The Bluebird fights have started. Last night, the Downy Woodpecker went back into the box for the night after the BBs were making a racket. Tonight, they did not let that happen. They showed up at bed time and the box is empty now. Males are chasing eachother around the yard too, and I hear a lot of scolding and calling. It is fabulous.
(cont.)I get pretty severe anxiety when ever I even think about praying to anyone, or setting up a shrine and I know that all the brain washing isn’t true but I don’t know how to get past it. Do you have any advise on how to continue?
Hi anon. Dreadfully sorry you had to go through that kind of conditioning as a kid. I wish I had all the answers but yours sounds like a pretty specific situation. What I can do though, is make some general suggestions.
See, Heathenry isn’t solely about gods, or spirits or shrines. What it is, first and foremost, is about getting to know your environment, and then going from there. There’s no rules that say you have to set up a shrine, or pray to anyone at all. There’s no massive disciplinary figure going to punish you for ‘doing heathenry wrong’. Now, I realise you were conditioned from childhood to associate that with religion, so please, understand that what I am about to say next is as close to unconditional as I can make it:
If it makes you feel alive, makes you feel connected and whole, then do it, If there’s something that inspires you, draws you to heathenry, makes your heart sing, that pulls at some thread of who you are, then follow that. Prayers and shrines can, are allowed to come later, if they are needed.
You are alive. You are no longer that child who had no choice but to accept what they were taught. You are your own person, and you survived. So you might carry scars, but you endured, did you not?
Heathenry draws you to it. Somewhere inside is a thing that recognises it, knows that you wish explore it. So sit with that recognition, that knowing; embrace the draw that you’re feeling. You don’t have to do anything, not yet.
Just allow that to blossom as it will, take some time to literally explore that feeling; go for a walk maybe, with that feeling, the feeling that your idea of heathenry evokes in you. Carry it around for a bit. because it’s yours. Because it belongs to you and nobody told you how or what to feel. It came to be, in you of its own accord. Sure, maybe something inspired it, that curiosity, that draw – and that’s OK, because it was the spark, the thing that started off the fire in you.
And let that fire warm you for a while, friend anon. Feed it when you need to, with things that make your heart sing, that make you smile and laugh with joy.
Because the thing with brainwashing is that it always sought to restrict you with rules and regulations. Things that if you transgressed them, would bring punishment or displeasure down on your head. It sought to narrow your idea of what was permitted, what was allowed, didn’t it?
And now:
Now, friend anon?
It’s perfectly OK to go for a walk. To enjoy the stirrings of your heart.
Now, you are someone who is very much alive. Someone who wants to explore, to open themselves up to new things, to the call of the world itself, which our ancestors heard all round them, to see what you can see,
I don’t know you anon, and yet I reckon you have a heartbeat. I reckon you have a pulse, even if you don’t notice it all the time. And you’ve reached out to me, asking for advice, and so all I can do is suggest. All I can do is tell you I understand.
Understand the need to connect . To be some part of some greater whole, and feel the rise and fall of an ancient way of being. Understand being scared, because it’s all so new and not like that child knew.
And that’s OK.
Because the person we were, when we were kids, didn’t really understand, did they? They had to do as they were told, despite that urge for wonder, despite that urge to play and explore. Had to follow the rules and did it so often that they believed it, because everyone else did, eh?
So imagine, anon, what that young kid would do if you took them with you. If you shared that feeling of curiosity with them, as you went about the world. What would you see, what would you experience if you told that kid it was going to be OK? If you and they played together, what would you show them? How would you share the richness of the world with them.
What would happen, if just for a moment, you shared that secret feeling, the sense that you were alive and free and feeling a connection to something which has no rules, no strictures. Heart to heart, mind to mind, just you and they?
What then, anon?
What kind of connection would there be forged between the two of you – because it’s not that kids fault that they’ve been brainwashed, is it?
Of course not. It was never their fault. Never yours, either. And of course, that kid has a heart, and they have a pulse and they were having hopes and dreams and the like. Some things remain.
Deep in the bones, in the marrow. In the blood, and in the breath.
They remain. Those things we share, all of us. Have shared, for as long as we’ve walked the earth. Long before we were born, here, you and I, in our separate places, joined together by a web of light, there was blood in the veins of mankind, and they walked and felt that kind of feeling that you have been feeling.
Been drawn, and it is drawing you, calling you to understand the world as we, as you are beginning to experience, and will surely experience until the day we die.
And so we live, you and I, as our ancestors did, with blood in our hearts and the pulse in our veins and that particular feeling deep inside, that bubbles up, that stirs us towards wonder.
Towards the numinous, the realisation that we are alive, and so is much more than we ever supposed before now. And we live, and in that living, perhaps we may be moved by wonder and awe to set up shrines, to sing songs and pray to the presences and persons we may or may not encounter.
And if not, that’s OK.
You are alive anon. Strive to remember that always, and the world will answer in kind, for it knows you are part of it. It’s been waiting for you to remember, to recall who you are
A remarkable Jacobean re-emergence after 200 years of yellowing varnish Courtesy Philip Mould
PAINT RESTORATION OF MESMERIZING
I saw this on Twitter. He’s using acetone, but a cellulose ether has been added to make it into a gel (probably Klucel—this entire gel mixture is sometimes just called Klucel by restorers, but Klucel is specifically the stuff that makes the gel).
Normally, acetone is too volatile for restoration, but when it’s a gel, it becomes very stable and a) stays on top of the porous surface of the painting, and b) won’t evaporate. So it can eat up the varnish.
