Astra

American artist Elizabeth Colomba painted her cousin Armelle while thinking with (and against) the language of canonical portraiture. The pose and polish nod toward John Singer Sargent’s "Madame X," but the remake shifts what is centered. It's not spectacle, not rumor, but presence and Black womanhood held with dignity and specificity. Armelle stands in an elegant interior, her body angled slightly while her face turns in profile. Her eyes look up and to our right, toward a framed painting on the wall. Her skin is a beautiful warm brown tone under soft, controlled light. Her black hair is gathered into a neat bun, and small earrings catch a faint highlight. She wears a crisp black-and-white ensemble with a white, button-front top with a deep black collar and black trim at the sleeves, paired with a long black skirt that falls in a smooth, heavy drape over a white underskirt hem. One hand rests lightly on a small wooden table, fingertips relaxed. The other hand holds a single pale pink flower on a long stem, hanging downward like a quiet punctuation mark. The floor beneath her is a bold black-and-white checkerboard, sharpening the geometry of the room. In the upper right, the framed picture shows an outdoor scene with a standing figure beneath palms. It's an image that pulls her attention and organizes the whole moment around looking. Armelle’s sideways glance toward the “painting-within-the-painting” (a 1885 watercolor painted in the Bahamas by Winslow Homer called "Under the Palm Tree" at the National Gallery of Art) creates a triangle of looking: we look at her, she looks toward art history, and art history looks back ... all reframed through family, roots, and choice. Colomba has described beginning from an existing story and remaking it to feel true to her mixed French and Caribbean inheritance. Here, that remaking reads as both critique and care, claiming the museum’s visual grammar as a space where Black beauty is not an exception but a standard.

"Armelle" by Elizabeth Colomba (French) - Oil on canvas / 1997 - Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #ElizabethColomba #Colomba #TheMet #BlackArt #BlackArtist #art #artText #BlueskyArt #PortraitofaWoman #WomenPaintingWomen #MetropolitanMuseumofArt

[liberal currents mentioned]

www.liberalcurrents.com/billionaires...

Digital art of a pastel white and rainbow pomeranian character with stars on its fur.

Also made myself a new cutesy oc. Its name is Birthday and its power is infinite but I think it will mostly use it to obtain snacks.

First post here! 🌿✨

🎇

personally i think ALL sports would be improved if the athletes were chased by wolves

🗝️

butterflyfish 🦋

Cape Town clinic reopens after extortion incident It was overwhelmed with patients on Monday morning

For the first time in two weeks, a long queue of patients stood outside Town Two Clinic in Khayelitsha on Monday. The clinic had been closed since the beginning of February following an extortion incident.

Read groundup.org.za/article/town... by Mary-Anne Gontsana and Vincent Lali

Yep. As embarrassed as I am about the stuff I firmly believed when I was 20, I'm VERY glad I got the worst of it ruthlessly educated out of my system before hitting 30.

I had the great fortune of being remarkably, demonstratively wrong about substantial geopolitical things at an early point in my education (undergraduate) where my opinion did not matter.

I recommend the experience to everyone.

A prickly pear cactus, wooden crate with a gear logo, a blue cardboard box with “GEARS” scrawled on the side. In a desert setting with mountains in the background

Fallout Craft Gear #pixel_dailies #Pixquare #pixelart #Cactus #Gear #Fallout #fanart

Colorful rainbow woman touching a rainbow slider that is during into paint blobs. The woman has rainbow hair, one rainbow braid, a white hoodie and red pants. Drawn by gdbee in Feb 2026

some rainbows for your workweek

Painted when Japanese artist Kumagai Morikazu (熊谷守一) was still in his earlier, more tonal phase, this portrait prioritizes observation like how light reshapes a face moment by moment. The sitter is often identified as Ōe Hideko (later Kumagai Hideko), whom the artist would marry a few years later, lending the work a feeling of casual closeness rather than formality. Painted with vigorous, tactile handling rather than academic finish, she is seated close, shown from the waist up against a rough, vertically brushed brown background. Her dark hair is gathered high and back, with small reddish accents like a ribbon. Light falls across her forehead, cheeks, and nose in uneven patches while shadow pools around her eyes and jaw, giving her gaze a quiet intensity. She wears a loose, kimono in muted taupe and gray, with a cool blue layer peeking out. Her arms fold inward to suggest hands resting. The depiction is built from short strokes and thicker passages that keep the surface alive. Her expression is composed, slightly guarded, and alert to hold the psychological center of the picture. A dark palette and compressed space intensify that encounter so we’re invited to meet her as a person at a time when modern Japanese painting was negotiating realism, intimacy, and changing social roles for women in the Taishō era. Kumagai is often remembered for the radically simplified, luminous style of his later decades using flat planes of color, distilled outlines, and an almost meditative attention to everyday life (plants, insects, cats, and the quiet dramas of home). Works like this show the foundation of that later clarity and a disciplined eye for structure and a refusal to idealize the sitter. In the late 1910s, he was building his reputation within Japan’s modern painting world, testing how far he could push direct observation while still letting the paint itself carry emotion. The result is a portrait that feels intimate and unsentimental.

