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The Artwork of Mark Maggiori Is on Another Level!

Mark Maggiori

Mark Maggiori is a French-American painter, graphic designer, draftsman, musician, music video director, and lead vocalist of the nu-metal band Pleymo. He is particularly known for his paintings that capture the essence of American cowboys, Native Americans, and the Southwest of the United States.

Maggiori’s work has gained significant recognition, including important solo and group shows, and his participation in notable events like the 2017 Night of Artists at the Briscoe Western Art Museum, where he received the Sam Houston award .

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Reading Between The Lines – ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

“I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable–if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.”

― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

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Reading Between The Lines – ‘Pink Floyd’

Pink Floyd Time

And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say

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Reading Between The Lines: ‘Andor’

luthen rael monologue

Lonni Jung: And what do you sacrifice?

Luthen Rael: Calm. Kindness, kinship. Love. I’ve given up all chance at inner peace, I’ve made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there’s only one conclusion: I’m damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost, and by the time I looked down, there was no longer any ground beneath my feet.

What is… what is my sacrifice? I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life, to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. No, the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror, or an audience, or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice?

Everything.

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The Backstories And History Of 10 Famous Paintings

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918): Death and Life, 1910, reworked in 1915, oil on canvas, Leopold Museum, Vienna

Gustav Klimt’s large painting ‘Death and Life’, created in 1910, features not a personal death but rather merely an allegorical Grim Reaper who gazes at “life” with a malicious grin.

This “life” is comprised of all generations: every age group is represented, from the baby to the grandmother, in this depiction of the never-ending circle of life.

Death may be able to swipe individuals from life, but life itself, humanity as a whole, will always elude his grasp. The circle of life likewise repeats itself in the diverse, wonderful, pastel-coloured circular ornaments which adorn life like a garland.

Gustav Klimt described this painting, which was honoured with a first prize at the 1911 International Art Exhibition in Rome, as his most important figurative work. Even so, he seems to suddenly no longer have been satisfied with this version in 1915, for he then began making changes to the painting—which had been framed for long by that time.

The background, reportedly once gold-coloured, was made grey, and both death and life were given further ornaments. Standing before the original and examining the left interior edge of Josef Hoffmann’s frame for the painting, one can still discern traces of the subsequent over-painting, which was done by Klimt himself.

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918): Death and Life,

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Reading Between The Lines – ‘The Bell Jar’

The Bell Jar

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.”

— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

 

This quote is from Sylvia Plath’s novel “The Bell Jar,” which was published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. The novel is semi-autobiographical, blending elements of Plath’s own life and experiences with the fictional journey of the protagonist, Esther Greenwood. “The Bell Jar” is often hailed for its candid exploration of mental illness, identity, and the societal pressures on women in the 1950s.

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