It looks scary, but acetone has no effect on oils, and jelly acetone is even less interactive with the surface of the paint or canvas.
Will someone PLEASE clean the mona lisa
For those who are wondering, they cleaned a copy of the Mona Lisa made by one of Da Vinchi’s students, and here’s a side by side comparison:
CLEAN THE FUCKING MONA LISA.
A couple problems with cleaning the Mona Lisa:
The Mona Lisa is a glazed painting.
A Direct Painting is one in which the artist mixes a large amount of paint of the correct value and shade the first time, and applies it to the painting. A Glazed Paintingis a painting in which an underpainting is painted, generally in shades of gray or brown, and a allowed to dry, before layers of very thin glaze – a mixture of a tiny bit of pigment and a lot of oil – is applied to the surface. Some artists, such as Leonardo, choose to work this way because it provides an incredible sense of light and illumination (look at how the real Mona Lisa seems to glow).
The Mona Lisa is an incredible work of glazed painting, but that makes it fragile, so fragile that many conservators don’t want to work on it because it’s extremely difficult and a conservation effort go wrong for many many reasons. One of the reasons it could go wrong is that the glazes and the varnish layers are actually a very similar chemical composition, and a conservator could accidentally strip off layers of glaze while removing the varnish.
In fact, in 1809 during its first restoration when they stripped off the varnish, they also stripped off some of the top paint layers, which has caused the painting to look more washed out than Leonardo painted it.
The Mona Lisa also has a frankly ridiculous amount of glaze layers on it, as Leonardo considered it incomplete up until he died, He actually took it with him when he left Italy (fleeing charges of homosexuality), meaning it never even got to the family who had commissioned it, and instead constantly altered it, trying to get it just a touch more perfect every time. That makes it really fragile, with countless layers of very thin paint, many of which have cracked, warped, flaked, or discolored. It’s not just the top layer, its layers and layers of glazing throughout the painting that have slowly discolored or been damaged over time.
Speaking of damage, look at the cracking. That’s called craquelure; it happens with many painting’s (even ones that aren’t painted with this technique) because the paint shrinks as it dries, or the surface it’s painted on warps. Notice that the other painting has very little of it, even though it’s almost the same age.
The reason the Mona Lisa has so much craquelure is because Leonardo was highly experimental, almost to the point of it being his biggest flaw. There were established painting techniques, and then there were Leonardo’s painting techniques. The established painting techniques were created in order to insure longevity and quality, but Leonardo didn’t stick to any of them. This has made his work a ticking time bomb of deterioration.
Don’t believe me, check it out:
This is how most people think The Last Supper looks
But this is actually a copy done by Andrea Solari in 1520.
The actual Last Supper looks like this:
The Last Supper has been painstakingly and teadiously restored, with conservators sometimes working on sections as small as 4 cm a day. To get to it you’ve got to walk through a series of airlocks (AIRLOCKS!?!?!) and they only allow 15 people at a time because the moisture from your breath and your skin particles will damage it. Despite all of the precautions and restoration, it still looks like that.
This is because Leonardo painted the last supper using highly experimental methods. He didn’t use the traditional wet-into-wet method that fresco painters used, and insead painted onto the dry plaster on the wall, meaning the paint did not chemically adhere. Before he even died the painting had already begun to flake. It’s a miracle it’s still there at all.
They’ve done what restoration they can on The Last Supper because the painting will absolutely disappear if they don’t. The Mona Lisa, which is delicate, but much more stable, doesn’t need the same kind of attention. And, like many of his works, is just too delicate to touch, and the risk of doing irreparable damage to it is far too high. The Mona Lisa is insured for something like 800 million dollars, and that’s a lot of money to be ruined by one wrong brush stroke. (fun fact: the most expensive painting ever sold was also a Leonardo, the Salvator Mundi, and it went for 450 million dollars.)
Furthermore, there are probably only 20 or so authenticated Leonardo paintings in the whole world. If you look through the list, most of them aren’t even fully done by him, are disputed, or aren’t even finished. It’s simply too difficult and too risky to restore the Mona Lisa, one of Leonardo’s only finished and mostly intact works, when there’s hardly any more of his paintings to fall back on.
Now the painting you see in the video above is 200 years old, not 600 years old, and I assure you, the conservators decided the risk to restore it was minimal (after extensive research, paint testing, x-raying, gamma radiation, etc.) and that the work they were doing was worth the risk based on the painting’s value.
Conservators make the decision all the time about how much they can do for a painting, because really, they have the ability to completely strip a painting of all varnish and glazes and just repaint the whole thing (which happens to a lot of badly damaged paintings, especially when there’s no way to save them – one of the very small museums in my area recently deaccessioned a Monet because it was barely original, and no one wants to look at a Monet that’s only 20% Monet’s work) – but doing that to the Mona Lisa, removing the artist’s hand from the most famous piece of artwork in history? Hell No.
(also, I’m not a conservator but I’ll be applying to a conservation grad program sometime next year, so sorry if any of my info is at all inaccurate)
I found this really interesting, thanks for sharing.
Just have this master of restoration fix up the Mona Lisa
i was watching some talking heads on the bbc discuss the ‘splintered left’ and they all just kept saying that there’s a new strain of ‘anti-elitism’ that’s making it hard to organise and i was like hmm i wonder why…. HMMMMMM I WONDER WHY….
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
You must be logged in to post a comment.