September 5, 2009
June 16, 2010
Fuck hope, ….hope is a useless thought….make it happen, don’t hope that it will happen
George Carlin (via dougstumblr)September 30, 2010
January 3, 2012
January 11, 2012
HOPE: “The art of GF Watts has inspired many, not least President Obama. ROADSHOW expert Grant Ford looks back on the work of this talented Victorian artist, now on show in the beautiful Watts Gallery after a multi-million pound restoration.
In 1990, 29-year-old Harvard law student Barack Obama attended a sermon by Jeremiah Wright, pastor of a Chicago church. The sermon was based around a Victorian painting by George Frederic Watts entitled Hope, of a blindfolded woman plucking at the only remaining string on her lyre - and what Obama heard that day was to change his life forever.
‘With her clothes in rags, her body scarred and bruised and bleeding, her harp all but destroyed and with only one string left, she had the audacity to make music and praise God,’ preached Wright.
‘To take the one string you have left and to have the audacity to hope… that’s the real word God will have us hear from this passage and Watts`s painting.’
Fourteen years later, Obama still hadn’t forgotten these words, adopting the phrase ‘audacity of hope’ for his 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address and using it as the title for his bestselling second book in 2006.
The painting, executed by Watts in 1886, is every bit as inspiring as Wright’s words about it. Nelson Mandela is believed to have had a print of it on his prison wall on Robben Island. And in 1986 Sotheby’s sold it to a private collector for the enormous sum of £790,000.”
via Homes & Antiques November 2011
