SERUM, an image archive
Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.
Paul Klee, Creative Confession, 1920
Painting is mute poetry, and poetry is blind painting.
Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting (tr.)
Nature loves to hide.
Heraclitus, fragment 123
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
Simone Weil, letter to Joë Bousquet, 1942
And sweet to me is foundering in this sea.
Giacomo Leopardi, The Infinite, 1819 (tr.)
True beauty could be discovered only by one who mentally completed the incomplete.
Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea, 1906
Listen… / With faint dry sound, / Like steps of passing ghosts, / The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees / And fall.
Adelaide Crapsey, November Night, 1915
How frail / Above the bulk / Of crashing water hangs, / Autumnal, evanescent, wan, / The moon.
Adelaide Crapsey, Niagara, 1915
It's autumn in the country I remember.
Trumbull Stickney, Mnemosyne, 1902
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Edward Thomas, Adlestrop, 1917
Out of a misty dream / Our path emerges for a while, then closes / Within a dream.
Ernest Dowson, Vitae Summa Brevis, 1896
I saw a man pursuing the horizon; / Round and round they sped.
Stephen Crane, The Black Riders, 1895
People see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects.
Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying, 1889
The eye is the best of artists.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 1836
Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 1836
Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854
To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
Walter Pater, The Renaissance, 1873
I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied.
Julia Margaret Cameron, photographer