On the Sixth Day of Christmas, my True Love Gave to Me…

December 30, 2020

On the sixth day of Christmas
my true love sent to me:
Six Geese a-Laying
Five Golden Rings
Four Calling Birds
Three French Hens
Two Turtle Doves
and a Partridge in a Pear Tree

And we’re back with birds. Only the more resilient artists go past day five, therefore we’ll change the roster of our recurrent illustrators a bit, but some of them will stay.

1. Hester Durkan

More than laying, her geese are lying, but after 6 days of celebrations I guess it’s understandable.

Justin Rowe, aka DaysFallLikeLeaves, does beautiful stuff in an unsettling way, because he creates sculptures out of books. I’m highly conflicted about this, but you can’t deny that his Six Geese sculpture is really something beautiful.

3. Ameluria

Amelia Leonards, aka Ameluria, decided she had enough of winter and her geese are sunbathing. Cheers to all my friends Down Under: this is the card for you.

4. Andy Schumann

You might remember his five golden rings or not, but I think his six geese are also quite beautiful, although not a-laying. I guess artists are not fond of showing eggs coming out of birds’ asses. I can’t blame them.

I’ve decided to continue showing you beautiful stuff (or at least stuff I think it’s beautiful) even after Christmas, but instead of having monographic articles featuring single illustrators I’ll be grouping them with themes. As a theme I’m picking the Twelve Days of Christmas, a British carol I adore. If you never heard it (you’re clearly not Britsh) I suggest you take a look at this incredible performance.

Summertime

Report from the Besieged City

Zbigniew Herbert was a major 20th-century Polish poet, essayist, and dramatist, born in Lviv in 1924 and associated with a strong moral, anti-totalitarian voice in postwar Polish literature. Report from the Besieged City is one of his best-known poems, first published in English in the

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architecture, engineering and construction

The Anthropology of Turquoise

These last six days have been about materiality: one object, one specific made or found thing, and its exact physical fact being conflated with everything that’s accumulated on top of that fact through use, culture, or attention. A crate. A furrow. A toad in an

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Summertime

Hills Like White Elephants

I don’t think Ernest Hemingway needs any introduction, but his Death in the Afternoon maybe does: it’s a 1932 non-fiction book about Spanish bullfighting, and it’s part cultural study, part travel writing, and part reflection on courage, fear, death, and art. It’s not for the

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On the Sixth Day of Christmas, my True Love Gave to Me…

1. Hester Durkan

2. Justin Rowe

3. Ameluria