某夫人像 (Portrait of a Lady) by 熊谷守一 / Kumagai Morikazu (Japanese) - Oil on canvas / 1918 - Kumagai Morikazu Museum (Tokyo, Japan) #WomenInArt #KumagaiMorikazu #熊谷守一 #Kumagai #KumagaiMorikazuMuseum #熊谷守一美術館 #JapaneseArt #art #artText #BlueskyArt #JapaneseArtist #PortraitofaLady #arte #PortraitofaWoman

Float & Caramel pudding
(2023)

When they're done right, low-stakes stories taking place over the course of only a few days can hit SO much harder than grander, more ambitious narratives. I love HOTD, but AKOTSK has given me far more Feels in the last couple episodes than it ever has.

Rhaenyra and Alicent from House of the Dragon/GRRM's Fire and Blood, the former clutching the latter while the sun sets in the background.

hell with book canon, i WANT one of them to kill the other or at least be there when the other dies *stamps foot* #houseofthedragon #asoiaf #fanart

Short, wordless comic in which Rhaenyra from House of the Dragon/GRRM's Fire and Blood is killed by the dragon Sunfyre.

practicing sequential storytelling with Ren and Sunny <3 #houseofthedragon #asoiaf #fanart

Rhaenyra from House of the Dragon/GRRM's Fire and Blood, sitting in a cell shortly before becoming Sunfyre's dinner.

the Black Queen's last hours #houseofthedragon #asoiaf #fanart

Fluffy gray tabby lounging sleepily on a pink crocodile throw rug in an office full of pink and vintage wood.

oh no the sunbeam has escaped the nap

Dunk and Egg from Tales of Dunk and Egg/A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, lying awake at night.

dunk: (thinking) shit, is he cold? he's cold. being cold is bad for little kids. what if he gets sick? i should get up and find him a scarf and a hat and an extra blanket and soup

egg: (thinking) i wish you would brutally murder like half my relatives

#aknightofthesevenkingdoms #asoiaf #fanart

Ohhhh proper purrs from the lounging lady!

The Balloon Festival 🎈#illustration

KZN flood victims stuck in emergency housing, three years later Hundreds of families are living in apartment buildings leased by the City of eThekwini

As the KwaZulu-Natal government rushes to house families displaced by recent storms, hundreds of families who lost their homes in floods more than three years ago are still living in emergency accommodation.

Read groundup.org.za/article/kzn-... by Tsoanelo Sefoloko and Joseph Bracken

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is VERY good.

Illustration of a raven perched on stump. The background is a wintry lake and snowcapped mountains, with an aurora and stars in the sky.

"The Raven" 🐦‍⬛✨🌌

From the Everyday Witch's Familiars Oracle deck illustrated by me, written by @deborahblakeauthor.bsky.social , and published by @llewellynbooks.bsky.social.

Signed art prints, stickers, tapestry blankets, and oracle decks are at albaillustration.etsy.com.

thank you! <3 the stars on his robes took me so long _(:3」∠)_

The Politician's Plight In the middle of the night, mere hours before he's due to deliver the defining speech of his career, Lord Capozzoli is saved from assassination by a most unlikely party. SHORT STORY + M/M ROMANCE

In the middle of the night, mere hours before he's due to deliver the defining speech of his career, Lord Capozzoli is saved from assassination by a most unlikely party.

www.smashwords.com/books/view/1...

www.amazon.com/Politicians-...

#gayromance #shortstory #indiepublishing #mmromance

An outdoor mural of an underwater scene that includes a huge octopus, a diver, and kelp.

seen in claremont #photography #capetown #southafrica

the polish figure skating team in the kiss and cry holding a plush pierogi

IMPORTANT OLYMPIC NEWS:

THE POLISH FIGURE SKATING TEAM HAS A PLUSH PIEROGI