And also, I'm allergic to dogs.

How can one be expected to think effectively when one's entire head is full of sinuses? It's impossible. Every time I have a cheerful thought it gets swamped in bile. Which might be why I like this article on drawing that was in the New York Times. It's gloomy too. But it's good, and I feel it's medicinal. Plus it's illustrated with dog drawings.



(image from Caroline Hunt Rimmer’s 1895 manual “Animal Drawing,” on view at the Grolier Club.)

Caroline Hunt Rimmer donated William Rimmer's Art Anatomy, a fascinating looking book, to the Boston MFA. I'm not sure what relation she is to William, but he's an interesting guy. Art Anatomy is full of drawings that draw relations between ape and human faces. (There's a good article about the book here.) I wish I could find bigger images of these online, but the tiny images are pretty evocative.



There's a creepy phrenological bent here, but Rimmer seems to have been obsessed, like Hunt, with combining animals and humans. His combinations, though, are less about finding the animal part of humans and more about physical combinations. (Didn't Bush say something about Manimals?) Here's Rimmer's The Fall of Night.



The Met has a dying minotaur sculpture and this nice attempt to figure out the similarities between horse and panther heads.



There's also this goofy lion: look at the person/cat faces on the right.



I really like his "Fighting Lions", even though it's not a combination. It's an apt metaphor for my head and my snot. Locked in battle for my soul.

Peace out, comrades.