#very similar collection of inexplicable doodles

[vivitur-moritur]

born to be fabulous

forced to wander staples in search of a very specific color and brand of graphing notebook they apparently no longer stock

[ghostlykestrel525]

Phantom HCs

and a little doodle of the man himself

i'm not overly good at drawing but look at him. cutie pie. maybe i'm a little too in love with the guy. just a little. ANYWAY -=-=- My headcanons: - Primarily a he/him, but being they/them'd doesn't bother him. - Looks to be somewhere in his mid twenties. Is actually a few millenia old. - Tall. Looks it, too: very lean and slim and it only exaggerates his air of being long. Probably 6'2, maybe 6'3. Noticably taller than Mare and likes to piss him off about it. - Mare's little brother. (by a handful of centuries) The type of brothers that would kill or die for each other, but also spend every waking moment at each other's throats and pissing each other off. - His voice is lower pitch than Nate's. Sort of how the song sounds in the slowed version, I think? Also has an inexplicable accent. Just a touch of southern drawl that gets stronger when he's tired or has Big Feelings. - Simultaneously fascinated by humans (for the little quirks and individualisms they have) and also couldn't care less for anything more than what power he can get from their souls. - Bit of a mean streak. Likes toying with people, and his favourite pastime aside from stealing souls is breaking hearts. - He's got a whole string of establishments. Music, drinks, low lights... the whole atmosphere being a little unsettling but somehow, you never want to leave. Sometimes he'll let Mare perform or help out working security. He'd never admit it, but half the reason for his little empire is so he could protect and provide for his brother if things went south. - Has a talent for finding budding artists of any kind - singers, songwriters, dancers, comedians, aerialists, anything of the sort, and giving them just enough taste of the limelight that it gets them hooked, then tricking them into signing away their souls. - Does have his own powerset, but most of what he can do comes from the souls he collects. The illusions and his skill at peeking into people's memories are his own thing, but the offensive capabilities are mainly the souls. Every new addition to the collection translates into some new kind of attack (i.e. a singer's soul might produce a sonic blast, artists might throw paint splashes, etc.) - Those stolen souls are completely under his control, ranging from translucent wraiths to solid beings but all bound to obey him. He sometimes stores them in the little glass spheres, like the one topping his cane, mostly reserved for his favourites. - He lives up to the nickname Phantom. Every pose and every move is made with a deliberate, fluid elegance, the long-trained confidence of a ballet dancer. Maybe he did lessons as a kid, maybe he's just like that. He's also completely silent on his feet - and abuses that power to sneak up and watch people jump. - Sometimes found behind the bar in his establishments. He's entirely competent with bartending (sometimes it seems like the only thing he can't do is quit being a flirt) and he likes to people-watch, or talent scout, from back there. - Has never performed himself, but he sure can sing. However, it's nothing more than an extra tool of manipulation, something intoxicating about that smooth, velvety voice making whoever hears him sing a little more... pliable... to his wishes... -=-=- and that's the main ones :3 Will probably be doing similar headcanons for Mare, Anti, and Dark (as they're the ones i'm mostly fixated on rn) but i have no idea when that'll actually happen Not sure about relationship headcanons (i.e. how he'd be if you were dating him) but maybe. who knows. idk what people are interested in reading, lmao

[unforgetabelle]

Loving you is a Religion

ao3       fanfiction

(2,071w)

She drew lazy doodles in the corner of her sketchbook, the low light of the afternoon sun streaking in fractured rays through the arched window and casting a golden glow across the hardwood floor. Their apartment was situated on a northern road tucked into a quiet part of old city, and they’d toured it at this exact time of day before buying. It was what had sold Marinette on the top floor of the repurposed warehouse. The exposed brick and wood beams were homey, and certainly charmed Adrien who’d grown up in the glorified mausoleum, but it was the windows that grabbed her attention. They were new, double panned and insulated against the sometimes harsh weather, but styled to match the turn of the century building. Expansively covering the entire length of the street-facing wall and accented in the middle with a half moon arch, they expertly made the most of the afternoon sun.

Closing her eyes, Marinette angled her head to the right, tilting her neck to catch the fading beams of sunlight. The warmth seeped through her, contrasting drastically with the damp London air just outside. Wrapped in the fluffy blanket Papa had given her and the misshapen oversized sweater Alya had tried her hardest to knit, Marinette could almost pretend she was in Paris. A familiar tapping echoed through the open space and she smiled past the familiar melancholy that unavoidably came with memories of home.  Opening her eyes, she turned her head towards the sound and felt herself warm for an entirely different reason.  London wasn’t her hometown, but then, home wasn’t a place. It was people. For her, it was a person.

