Decorating With The Dead Skin, Bones and Shells as Symbols Honoring the dead with beauty, art and spirit Nature always wears the color of its spirits, said Ralph Waldo Emerson. And people have always decorated from nature.  Caves in Lascaux, in the south of France, are decorated with depictions of horses by early hominids.  Later, Egyptians painted Papyrus, sacred cats […]

Plato suggested that, of course, Aphrodite (Venus in Rome) is nude because comtemplation of physical beauty allows the mind to understand and inspire intellectual love. Sounds like a line to me. Plato was in the hobby shop. In Sandro Botticelli’s Venus on the Half Shell (Nascita di Venere) is another sexy beauty nudely standing in the half-clam, with only her […]

Ah, the Pearly Gates of Heaven.  I’m thinking about them because I recently lost a dear friend, and am thinking that he is meeting St. Peter at those very gates.  According to Revelations, the twelve gates of Heaven are each made from a single pearl.  Of course this is symbolic, or the pearls were rather large (or the gates small..).  […]