric than pastoral but as open-ended as ever. As always, Jesse Sheppard mans the 12-string, whether acoustic or electrified, while Drew Gardner plays the six, as well as a few other instruments notably zither and vibraphone. Gardner is responsible, as well, for the pounding, grounding percussion in The Red Valley, nothing complicated but a key component of making this duo sound like a band. And finally, Jesse Sparhawk contributes lever harp and pedal steel. It’s a lush, enveloping sound, nothing minimal about it.

“Black Wind of Kayenta” runs dark and more turbulent, building ominous, western-tinged expanses in distortion blasted low-end runs. An acoustic dances atop these shadowy foundations, bending and flowering in high blues licks. I hear a sunset here, the air darkening, the clouds lit up with brilliance, a few stray rays of sunlight still on hand but not for long.

“Inside Spider Rock,” by contrast, is a prickly blossom, all pizzicato runs and trebly flourishes, aided by Sparhawk’s lever harp. This is an instrument favored by Celtic musicians for its quick, hand-manipulated tunings (as opposed to the classical harp which works with pedals), and Sparhawk makes the most of its sparkling, note-flurrying radiance, an excellent match for the ethereal overtones of 12-string.

Elkhorns roots are in blues, folk and country, though you won’t hear much of the latter until “Jackrabbit Hops” with its eerie masses of pedal steel (Sparhawk, evidently) and bent notes melting like Dali’s clocks. A jangle of bells, a slash of cymbals works as atmosphere, but not really as timekeeping. This track moves on its own schedule, stretching minutes out like taffy and snapping back in quick rhythmic bursts.

“Gray Salt Trail” is the long one, quiet reverie that sits at the intersection of blues, folk and raga, very much the neighborhood Jack Rose inhabited when not in Dr. Ragtime mode. There’s a bit of rock churn in the way that the guitars roar up, a bit more distortion and dissonance than on, say, “Cathedral et Chartres,” but the vibe is similar. The song goes on for more than nine minutes, but who’s in any hurry when the shimmer hits the shadow like this?

Jennifer Kelly

[vyva-melinkolya]

“It's much too late for the action

you've made this place Unbecoming”

do I have to stay?

[jt1674]

[zmediaoutlet]

Excuse you very much, I love the Belgariad! So nostalgic.

#41 and #55 for the writing ask pls.

hey, I'm not saying the Belgariad's not fun! But it did ruin fantasy for me as a genre, lolol. Oh, look a Chosen One orphan on a farm who falls for the sassy magic princess? With a wise older mentor to boot? Like --

41. what is the weirdest story idea you’ve ever had.

oh man, I feel like either my definition of weird is completely broken or I'm really just not weird at all. Probably b. I guess as far as strange-for-fandom there's the idea I had where Bobby had been SAed by his deadbeat dad as a kid and had some wires crossed as a result, and now was doing his absolute best not to follow those same patterns with Dean. It's one of those fics that absolutely no one wants to read, lol. So weird on that front. Similarly a J2 fic where Jared had a heavily disabled kid and the stress made him get divorced from his wife, and he was now the 'deadbeat dad' and meets Jensen and they have a lot of sex about it but primarily it's about stress and grief. No one wants that either, haha. Why can't I have fun weird ideas like "and then tentacles fucked him in exciting and mysterious places"? That would be way easier.

55. do you have any abandoned WIP’s? What made you abandon them?

oh... lots. I guess a common feature is being longer than traditional one-shot length -- like once something gets over 10k, I start to get really diffident and self-defeating about the amount of effort going in compared to perceived return. Like -- I'm stressing about this for an hour every night for three months and what's likely to happen is 200 people maybe clicking and maybe 20 of those people clicking the heart button and one person going "loved this!", haha. (I know you're supposed to "write for yourself" but if anyone actually did that they'd keep it in private diaries. Let's be real here.) I also get VERY mired down when there needs to be a legit Plot. The plot should always just be "and how did they fall in love? oh look they did! aaah big kissies time muah muah the end." Once you have to build in intrigue -- ech. I am not John Grisham, let's put it that way. ...Like in a number of ways I am not John Grisham.

[abwwia]

Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones, The Shoe Shop, 1911.

Photograph: Elyse Allen/© Art Resource, New York Scala, Florence