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signifier.bsky.social
Signifier
@signifier.bsky.social

quality writing on : art : design : media
also The Signifier : six : shot : gallery

🌐 https://medium.com/signifier

Editor & Curator: @remydean.bsky.social‬
❄️ 🦃 🎄

" #Thanksgiving & #Christmas & other mid-winter traditions tend to dwell on reminiscences, thinking about the ancestors, honouring & celebrating their 'olde-world' customs. So, the nostalgia-saturated images of Grandma Moses are a perfect fit."

medium.com/signifier/wh...

#illustration #art
December 6, 2025 at 12:43 AM
🌄 🌊 🎨

'First Impressions of Claude Monet'

@remydean.bsky.social explores how the 19th-Century French painter strove to portray the world as authentically as possible… & how the humble ferrule helped

🖌️ medium.com/signifier/cl...

#art #ArtHistory #history #landscape #painitng #Impressionism
December 2, 2025 at 1:11 PM
🪨 ⚒️ 🐄

'Body Beautiful?' a few Classical Greek statues established the western paradigms of masculine & feminine (even bovine) #beauty that have persisted for millennia

@remydean.bsky.social considers gendered aesthetics in some classical statues

💪 medium.com/signifier/bo...

#ArtHistory #art
November 24, 2025 at 1:14 PM
'The Explosive Quiet of Cornelia Parker'

@kimvertue.bsky.social considers an artist who "continues to use #art as a non-partisan discussion of important issues & cultural identities ... examining the relics of the past while addressing the present & the future"

🪡 medium.com/signifier/a-...
November 21, 2025 at 3:31 PM
"unusual for a woman to make it as an artist at that time but her own father said that she painted beauties more skilfully than himself ... he was Katsushika Hokusai"

'Hokusai’s Daughter' by @kimvertue.bsky.social

🏮 medium.com/signifier/ho...

#Japan #art #ArtHistory #history #illustration #イラスト
November 18, 2025 at 7:28 PM
Illumined Thinking — Bright Ideas from the Bauhaus

@remydean.bsky.social remembers the first product from the Bauhaus as a sort of introduction, in itself, to what the influential design school were all about...

💡 medium.com/signifier/il...

#art #design #history #ArtHistory
November 17, 2025 at 1:35 PM
Claude Monet #BOTD 1840

Once reviled, now revered, his famous #paintings of Water Lilies reflect on the tragedy of war, express a hope for peace, & celebrate the joy of creation 🖌️

@kimvertue.bsky.social looks beyond the surface of Monet’s Final Masterworks of #art

🪷 medium.com/signifier/fo...
November 14, 2025 at 1:51 AM
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'When Art Went Pop! in the USA'

"along with #Surrealism, #PopArt was among the 1st major Post-Modern movements to emerge in the mid-C20th & they share overlapping visual vocabulary"

@remydean.bsky.social 💥 medium.com/signifier/wh...

#art #ArtHistory #sculpture #history #illustration
November 12, 2025 at 10:54 AM
“In My Garden”

#art by Sharon Stone was our November 2023
#exhibition in The Signifier : six : shot : gallery :

6️⃣ medium.com/the-signifie...

#ContemporaryArt #painting
November 11, 2025 at 3:33 PM
👃 ⚔️ 🎭

'Cyrano de Bergerac, a Literary Oddity?'

Samuel Belleville-Douelle reflets on how the author Edmond Rostand caused such a stir in fin de siècle France with his 5-act play in verse & why it still resonates today

📖 medium.com/signifier/cy...

#art #ArtHistory #literature #movies #history
November 10, 2025 at 2:43 PM
Are Ziggy Stardust & Thomas Jerome Newton the same person? Such parallels landed David Bowie a starring role in 'The Man Who Fell to Earth' (1976)

@remydean.bsky.social discusses how two iconic personae fused multimedia fictions in a Pop Art cycle of creative feedback

medium.com/signifier/wh...
November 9, 2025 at 6:56 PM
“Excuse Me, But Where Do You Come From?”

#art by Victoria Si Wah Dong was our November 2022
#exhibition in The Signifier : six : shot : gallery :

6️⃣ medium.com/the-signifie...