Adrien sat at his desk, shuffling through legal documents and construction plans of the newest Gabriel endeavour. They had opened a design school here in London years ago. Small to start, but with an intensive program that focused on fabric mechanics: the design, construction and creation of new weaves, threads and fabric hybrids. He and his father had finally seemed to find common ground and had announced the newest project to glowing accolades. The press announcement was sunny and cordial, both men speaking with polite smiles about this new direction of the company, but she knew Adrien was bursting with excitement on the inside. She knew, because she’d already seen it.

When Adrien had come home the night he and his father had first come to the agreement , Marinette had never seen Adrien so joyful. It was almost five years ago now, but Marinette would never forget the smile on his face  as he told her the news. He was summertime, concentrated and bottled and only for her. The only taint to his joy was that this new project came with the caveat that he move to London to oversee it. At first, they’d been resigned to visiting each other as much as possible, it wasn’t an impossible distance after all, but then she had a better idea. Her internship would be coming to a close soon anyway, and while she enjoyed the company she worked for, they had taken her as far as they could. She’d started applying for jobs elsewhere in Paris even before they knew about Adrien’s move, so adding London into her radius seemed like a no brainer. She hadn’t expected to find something as quickly as she had.

It was with an established designer with a modest amount of fame. He’d recently captured some high-end clients at the time and his workflow was burgeoning. While he had an assistant and expert tailors, what he was really looking for was a young designer to act as his second set of eyes.  Someone with talent and vision that he could trust not only to tell him when he was being absurd, but who would could sublement his inspiration with their own.  Marinette had been hired on the spot after her first meeting with Liam, managing to impress him by kindly making suggestions of improvements on a new collection that he had neglected to tell her was his own. Initially, it had been a temporary position, probational to see if it worked out between the two of them. Four years later, and her temporary position had become very permanent, her sub-label under Liam’s now-very popular brand set to debut in the spring.

Adrien’s dream had been realized as well. Once the school had a decent foundation, he was given permission to put that physics degree to good use and teach as an adjunct professor. The program had been popular enough that they were planning an expansion now. It was a tremendous responsibility, and she could tell he still wasn’t confident under its weight, but she’d never doubted him. The move had ended up being the perfect decision for both of them.

Looking over at her partner of 6 years, she settled further back into the plush couch, her hand continuing to draw absentmindedly as she gazed at him. Unaware and lost in the labyrinth of his mind, Adrien was unendingly beautiful to her. His hair was shorter than when they first met, though he kept it long on the top for her. She loved the way it curled at the edges on the days he didn’t style it for the office. Flopping slightly into his eyes, he suddenly became the young boy she fell in love with while still maintaining the mature lines of the man she’d come to implicitly entrust her heart and life to.

His green eyes glowed from behind his glasses, forever slipping down the bridge of his nose. Adrien hated them, annoyed and frustrated when he realized his vision was worsening. Stubbornly, he never had gotten used to them, but she had. She loved her kitten’s studious look. Although, at the moment, rumpled and fidgeting, she had to admit he was veering more towards “derpy university student” than “successful business owner”. But she’d take this Adrien over his polite and unerringly gracious public persona any day. His students got a glimpse into the excitable dork she called her own, but only she got to see the truly unkempt boy: sitting at his workstation in a tattered sweatshirt, humming and tapping erratically on the desk.

She smiled, her hand still flying over her sketchbook in a absent minded drawing. The tapping had driven her crazy when they first moved in together until she realized what it was. He was playing the piano soundlessly. Tilting her head to hear his soft hums, she smiled wider. It was ABBA’s Fernando. One of her favorites. Her sweet boy.

Swaying slightly in tune with his hums, she turned her gaze away from Adrien and looked down at her sketchbook. Her face dropped, blinking in surprise as she stared at the scene she’d unintentionally created. It was Adrien’s profile, just as it was from her point of view at that very moment. Strong jaw and high cheekbones, his face was angled downward. Her gaze skirted past the structured collar of the formal jacket he was wearing to the much more delicate hand resting lovingly on his shoulder. Slender fingers faded into lace sleeves that ended at the tip of a petite shoulder. Marinette’s eyes skimmed the lines on the page, a rough drawing of her own face staring adoringly up into Adrien’s much more detailed features, both clad in what was unmistakably wedding attire.

