Photographer Gunarto Song captured a remarkable photo of a meteor falling “into” a volcano (
Mount Merapi, the most active volcano in Indonesia), and the resulting shot looks like there’s a green beam of light shooting up from the crater. (SOURCE)
the faded, once-beloved tumblr diva ushers you into her projection room and has her gay butler put on a reel of hit posts from days of yore. “look at me” she says, clutching your arm a little too tightly with her sharp sharp nails and puffing on a gold cigarette holder, hoping the smoke will hide the tears brimming in her eyes “wasnt i beautiful”
“Départ pour le Sabbat” -Leaving for the Sabbath c1910
Pénot was an Academic artist whose work veered into the erotic and occult. Like his spiritual sibling Luis Ricardo Falero (1851– 1896), Pénot’s work is marked by his facination with the curves of the nude female form to the exclusion of almost everything else.
His immaculate, entirely idealized women recline, float and fly through the ether on broomsticks, walking the line between pinup exploitation and, in the case of his most well-known work, La Femme Chauve-Souris, The Bat Woman—a sort of empowered ferocity.
It’s no accident that Pénot’s occult-tinged nudes call to mind Luis Falero’s otherworldly women. As the keystone of their academic education, both artists studied under the Orientialist painter Gabriel Ferrier(1847-1914). Falero was eleven years older than Pénot, and likely studied with Ferrier before Pénot arrived, but he must have left his mark on the studio, because like Falero, Pénot rejected the opulant backgrounds of their orientalist teacher, preferring to set his nude figures in abstracted misty landscapes or suspended in cloudy chiaroscuro skies.
While Pénot never rose to the soaring heights of the Academic giants like William Adolphe Bouguereau or Alexandre Cabanel (who rendered their nudes in detailed settings), it seems that Pénot won some minor acclaim, winning an honorable mention in the 1903 Salon des Artistes Francais.
In 1906, the La Croix newspaper reported that Pénot received the national commendation Ordre des Palmes académiques, ‘Order of Academic Palms,’ an award recognizing distinguished academics and valuable service to universities. And in 1908, he won third place in Salon des Artistes Francais. Not bad, Pénot.
