Vicky McKay

This cartoon hit me three different times! So good.

A church, a shed, a roof, and some beautiful hollyhocks. A lucky horseshoe can just be seen.

The Pest W. R. Darling Oh ye, wha in your oors o ease, ‍‍ ‍‍Are fashed wi golochs, mauks, an flees, Fell stingin wasps an bumble bees, Tak tent o this: There’s ae sma pest that’s waur nor these To mar your bliss. They hing ower hedges, burns, an wuds, ‍‍ ‍‍An dance at een in dusky cluds; Wi aw your random skelps an scuds, They’re naeweys worrit: Gin there’s a hole in aw your duds, They’ll mak straucht for it. I’ve traivled wast, I’ve traivled east; ‍‍ ‍‍‍I’m weel aquaint wi mony a beast; Wi lions, teegers, bears – at least I’ve kent their claw: I’ve been the fell mosquito’s feast – But this cowes aw. Auld Scotland, on thy bonnie face, ‍‍ ‍‍Whan Mither Nature gied ye grace, Lown, birken glens an floery braes, Wild windy ridges, To save ye frae deleerit praise, She gied ye midges.

Oh ye, wha in your oors o ease, ‍‍
‍‍Are fashed wi golochs, mauks, an flees,
Fell stingin wasps an bumble bees,
Tak tent o this:
There’s ae sma pest that’s waur nor these
To mar your bliss…

—W.R. Darling, “The Pest”
Oor Mither Tongue: An Anthology of Scots Vernacular Verse (Alexander Gardner, 1937)

Photo of sunlit alley with a man leaving from the back left.

A white hand with a blue human eye in the centre, fingers sprouting colourful flowers, the eye crying blood with the hand emerging from a flouncy white cuff tied with a pink bow and patterned with red hearts, this is made from felt stuck to a black velvet background

Experimenting with making folk horror Fuzzy Felt, combining shapes from vintage sets with cutting my own.
Only a work in progress & a tentative first attempt but I’m enjoying working out the process & possibilities

Diana and the gals were bathing in a baptismal font when along came Actaeon. Clearly had to be transformed into a stag! From Domenico Veneziano, whose day is today.

Bigger Trees Nearer Warter by David Hockney Winter 2008
Oil on Nine Canvases
(Private Collection)

Illustration from Giovanni Morelli’s Italian Painters (1892), showing the author’s diagram of ears by various Renaissance painters

Is there really anything more exquisite than an ear painted by Bramantino?

A sandy beach. A sandy island. Fish swim in currents of the stream. A whole semi-aquatic world envisioned by Bernard Palissy, whose day is today.

YouTube video by Modo de Usar Frank O´Hara reads "Having a coke with you"

youtu.be/YDLwivcpFe8?...

The cover of the puffin book of magic featuring a colourful illustration of a giant puffin with surrounded by witches and magical apparatus

More Puffin perfection.

I remember those photos from ‘the other place’ at the time. Now I have my own, very new, garden and I’m watching my first flowers appear.

@desdelboy.bsky.social

Mark E Smith of The Fall at The Foresters in Prestwich.

Photograph by Charles Gordon Montgomery, early 1980s.

‘Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting.’ Virginia Woolf