Art Is For Living
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artisforliving.bsky.social
Art Is For Living
@artisforliving.bsky.social
33K followers 7.4K following 790 posts
Art, music & literary gems. ✨ Made with love & alt-text 💗

I'm a visual artist, musician (🎸 + 🎛️) & researcher. Profile art is my own.

#modernart #writing #music #jazz #photography #creativity #blacksky #artsky
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artisforliving.bsky.social
lol. lmao
Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes Oopsie. JUL 6, 6:00 AM EDT by NOOR AL-SIBAI (Image of a clown with yellow background)
July 17, 2025 at 12:57 PM
artisforliving.bsky.social
Gorgeous palette in this viral YouTube video thumbnail. Very summer-autumn.

#artsky #color #palette #art #design #thumbnail
A stylized cartoon image of a young woman in a red hoodie blowing smoke while looking wide-eyed and dazed. The word “WEED” is written in bold white letters at the top of the frame. The background features glowing stars, green smoke clouds, and a dark-blue sky. Several white-circled sampling points are overlaid on the image to indicate extracted colors. Below, a color palette bar displays swatches ranging from deep navy and maroon to bright pink, orange, yellow, mint green, emerald, and dark blue.
July 16, 2025 at 5:31 PM
artisforliving.bsky.social
Sampled these colors from a viral YouTube thumbnail. Brown and blue are such an underrated pairing.

Hex codes below 👇

#artsky #color #palette #art #design #thumbnail
A stylized, high-contrast image shows a young man holding a microphone, lit with cool blue and soft pink lighting. His face is partially lit, with one eye looking forward and the other obscured. Behind him, a large, semi-transparent close-up of his own face fills the background in vivid blue tones, creating a layered, introspective visual effect. Several white circles mark points of color sampling. Below the image is a color palette bar displaying a gradient of sampled colors, ranging from black and maroon to light pink, lavender, deep blues, and bright cyan.
July 16, 2025 at 9:39 AM
artisforliving.bsky.social
Photo by Yusuke Maekawa.

#photography #photographysky #japan
#zzzn #sleep #apparel #osaka
Photo of a woman's head and shoulders, closing her eyes and resting, clad in a futuristic powder blue puffy jacket with circuits, small lights and wires attached.
June 17, 2025 at 1:47 PM
artisforliving.bsky.social
Amazing work by Lebanese illustrator Tracy Chahwan in the New York Times this week. This accompanies a review of the new crime thriller by SA Cosby, King of Ashes.

The review is here: www.nytimes.com/2025/06/10/b...

#illustration #art #artsky #litsky #booksky #thriller
Woodblock style illustration in deep maroon with blood-orange, cream-orange and yellow-orange lines and highlights, showing a man walking toward a distant house with smoke billowing from its chimney, his shadow stretching in front of him, and two other shadows stretching across the ground next to his own, one pointing a smoking gun. Illustration by Tracy Chahwan for the New York Times
June 15, 2025 at 7:00 PM
artisforliving.bsky.social
Frog and Toad origami paper set
Photo of a Frog and Toad origami set, with Japanese text and images of frog and toad
June 9, 2025 at 1:35 AM
artisforliving.bsky.social
Don’t know I needed this but now I can never go back
A massive stack of oversized memo notes, next to a hand on a desk
June 4, 2025 at 2:24 AM
artisforliving.bsky.social
I took this picture with one hand while holding a tricycle and rushing to the car and it turned out perfect somehow.

#nature #photography #flowers #summer
Close up photo of a small sunflower-shaped flower with soft yellow petals and a radiating orange center, with shade and sunlight falling on it.
May 13, 2025 at 7:11 AM
artisforliving.bsky.social
I’m trying not to overlook the small pockets of beauty and peace that are planted around me. Like this one today.
Overhead photo of a cylindrical container full of short colored pencils, which bloom outward from the center.
May 8, 2025 at 12:42 PM
artisforliving.bsky.social
Life continues 🍃
Vibrant and shiny green leaves
May 3, 2025 at 2:57 AM
artisforliving.bsky.social
“You are the sky. Everything else — it’s just the weather.”

Pema Chödrön
Black and white photo of Pema Chödrön from the shoulder up, in recent years / older age, looking to the camera and slightly smiling, wearing her traditional Buddhist nun’s robe / attire.
February 13, 2025 at 12:47 PM
artisforliving.bsky.social
Today I created a new account on #Substack. I was instantly shown a stream of posts like these (the first post was from a gothic letter 'national socialist' account). It then suggested I follow Edward Snowden, Tulsi Gabbard and Vivek Ramaswamy.

That platform is COOKED far beyond what I had imagined
Screenshot of a Hitler fancam video ('This will really resonate with those of you who know the truth') followed by a lurid race-baiting post about a group of Pakistanis murdering a boy 'because he was White' in the UK
February 6, 2025 at 1:32 PM
artisforliving.bsky.social
"My love"

Gaza, 2024

#photography #photographysky #artisforliving #arabic #gaza
A hand holds a dusty and damaged plush heart with the Arabic word "عشقي" ("my love") printed on it with decorative hears. In the background there are the shattered remains of a home.
January 18, 2025 at 3:37 PM
artisforliving.bsky.social
Bodybuilder Chitra Purushotham, photographed by Keerthana Kunnath for the series “Not What You Saw.”

