A detail (see below.)

It's a Woodcut like Godzilla is a Lizard.

The Triumphal Arch of Maximillian I, 1515 at the wonderful Philadelphia Museum of Art. It's huge. It's by Durer and pals. It's incredible. It's got snakes, goats, battles and mysterious empty seascapes. I'm going to have to go sit and stare at it for a few hundred hours before it goes away. You should too. Try to contain your drool. It won't be easy.

If I Invited You to Wear Pink and Watch Me Ride a Horse on my Roof You'd Come, Right?

Well, you would if I was Maharao Ram Singh II of Kota, who in 1851 invited all his courtiers to do exactly that. This painting shows the event, complete with telling details, like the empty windows of his magnificent palace. Everybody came. All the rooms in the palace are vacant except one in the very bottom left, which holds a caged tiger.

You can see the original and lots more amazing art in the new portrait exhibit The Privilege of Paint in the Indian Art room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Gloria Swanson Leaf

I'm testing a new system of blogging on the go that only lets me post one image at a time- but this is a good one.

It is, as I said, an image of Gloria Swanson carved in to a leaf. I saw it at the Ransom Center at UT Austin, which had a wonderful drawing show up while I was there. This leaf was part of their amazing permanent collection, which includes all kinds of manuscripts and writerly ephemera, such as the ratty old sock that was included in the collection of (I think) Somerset Maugham.

I was in Austin making some prints with the wonderful artists at Slugfest Printmaking Workshop. (They're great. And just because I'm related to them doesn't mean it's not true.) I loved making etchings, but now that I'm back I'm hard at work on a new drawing and a long term project I've been working on- an artists book. I'll post images of the prints and the new drawing when I have them, but expect lots of single-image posts till then.