The soft smile returned, an inexplicable wave of contentment washing through her at the realization. With him she’d finally found that indescribable something poets and artists spent their lives trying to describe. It wasn’t perfect, but neither were they. They’d had more than their fair share of miscommunications and misunderstandings, spending years circling each other in a tangled web of their own making, but it was worth it. Every heartbreak and rejection made them who they were; made them realize the inconceivable beauty in what they had once they finally managed to get it right. The flaws made them who they were, and even if he’d never quite gotten over his abandonment issues from a child, nor she her inclination to shoulder her burdens alone,  they’d get through it together: steadfastly filling in the gaps their pasts had left in each other and forging forward as one.

She turned to eye her imperfect man and felt no trepidation at this life she’d drawn for them. He had been her partner long before she even had an inkling of what that word truly meant. There was no one she trusted more to give her hand and heart to for as long as they both should live. Loving him was a religion she’d gladly dedicate her life to. It wasn’t the idol worship of her youth or his infatuation with the mystery behind her mask. It had become so much more; a continual path of self discovery through each other.

Adrien’s body shuddered slightly bringing her back to the present, but he didn’t move, lost in the papers before him. Placing her sketchbook on the coffee table, Marinette rolled out of the blanket cocoon she’d made and started to shuffle towards the kitchen. Pausing as she passed him, she laid a cool hand on his shoulder, stooping to press her lips to the exposed skin of the back of his neck. His hand reached up to cover hers immediately, his humming turning from its melody into a low purr instead. She didn’t pause long, moving on towards the kitchen and switching on the kettle for tea.

Marinette had become attuned to Adrien’s quirks in the years they’d been living together. Their drive was frighteningly similar at times, and she knew he’d stay shivering at his desk and lost in his work unless roused by her or the smell of food. Tea worked, too.

She picked up on where he’d left off humming, her movements around the kitchen graceful as she grabbed the tea tin from the cupboard and milk from the fridge.

Right on cue, the scrape of Adrien’s chair sounded from the other room. She heard his soft footfalls move about their small living area before they finally grew louder as he headed in her direction. Marinette sensed him enter the kitchen and move behind her, and she angled her head without thought to offer him her cheek. At the absence of his customary kiss, she paused, about to turn when his hand reached around her and placed her open sketch book on the counter. His body hovering just behind her, she leaned back into his chest, humming louder as Adrien’s hands instinctively come to rest on her hips.

“Do you like my drawing, chaton?” Her voice came out softly, a smile evident in its tone even if he couldn’t see her face, but instead of pulling her closer, his warmth disappeared from her back. Spinning in confusion, she startled to find him down on one knee before her, his signature smirk softened by the look of pure adoration in his eyes.

“You beat me to it, M’Lady, but then, you always are one step ahead of me,” Adrien continued to smile up at her, his eyes dancing with barely contained laughter. “I’d love nothing more than to follow you for the rest of our lives,” he continued, gaze blurring with unshed tears as she lifted a hand to cover her own smiling lips.

Marinette fell to her knees in front of him, loving his traditional gesture, but needing to be on equal footing with her partner at what was the beginning of the journey that would be the rest of their lives.

“No,” she answered, reaching up to cup his cheek to soften her words. “I don’t want you to follow me,” she continued quickly, watching as his confusion at her response started to dissipate. “I want you to walk beside me, to calm my frantic pace with you warm smiles and steady love,” she paused, leaning closer and whispering the first of many vows. “For the rest of our lives.”

Adrien’s face lit up, her perfect dose of sunshine again, as she pulled him closer. He stopped her, just at the edge of her kiss, and whispered the words against her lips.

“Marinette, will you marry me?”

“Only if you’ll marry me.”

Neither of them spoke. The promise made beyond the capacity of mere words. His lips capturing hers were the only answer either of them would ever need.

Thanks for reading! Check out my other fluffy works over at ao3 :D

 Also, this story was inspired by a single line from a Maisie Peters song called “The Writer” which you can listen to here

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Gina Ruggeri’s “Maneuver X”

Gina Ruggeri, “Patchwork Infinitum” (2016), acrylic and ink on cloth, 120 x 117 inches (all images courtesy Nancy Margolis Gallery unless noted otherwise)

Looking over a group of my paintings a few years ago, a friend pointed out her favorite and told me she preferred it because it was “the least ingratiating — it seems indifferent to my response.” This curious critical metric, since then lodged in my brain, proves useful when thinking about an exhibition like Gina Ruggeri’s spectacular solo show at Nancy Margolis Gallery, on view through April 1.