#photography #photographysky #portrait #artisforliving
Photo of a South Indian female bodybuilder, naturally lit by the late afternoon sun, leans on a rock with one arm and looks into the distance with a slight smile. Bangles decorate her wrist as she flexes a large bicep. Behind her a hazy landscape fades into the horizon.
January 18, 2025 at 5:08 AM
artisforliving.bsky.social
Pablo Picasso ✨
Woman in a Chemise in an Armchair (1913-14)

#art #artsky #painting #modernart #picasso
An abstract painting "in the style known as Synthetic Cubism, in which color, pattern, and texture enliven Cubist form. The painting represents a woman seated in a velvety purple armchair; her left arm is raised and her right hand holds a newspaper." (Met museum)
January 16, 2025 at 6:14 PM
artisforliving.bsky.social
Wrote this note to myself several weeks ago and just found it today. Timely.

Stay in touch with your people.
Stay in touch with your people. Now is not the time to isolate. We see the world differently when we’re together with friends and loved ones. Our vantage point shifts.
January 15, 2025 at 4:00 AM
artisforliving.bsky.social
A retro blue Volkswagen van somehow survived the Palisades fire in Malibu, perfectly intact in a sea of ashes.

Photo by Mark J. Terrill

#photography #photographysky #losangeles #lafires
A wide view of burned out homes on a hillside, charred grey and burnt brown, with a perfectly preserved, bright blue and white retro Volkswagen van improbably parked in on a street midway up the hill.
January 15, 2025 at 2:10 AM
artisforliving.bsky.social
“Live. Hold out. Survive.

I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.”

Octavia Butler (Parable of the Sower)

#booksky #artisforliving #scifi #writing
Black and white photo of Octavia Butler looking intently into the camera with a shelf full of books behind her.
January 14, 2025 at 4:10 PM
artisforliving.bsky.social
“Blues Dance” (2023) by Claudette Johnson ✨

A joyful depiction of a woman swaying to her own beat.

#art #artsky #contemporaryart #womensart #blackartists #artisforliving #musicsky
A drawing / painting of a young black woman swaying with hands slightly raised, looking down / closing her eyes while moving. She wears a light blue dress, has a dark small jacket and small purse on her shoulder. Made with pastel, watercolour and gouache on paper.
January 14, 2025 at 2:05 PM
artisforliving.bsky.social
Pop art pioneer Keiichi Tanaami. 🙌🏽

“Law of the Forest” (2024).

Painted during his final year, the piece includes a playful reference to Rousseau’s “The Dream”.

#art #artsky #popart #japaneseart #painting #collage #artisforliving
A large canvas filled with intricate and vibrantly colored plants, animals, human and robot figures, and other hybrid creatures. A soft blue sky can be seen above and behind the blue-green foliage and the bright red, yellow and pink characters.
January 13, 2025 at 6:35 PM
artisforliving.bsky.social
Dizzy Gillespie and Quincy Jones in the recording studio, 1965.

#music #musicsky #jazz #photography #photographysky #artisforliving
Black and white photo of Dizzy Gillespie and Quincy Jones seated next to each other. Gillespie blows into a trumpet and has large, inflated cheeks. Jones stares intently in front himself, reading, with a cigarette hanging from the side of his mouth. Photo by Joe Alper.
January 13, 2025 at 9:31 AM
artisforliving.bsky.social
“Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.”

James Baldwin
Black and white portrait of James Baldwin, showing his face perched between his two hands, looking wide-eyed toward the camera. Photograph by Richard Avedon, taken in 1962
January 11, 2025 at 5:15 PM
artisforliving.bsky.social
“Frida on white bench” (1939), photographed in New York by Frida’s longtime friend and lover, Nickolas Muray.

#photography #photographysky #portrait #art #artsky #frida #artisforliving
Vividly colored photograph of Frida Kahlo, seated in a long black dress with white floral patterns and a brown/crimson embroidered band near the lower end. Seated in on a white bench that looks like white flowers, in front of elaborately patterned green and white floral printed wallpaper.
January 11, 2025 at 2:26 PM
artisforliving.bsky.social
“You must aim high — not in what you are going to do at some future date, but in what you are going to make yourself do today.

Otherwise working is just a waste of time.”

Edgar Degas
Self-portrait of Edgar Degas done around 1855-1856, showing him as a young man, from the chest up, in a light colored jacked, dark sweater and white collar, and looking toward the viewer with a determined and serious face. Held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
January 11, 2025 at 12:59 PM
artisforliving.bsky.social
Georgia O'Keeffe

“Deer's Skull with Pedernal” (1936)

#art #artsky #modernart #okeeffe #painting #artisforliving
Painting of a white deer skull affixed to a leaning barren tree, with a blue sky and New Mexico’s flat-topped Pedernal mountain far in the background
January 11, 2025 at 6:04 AM