Word: artisticness
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With a career encompassing 25 years that included five novels, a handful of plays and thousands of drawings, paintings and sketches, why isn't Mervyn Peake a more celebrated English literary and artistic hero? A cult figure today, Peake is best known for Gormenghast, his bleak but compelling gothic fantasy trilogy published in the 1940s and '50s about the hierarchy of a fictional castle, Gormenghast, and the Machiavellian machinations of its inhabitants. But he was also an accomplished illustrator, painter and war artist. "If somebody's good at everything, then they're never taken seriously, are they?" muses Chris Beetles...
Early in his career, Peake became a documentary war artist during World War II. This experience appears to have pushed his world view and his art into a considerably darker realm. In June 1945, he was among the first British civilians to visit the liberated concentration camp at Belsen, Germany. Most of the former prisoners he saw there were too sick to be evacuated. The stark poems and drawings he made about these victims literally dying before his eyes are nearly too harrowing to bear. Returning to Britain, he finished the first Gormenghast book in 1946 and spent the next...
While his style is similar to American contemporary Edward Gorey, Peake's bizarre sensibilities were less cruel. He enjoyed great critical acclaim as an artist during his career - he was commissioned by the Queen Mother to do illustrations for her grandson Prince Charles' nursery in the 1950s - but he was largely ignored by the literary observers of the time. Kingsley Amis once called Peake "a bad fantasy writer of maverick status...
...took Susan and David Emerling a few years to figure out how to bring that message to their blended family. Susan, a dental hygienist and artist, receives child support from her ex-husband and uses it to buy necessities for her two teenagers. David, an engineer, pays for his two. "I take care of Mariel's and Jillian's needs," she says, "and he takes care of Rachelle's and Ben's." To avoid hurt feelings over clothes shopping, they decided to give each child cash or a gift card in the same amount every fall and spring. It worked...
...getting the magazine is guessing what will be on the cover and then seeing what TIME has chosen. I understand the red and blue Venn diagram, but it looks terrible on my coffee table. I hope the Person of the Year cover will not be an abstract artist's caricature of somebody on a white background. If I want to see that kind of art, I'll go to a museum...