#ContemporaryArt #illustration #printmaking #weaving
November 8, 2025 at 1:14 PM
Where we encounter art affects our responses to it. We may feel very differently about saleable objects presented as #art in a classy gallery than something unlabelled we encounter ‘in the wild’

Rodrigo S-C explores these notions by way of a short anecdotal sojourn...

🍷 medium.com/signifier/wh...
November 6, 2025 at 4:09 PM
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remember. remember...

'Fireworks at Ryōgoku Bridge' (c.1858) from Utagawa Hiroshige's 'One Hundred Famous Views of Edo'

learn about the artist's 'Road to Fame' in our article by @kimvertue.bsky.social

💥 medium.com/signifier/hi...

#art #ArtHistory #illustration #イラスト #fireworks
November 5, 2025 at 3:02 PM
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A Small Thing But My Own

@kimvertue.bsky.social looks back on the technicolour emotions of Howard Hodgkin & how daubs of vivid colour & elusive forms represent intangible feelings about solid reality

💎 medium.com/signifier/a-...

#art #painting #ArtHistory #illustration #GraphicDesign
November 4, 2025 at 4:01 PM
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Richard Long’s #landscape #art is the land itself

@remydean.bsky.social shares a long walk through some of the ground-breaking artist's oeuvre that spans the globe in distance & could also be interpreted as spanning a timeline of geological epochs

〰️ medium.com/signifier/a-...
November 4, 2025 at 2:11 PM
💀 dark #art & witches & #ghosts 👻

this week, our popular & trending section is stuffed with spooky stories ideal for #Halloween reading...

🦇 medium.com/signifier
October 29, 2025 at 9:14 PM
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'The Dazzling Vortex'

Some Vorticists flirted with Fascism but their #art also helped defend the allied navies.

@remydean.bsky.social finds "a rare example of art, abstract art at that, having a proven & quantifiable function..."

🏁 medium.com/signifier/th...

#ArtHistory #history #design
October 17, 2025 at 12:38 PM
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'David Hockney: Making a Splash with the Bigger Picture'

@kimvertue.bsky.social dives into the large-scale, immersive #art of the people’s painter who continues to please with new work more than six decades later…

💦 medium.com/signifier/da...

#painitng #ArtHistory #history #photography
October 14, 2025 at 1:55 PM
it's #fungi season in the Eurozone so time to revisit:
'Beatrix Potter’s Field Studies' 🐸

@kimvertue.bsky.social on the #art & #science of a pioneering mycologist better known as the beloved children’s #author & #illustrator

🍄 medium.com/signifier/po...

#illustration #fungi #history #ArtHistory
October 13, 2025 at 11:47 AM
'Résumé'

#art by Géraldine Swatridge was our October 2021 #exhibition
in The Signifier : six : shot : gallery :

6️⃣ medium.com/the-signifie...

#ContemporaryArt #painting #drawing #landscape #illustration
October 13, 2025 at 11:41 AM
'From Beyond the Grave — Unearthing Japan’s Forgotten Photographer'

@remydean.bsky.social finds a haunting beauty in the unique #art of Ukai Gyokusen which has finally surfaced after being, very literally, buried in the past

🔲 medium.com/signifier/fr...

#photography #ArtHistory #Japan #history
October 9, 2025 at 4:31 PM
French painter Georges-Pierre Seurat used Pointillism & Divisionism to point out divisions in society: "these ‘noble workers’ were as important as the people in grand historical paintings hung in museums"

@remydean.bsky.social considers early Modernist Masterpieces

🚣 medium.com/signifier/th...
October 3, 2025 at 12:05 PM
'Victoriana-o-rama'

Lawrence Alma-Tadema enjoyed success in his lifetime but his #art suffered the the vagaries of fickle fashion since his death… @remydean.bsky.social discusses the life & times of an artist who influenced #comics #illustration & Hollywood #movies

🖼️ medium.com/signifier/vi...
September 29, 2025 at 12:31 AM
👞 🩰 👢

'Whose Shoes?'

@remydean.bsky.social takes us on a quick-step through some shoe symbolism in #art & #culture along the path from innocence to experience... from #FairyTales to #horror films

👠 medium.com/signifier/wh...

#art #ArtHistory #shoes #illustration #イラスト #fashion #movies #history
September 28, 2025 at 1:39 PM