Author: doodledweller
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The Great Wave
The Great Wave off Kanagawa is Katsushika Hokusai’s first and most celebrated work in his collection of Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. It is of the Ukiyo-e genre, meaning “pictures of the floating world”, which flourished in 17th-to-19th-century Japan. The woodblock print depicts three elements: three boats weathering the stormy sea, the great wave, and…
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The Flamingo Party
Color had been considered superfluous in Western culture since ancient times. Classical writers saw it as being indulgent, even sinful, a distraction from the true glories of art, which were of line and form. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote in Theory of Colors, 1810 that “savage nations, uneducated people, and children have a great predilection…
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Aries
To paint a sky onto my cloth, I have chosen the Aries constellation. It is located in the Northern celestial hemisphere between Pisces to the west and Taurus to the east. The name Aries is Latin for the ram, thus the astronomical symbol for Aries represents the ram’s horns. The brightest star in the constellation…
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Zoot Pants
Interviewed by Vogue in 1911 about the possibility of women wearing trousers, the English designer Charles Worth said, “Yes, certainly they will. They will accept it because it is vulgar, ugly, and wicked – those reasons insure the success of any article of feminine wear! The world has gone mad!” The earliest versions of female…
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Tee’s Sleeves
Beyond the classic T shape, graphic tees have become a most popular medium for self expression. Whether proclaiming advertisement, activism, pop art, science, technology, or humor, it is the unique advantage that the tee has gained over other apparels. While Marlon Brando was looking hot in his ringer tee in the 1960’s, companies such as…
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Small Talks
Until we have walked in others’ shoes, we’ll never know what they’ve been through. All things considered, it is not fair for us to hope for others to see with our eyes. Even more so, those leading interesting lives should not expect those who’ve seen less to possess their nature, their sensibility, or their temperament.…
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The Empire
The concept of empire has been considered since ancient times. The Roman historians Livy and Tacitus argued the empire formed not on the basis of force, but the capacity to present force as being in the service of right and peace. The empire was not born of its own will, but rather called into being…
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Freedom, The State, The Nation
In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes argued that the sovereign derived his legitimacy from an unwritten social contract by which the individual forfeited their natural liberty in order to secure their natural right to life, which would otherwise be threatened by the “war of every man against every man.” Human beings were willing to concede their freedom…
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Accountability & The State
If we are to believe that democracy is the best government system known to men, then we should attempt to prove our premise. It is possible to do so with data provided by international institutions such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and research organizations such as the Pew Research Center. To study the…
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The State
To live and breathe in a democracy today is to believe that it is the best government system known to men. Democracy’s history has been traced all the way back to ancient Greece. Philosophers such as Hegel and Nietzsche saw it as a secularized version of the Christian doctrine of universal equality of human dignity,…
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