looking..

(detail from Jane 2010)

check out this fantastical beast-girl (the very last one, "fin III") by Joao Ruas...
I am having a nice time looking at what other people do...

One place I looked there seems to be a lot of really shiny, beautiful girl paintings, kind of hyper-real, too-beautiful semi-nudes... I don't know if I really like them. I certainly admire the talent and skill that goes into such life-like figure painting... But what's the difference between a photo of a gorgeous, semi-naked girl, and a photo-real painting of one?

... on a somewhat different note... I have this year decided I need to read more classic novels, like Jane Austen, Bronte (how does one do the ..?)... And I have just finished Jane Eyre, which I had never before read apart from a stupid abridged version when I was about eleven. I loved it. And this passage really spoke to what I was thinking about.

"I ever wished to look as well as I could, and to please as much as my want of beauty would permit. I sometimes regretted that I was not handsomer; I sometimes wished to have rosy cheeks, a straight nose, and small cherry mouth. I desired to be tall, stately, and finely developed in figure; I felt it a misfortune that I was so little, so pale, and had features so irregular and so marked. And why had I these aspirations and these regrets?..."