The show includes 11 abstract, robustly chromatic works — paintings, essentially — in acrylic and ink on vaguely rectilinear expanses of fabric that are collaged together from smaller bits and pieces. This is quite a change: just a few years ago, Ruggeri’s paintings were highly illusionistic, restrained in palette, on irregularly shaped pieces of Mylar. Attached flat against the gallery wall, they ruptured those white expanses with jarring, slightly creepy depictions of decay — or at least, of surrealistic incongruity: enormous cracks and crevasses opening up to some unfathomable depth; grotto-like cavities growing inexplicably into space; puffy (if oddly weighty) clouds floating near the ceiling.

Gina Ruggeri, detail of “Patchwork Infinitum” (2016) (photo courtesy the author for Hyperallergic)

Intelligently conceived and beautifully realized, these paintings implied a wide-ranging critique of the tenuous nature of shelter, the ongoing crumbling of infrastructure, and the precariousness of real estate markets and maybe even the gallery system itself.

Beginning around 2012, Ruggeri’s work underwent a shift, then an overhaul, then something like a transformation. The exhibition’s press release is mum on all this, other than to say that she “made a conscious decision to forgo her earlier painting process in search of a new language.” (In a video interview with Nancy Margolis that plays in the gallery’s viewing room, Ruggeri explicitly links these changes to her experience with surfaces and situations other than the pristine walls of conventional exhibition spaces.)

The “language” may be new, but the underlying strategy is unchanged: to win over the viewer, through the sheer force and scale of commitment to a method. Of course, many artists go for the “wow factor,” a conspicuous abundance of something or other (as in technical skill; fulsome color; procedural complexity; an enormous quantity of some weird material). In any case, if the appeal of illusionism is rooted at least in part in beguiling the viewer with a seamless display of traditional technique, that approach remains intact in many of Ruggeri’s new paintings. She seems intent, still, on dazzling the viewer.

Gina Ruggeri, detail of “Patchwork Infinitum” (2016) (photo courtesy the author for Hyperallergic)

And dazzle she does, in works such as “Patchwork Infinitum” (120-by-117 inches; all works acrylic and ink on cloth, 2016 unless noted), an ambitious and beautiful collage-painting of enormous formal energy. Hanging curtain-like from a single horizontal crossbar, it is a wildly exuberant collection of incidents and effects, distinct passages grafted onto one another in a glorious profusion of blots, dots, curlicues, serpentine lines, billowing clusters of pod shapes, and slithering teardrops.

Most of the cloth seems fairly lightweight — muslin, maybe — but the surface sheen belies an adhesive- or medium-heavy process that would considerably stiffen the fabric. Underlying the composition is the hint of a grid, but that structure seems to emerge organically from joining the constituent yardage rather than from any particular affection for that emblem of modernism. Little pictorial dramas unfold here and there, much like a crowd scene in a Bruegel painting.

Gina Ruggeri, “Purple Remnants” (2016), acrylic and ink on cloth, 61 x 42 inches

There is a lot to like in the teeming “Purple Remnants” (61-by-42 inches), including a delicious contrast between saturated spectral colors and a translucent grayish mesh; the visual flavor is floral, though no flower is depicted. A commanding presence, “Quips and Gripes (Strips and Stripes)” (93-by-65 inches) is organized around a high-value-contrast, horizontal band of parallel stripes that spans the picture plane from side to side — a compositional move that is rare among these works. A dominant, decisive swath of crimson distinguishes “Embedded Red” (67-by-83 inches), asserting itself as figure in relationship to the surrounding ground.

Gina Ruggeri, “There Isn’t There” (2016), acrylic and ink on cloth, 35 x 40 inches

At the small end of the size spectrum, but no less riotous, is “There Isn’t There” (35-by-40 inches). Shoehorned in among the bumptious shapes in this bustling work are snippets of straightforward drawing, in particular a twisting, ribbon-like band that sometimes doubles back on itself like a baroque Möbius strip. If Ruggeri uses the motif to hint at the interplay of two- and three-dimensional space, she thereby directs our attention to the all-important physical space — about three inches deep — between these suspended paintings and the wall behind them. After that, there’s no missing the import of the negative, cut-out shapes that punctuate many of these paintings.

