Category: Art & Artists

All about art and artists. Self-portraits, dream visions and more.

In Vogue: Jupiter-Venus Conjunction Today
There’s a lucky conjunction at 7° Scorpio between lovely Venus and munificent Jupiter. You might want to choose to spin the wheel of fortune, or just indulge in some beauty. To help you with the latter. I’ve excavated some old pictures from British Vogue (December, 2010). How well do you think [...]
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A Short Moment of Libran Momentum
Today, September 29, is the birthday of three truly great painters — all masters of colour and movement. Here is Boucher, whose decorative, feathery, rococo paintings defined the taste of 18th century France. Here is Tintoretto, the Venetian colourist, “Il Furioso”, who’s mastery of movement [...]
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Crab, Crayfish — or Scarab?
If you look at old manuscripts, or the doors of cathedrals, or stained glass or indeed most representations of the sign Cancer before the Renaissance, you won’t always be looking at a roundish, cosy old crab. Sometimes Cancer is a crayfish, sometimes an odd beetley thing, sometimes who knows?! [...]
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Solstice Blessings
It’s true the world around us is in upheaval. We are in a time of transition, with all the dangers, obstacles and dramas which that entails. And astrologically on this Solstice we can expect the collective emotional temperature to be turned up to boiling point — (with Mars and the Sun in [...]
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Venus in Aries: Cy Twombly
“It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture.” — Cy Twombly Cy Twombly’s work is unmistakable: giant scribbles, smudges, words and phrases crash together across vast stretches of white. They look as if they’ve been made in an instant, a flash, a dash, a moment of possession — [...]
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Astrology of Now: Sensual, New
Today, Mars, the planet of physicality, action and Iron John moves into the sign of the Bull. Strangely, this is traditionally considered a difficult position for the planet of masculinity — maybe there’s just too much testosterone there. However, I note that people with this placement natally [...]
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Venus in Aries: Alexander McQueen
The late Alexander McQueen said that he wanted people to feel afraid of the women who wore his clothes. His shows were legendary: shocking, emotional, Gothic, visceral — absolutely exquisite. In 1995’s The Birds — inspired by Hithcock’s movie — models stumbled down the catwalk, dresses torn [...]
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Venus in Aries: Willem de Kooning
“Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure.” Willem de Kooning, April 1946 How Willem de Kooning worked made an impression on visitors. He would sit for hours contemplating a painting and then pick up a brush and attack it intensely and decisively. “The ‘Women’ had to [...]
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Venus in Aries: Anish Kapoor
Continuing the series on artists with Venus in Aries. The picture tells the story really. Anish Kapoor has Venus at 0° Aries — the Ur degree, the alpha … the very beginning of the whole Zodiac. And well, is here is a great big Mons Venus in Aries own colour. Kapoor loves red. It’s nice that he [...]
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Venus in Aries: Francisco de Goya
Venus, the planet of love and art, harmony and sweetness, spends a long time in Aries, a sign that represents some quite contrary energies, in 2017. So we have an opportunity to look and think about how Venus behaves here. I’ve been looking at the charts of artists, fashion designers and film [...]
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Vivienne Westwood: Venus in Aries
Vivienne Westwood started her career running a shop called Sex at the grubby end of the King’s Road — first stop on London’s punk trail in the 1970s. Today, she is a doyenne of fashion world — doing the whole cat-walk-show thing and yet still a social revolutionary. With her North Node and [...]
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Astrology of Now: Countering The Ugly
February is a fast and urgent month with Mars, Venus and Uranus in fiery, furious Aries. Mars in his own sign is rather unbridled, Venus in her opposite sign is not doing her usual harmony, sweetness and light thing and Uranus is spitting sparks. Somewhere in your life there’s probably a bit [...]
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When Scorpio Engages With The Camera
John Berger, art critic, author, poet, visionary, European became (almost) a household name when he made a four-part TV series called Ways of Seeing. This came out in 1972 and it’s a fascinating watch today — not just for the ideas, which became extremely influential (and still sometime [...]
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8 Things To Do While Jupiter’s in Libra: Flamboyant Grace
The planet of luck, exaggeration and expansion, Jupiter, is in Libra until October 2017. Here are some ways to work with that rather flamboyant energy. Polish Your Politesse It’s time for manners to make a comeback. Make a conscious effort to say please and thank you, to respond graciously [...]
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Magnified, Sanctified: Leonard Cohen
A poet, a mystic, a lover, a joker — a man. Leonard Cohen, who died last week at the age of 82, wrote complexly layered lyrics, with deceptively simple tunes. His songs coil and then unwind, as images and fragments of stories twist freely into your imagination. “There is no God in Heaven [...]
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Astrology of Now: Through The Looking Glass
As some readers of this blog may have noticed, I couldn’t bring myself to take a close look at the close of polls chart for the US election. It was just too important — and I was scared of what I might find. However, a couple of weeks ago, when I was writing your horoscopes for […]
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The Autumn Equinox
Today the Sun moves from mutable Virgo to cardinal Libra and the night is as long as the day. It’s one of the four corners of the year, when the season turns and we start our walk to the darkest day of the year. We are at one of the four Cardinal points (0° Libra), a beginning. And this year, [...]
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Artist’s Birthday: Arthur Rackham
They say that the best way to see fairies is slantwise, out of the corner of your eye. Twisting, twirling, pirouetting india ink, delighted detail, subtle washes of colour and something sinister: the drawings of Arthur Rackham. Fairies swirl into trees, spin into trolls, spin into wild [...]
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The Wonderland Book
Kirsty Mitchell has a magical opposition between Venus in Gemini and Neptune in Sagittarius. Her imagination, rooted in fairyland, branches out into stranger worlds. She is an artist whose brush is a camera. She is a photographer — a province of Neptune — and she photographs beauty (Venus) in [...]
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