Good morning from #JohnSingerSargent who - in 1875 - painted this otherworldly work when he was a teenager. Let that sink in. (I don’t remember ever seeing it before; and many of you know that too much Sargent is too much for me; but one at a time, he can demolish. And it reminds me if the next Baselitz post.) He must have looked at an octopus and saw a writhing masterpiece of pure paint. Nothing is stable. (There are two octopi.) Everything slips, coils, glistens, mutates. The creature seems half animal, half liquid thought. Those tentacles wiggle and flip and slither across my nervous system. It’s a small picture about looking, touch, appetite, and the strange beauty of otherness. H/t greg.org