Two other painters who have hung complex abstract canvases from a single horizontal crossbar are Al Loving and Terence La Noue. Loving’s 1970s dyed-fabric constructions have a scruffy, rags-and-patches informality that only heightens their elegance; La Noue qualifies his paintings’ sumptuous palette and overall visual gregariousness by way of encrusted, willfully unlovely surfaces. Both artists ramped up their works’ tactility and physicality, keeping decorativeness in check; Ruggeri has done something similar in at least three paintings in this exhibition.

Gina Ruggeri, “No Recall” (2017), acrylic and ink on cloth, 71 x 43 inches

These works are the most recent, according to the gallery. They are tougher, less solicitous about our opinion or eager for our approval. Like the artist’s earlier paintings on Mylar, they are attached directly to the wall, but illusionism is banished completely; the pictorial space is flattened, reduced to the physical depth of the fabric’s conspicuous wrinkles and bulges. With its rumpled disk of black amid a patterned field of subtly varied greens and a neutralized orange, “No Recall” (2017, 71-by-43 inches) is relatively simple, even reductive. If “Patchwork Infinitum” is a run-on paragraph, “No Recall” is a simple declarative sentence; if the former evokes an enormous, detailed map, the latter looks more like a flag.

Gina Ruggeri, “Casting: Clinging” (2017), acrylic and ink on cloth, 67 x 64 inches

“Casting: Clinging” (67-by-64 inches) also operates according to overt figure/ground relationships, the ground here being a yard or two of camouflage-print cotton in a range of greens and browns. (The presence of the white, unprinted margin along the top edge, at the end of the bolt, might be a funny nod to “truth to materials.”) A few crumpled bits of cloth, painted with patterns of ovals, spots and dots, are arrayed across it, stuck to the surface presumably with acrylic medium. Their placement might seem arbitrary until you notice just how exquisitely they interact with each other and with the camo ground.

Gina Ruggeri, “Shrunken Red” (2017), acrylic and ink on cloth, 62 x 51 inches

These offer a different, more complex order of aesthetic experience, requiring more work on the viewer’s part; rather than let it wash over us, we must approach the object on its terms, meet it halfway. “Shrunken Red” (2017, 62-by-51 inches) uses one of painting’s primary conventions, a rectangular shape, to counter the visual mayhem unfolding across its surface: frantic doodles emerge from behind clotted swatches of crumpled fabric, blooms of dark green and indigo that push aside washes of yellow and blue. An actual ribbon-like strip of twisted cloth puts in an appearance as if claiming its rightful place among Ruggeri’s lexicon of shapes. “Shrunken Red” goes for broke, flirts with chaos. Looking at it involves a different sort of delectation than does the poised and smoothly functioning “Patchwork Infinitum,” or the precisely calibrated “There Isn’t There.” But “Shrunken Red” doesn’t really care.

Gina Ruggeri, “Quips and Gripes (Strips and Stripes)” (2016), acrylic and ink on cloth, 93 x 60 inches

Frank Stella is relevant, of course, to any discussion of the dark side of the decorative; it seems to me he subverts his works’ eye-candy potential with the chilliness of industrial fabrication — and sheer size. “Decorative with a vengeance” is how someone once described Stella’s production during the 1980s, and the phrase captures the passive-aggressiveness that gives that work its bite. Though Ruggeri’s work is very different from Stella’s, it raises the issue of what kind of relationship a viewer expects to have with an artwork, on a spectrum ranging from easy familiarity to mutual animosity.

In Whit Stillman’s 1994 comedy Barcelona, protagonist Ted Boynton (“deeply into sales”) describes “Maneuver X,” an advanced technique by which the salesman resorts to “removing all pressure” on the prospective customer, thus “creating a space that the customer has to affirmatively cross.” A willfully indifferent artwork can exert a similar pressure; many of Steven Parrino’s later paintings, for example, have a take-it-or-leave-it bluntness that, while unsettling, is unexpectedly seductive. Ruggeri seems to be increasingly comfortable making uncomfortable work, leveraging one of painting’s paradoxes to her great benefit.

Gina Ruggeri continues at Nancy Margolis Gallery (523 West 25th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through April 1.

The post Gina Ruggeri’s “Maneuver X” appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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