Art + Design x Life
Mad Muse: A Cultural History of the Tortured Artist
From Plato’s ecstatic seizure to Kusama’s self-curated hallucinations, the link between madness and brilliance has never belonged to biology or metaphor alone. It belongs to society’s need to pathologize prophecy, sanctify breakdown, or canonize pain.
Tsarouchis’s Greek Pantheon: Gay Eros & Zeibekiko Icons
Eugene Séguy’s Diptera: Entomology as Graphic Poetry
Séguy’s illustrations, governed by taxonomic fidelity and the formal grace of Art Nouveau, are decorative declarations. Reminding us that even the humble fly contains a symmetry as deliberate as any architectural frieze, and just as enduring.
Cartographer’s Gaze: Émile Prisse d’Avennes Canvas of Islamic Art
Stieglitz — from Manhattan to Lake George & the Sky
Vetti, Flesh & Queer Rebellion: Lionel Wendt’s Erotic Ceylon
Lionel Wendt conjured a Ceylon ungoverned by imperial cartography. Where colonial rule had criminalized queer intimacy and privatized the commons, Wendt’s gelatin silver prints offered a counter-archive: lush, erotic, and defiantly abundant.
Henry Scott Tuke and the Queer Erotics of Edwardian Sunlight
There are afternoons that behave like secrets. Not whispered—just unsaid. Henry Scott Tuke knew this. He painted them. Salt-damp bodies along the Cornish coast, young men folded into each other’s shadow and gleam. Not staged. Not coy. Just... held.
Muscle and Myth: Sascha Schneider’s Gay Symbolism
Schneider painted like someone smuggling voltage. He wrapped classical allegory around homoerotic fire, camouflaging danger in toga folds and divine musculature. In a language only the outlawed understood: each canvas a sigil, each body a cipher.
Baron von Gloeden’s Sicilian Mythography
Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden reimagined classical antiquity through the sun-drenched bodies of Sicilian youth. Exiled by tuberculosis to Taormina, he transformed the village into a queer Arcadia—where marble myths met Mediterranean flesh.
Masters & Visionaries: LGBTQ Art Through History
From the Renaissance rediscovery of classical ideals, to the effusive creativity of the Harlem Renaissance and the turbulent activism of the AIDS crisis, LGBTQ+ art often reflects dramatic social upheavals while forging breakthroughs in visibility.
Veiled Gaze: Homoerotic Desire in Orientalist Art
Beneath the veils of Orientalist fascination, a deeper current pulses—homoerotic tensions intertwined with power, conquest & longing. Bridges to how human desire confronts empires, ideology & unspoken rules.
Naked Ambition: William Etty’s Daring Nudes
Looking at William Etty’s nudes—once so scandalous they could raise the temperature of an entire Victorian drawing room—you can't help feeling charged with the same electric bravado of this man who was unafraid to provoke ardor and outrage.